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Trump Era 2025-2029 : Stock and Economic Comment

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Over view of Trump administration.

Driving at high speed, doped, blind and with no seat belts. What could go wrong ?

The Art of the F*ckup​

So much for the “more professional” team in Trump 2.0.​

Sam Stein
Apr 23, 2025





President Donald Trump answers questions as he meets with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador in the Oval Office on April 14, 2025. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

1. A pileup of screwups​

Last week’s revelation that the Trump administration’s high-stakes standoff with Harvard University had been sparked by a demand letter sent erroneously is notable for two reasons. The most obvious is that the resulting imbroglio, along with ending billions of dollars worth of federally supported research, threatens to damage the crown jewel of American academia.

The second is for the sobering reminder the episode provides about how this new Trump administration functions. This is not a smooth-running operation. Indeed, the extent to which Trump’s first three months back in office have been characterized by mistakes—from bumbling embarrassments to calamitous errors endangering national security—is frankly breathtaking.

Weeks before the White House’s antisemitism task force sent an “unauthorized” letter to Harvard making demands so onerous (such as federal oversight of admissions) that university leaders felt compelled to publicly fight it, Trump officials acknowledged they mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.

Weeks before that, the White House conceded that top national security officials had erroneously added the editor of the Atlantic to a Signal chat where they discussed war plans.

In the middle of all that, economists at the American Enterprise Institute noted that the tariff formula the president was applying to dozens of countries had a massive mathematical flaw in plain sight, while penguins in the Indian Ocean were dismayed to learn that the tariffs were targeting them.

Those were the main-course screwups. The side dishes have been plentiful, too. Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he had mistakenly fired an unhealthy chunk of the federal health care bureaucracy; the State Department said it cut funding to some lifesaving UN food programs by mistake; and the Justice Department was dinged for putting out personal information in its release of files around President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

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And then there is Elon Musk, the master chef of Trump world fuckuppery. Among other missteps, Musk’s DOGE was forced to delete items from the list of savings it has compiled because the data was wrong, had to rehire hundreds (if not thousands) of wrongly terminated workers, listed and then unlisted federal buildings it proposed to put up for sale, and acknowledged accidentally stopping work on critical functions, like nuclear-weapons monitoring and Ebola prevention. Musk has been so prone to error that he has sought to turn it into a virtue—a manager with the capacity to admit flaws!

“Nobody bats 1.000,” Musk said.

And, of course, that’s true. Every White House makes mistakes, including some pretty major ones—the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the launch of healthcare.gov, the decision to keep interns around during a government shutdown, and so on. But the Trump mess-ups stand out both because there are so many of them and because of how indifferent the president and his team are toward pursuing fixes. Rarely, if ever, are remedial steps taken. Often, Trump’s team will compound an error by refusing to acknowledge it at all, or aggressively defending it as if it had been the approach they’d wanted to take all along.

● RFK Jr. and Musk have both admitted that cuts were mistakenly made. But they also continue to defend their shoot-then-aim approach.

● Signalgate did not lead to serious introspection about the dissemination of classified material. Instead, it morphed into an effort to downplay classification and rationalize the use of encryption apps—and even more hackneyed defenses after a second instance of Signal use was reported this past weekend.

● The math blunder behind the tariffs wasn’t corrected. Instead, it was hailed as a properly aggressive means to rebalance trade deficits, nearly bringing the global economy to a free fall before Trump advisers resorted to desperate, juvenile measures to pause the pain.

● Trump officials didn’t try to calm matters with Harvard after sending the unauthorized letter. Instead, they used the university’s shock at the demands being made of it to rationalize going after it even harder.

● And, of course, rather than just bringing back Abrego Garcia and deporting him to a third country, the administration has taken extraordinary steps to keep him in El Salvador, in defiance of court orders. Trump would rather risk a constitutional crisis than fix this error.

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2. “More professional”?​

Which brings us to perhaps the most remarkable feature of this season of screwups: There are plenty of people who believe the White House isn’t making missteps at all—that these are all really just carefully crafted plans by the president’s team to push the lines of presidential authority. After all, the thinking goes, Trump and his team had four years to chart out what they would do in a second administration. That team was expected to be staffed by competent people who had spent years out of office preparing for their jobs, ready to hit the ground running. And Susie Wiles, credited with making Trump’s third presidential campaign “more professional” than the first two, was named chief of staff in hopes she’d do the same thing for the White House: This was supposed to be a more professional operation.

And to a degree, it has been. The mistakes of Trump’s first term (especially pre-COVID) seemed more shambolic—a combination of staff incompetence, unclear policy direction, and poor leadership. Remember this graph of turnover among the top-level presidential staffers?



(Via Wikipedia, based on data from Brookings)
So far we haven’t seen signs that this new Trump administration is plunging toward that kind of staff chaos. (Pete Hegseth: Hold my [non-alcoholic] beer.)

But errors are quickly coming to define Trump 2.0. And it is precisely because they are being made in the service of larger projects that the administration is fixated on—expanding the powers of the presidency, breaking academia and other cultural foes, testing what deportation powers the courts will grant them—that those errors feel and indeed are more consequential.

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3. Rusty guardrails​

I started drafting the above on Monday, having spent some time over the weekend marinating on all the ways in which the Trump administration had stepped on rakes. This morning I was reminded once more of why this all seems so much more consequential than in Trump 1.0.

Over at Morning Shots, my colleague Andrew Egger has a really smart piece looking at the market reaction to Trump’s tariffs and his threats to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell. The item boils down to three main points: (1) Wall Street doesn’t like Trump’s policies, especially not his tariffs; (2) Wall Street is worried that Trump may actually act on his anti-Powell impulses this time around; and, most importantly, (3) there are fewer guardrails in existence to prevent Trump from acting.

Guardrails—whether in the form of independent agencies, clearly defined legal limits, a Congress willing to push back, or staffers with the courage to stand up—matter. And what we are witnessing now is what happens when they are weakened or outright eliminated.

In the absence of guardrails, Trump’s threats have to be taken both seriously and literally. There are fewer chances to prevent missteps (Hey, Mr. President, maybe we should check the math on those tariffs one more time?). There are fewer opportunities to clean up mistakes after they happen (You know, is it really worth bringing down the constitutional order over this Abrego Garcia case?). And there are fewer occasions when Trump’s impulsive utterances can be written off as him just blowing off steam (Wait, you really want to deport American citizens, too?).

Governing without guardrails is like driving without guardrails: You might survive just fine if you’ve got someone steady at the wheel. But with someone reckless in charge things are likelier to veer toward disaster.

So, here’s a constructive thought to end on: How do you rebuild guardrails that have been weakened or destroyed? What laws should be passed? What reforms are needed? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The Art of the F*ckup

So much for the “more professional” team in Trump 2.0.
www.thebulwark.com
 
As I see it, Trump is the political "face" but there's an underlying story here much like there was last time society went through major changes.

Last time it wasn't a single event but a series of events mostly during the period from 1967 - 1975 that reshaped the world, with a few outliers either side of that. Notable occurrences being the severing of remaining US Dollar ties to gold, the Lima Declaration, the rise of feminism and environmentalism, the Oil Embargo, etc. On the other side of the coin, the moon landing symbolically marked the peak of the dominance of engineering and the industrial era, and at a national or local level so did the completion of an assortment of major construction projects (dams in particular).

This time around it's the old situation - history doesn't repeat but it sure does rhyme. One one side of the equation we have the global financial crisis that marked an inflection point in many things, soaring government deficits and debt reaching problematic levels, the housing crisis in a number of countries including Australia, trade deficits particularly the US, the situation with Russia and the supply of gas to Europe, a significant group within society feeling oppressed and downtrodden. On the other side of the coin the legalisation of same sex marriage and separately the legalisation of euthanasia are of symbolic significance representing the achievement of long standing progressive political goals.

I've intentionally avoided comment on the merits or otherwise of any of those points, I'm just noting their occurrence and that the parallels are clear. What we've seen looks remarkably similar to last time around - the "old" thing having achieved its longstanding goals and real pressure, both practical and political, to do things differently going forward.

Trump hasn't done all that, indeed he's had absolutely nothing to do with most of it. He's just the political face of the change in much the same manner as Reagan, Thatcher or locally Hawke were last time around. The shift's already inevitable, the underlying triggers to force it have already occurred, it's just been a question of whether someone grabbed the reins and did it voluntarily or whether it became a forced situation on the financial side.

My point there isn't political but rather, it's that there's no going back. Even if Trump resigned as President right now, even if he dies, that'd really be little different to if Raegan, Thatcher or Hawke had resigned. The broad shift is still going to occur, all that'll change will be the detail.

That being so, as investors there's no point clinging to the past and hoping it comes back because that's highly unlikely. The paradigm of recent decades and the things that've dominated are on the way out, the question as investors is what's actually coming in? Where's the actual investment potential in all of this?

From a longer term investment perspective my thinking is around the supporting infrastructure. Regardless of what the US or any other Western country actually manufactures, it's a given there's transport and energy involved. You just can't manufacture without that. Those are somewhat less than straightforward industries to invest in, since they're subject to considerable regulation and also the direct participation of governments, but opportunities certainly do exist, listed companies operate in both sectors.

The other that comes to mind is companies involved with anything where government's not going to let it slide, where bringing production to the US or other Western countries is considered critical. Microprocessors, rare earths, industrial metals in general, chemicals, etc.

In the Australian context, well I'd be very surprised if either of the two remaining oil refineries were allowed to fail at this point. Ampol (ASX: ALD) and Viva Energy (ASX: VEA) would seem to be "too important to fail" companies. They arguably have implicit government backing to continue operation no matter what - that doesn't guarantee a profit for shareholders, but they already are subject to financial underwriting via the Fuel Security Services Payment.

Just my thoughts, and I've intentionally avoided commenting on the merits or otherwise of the politics. Just observing. As with last time this won't move in a straight line, eg we never did shut every factory, the previous change was still occurring right until the point the tide turned the other way. This will be no different - in 2050 it'll still be unfolding is my expectation.
 
Why would the Billionaires and multinationals want to change things?

Why would they have backed Trump, if he wants to make the billionaires and multinationals lose money?

Why would the billionaires and multinationals want to make stuff in the U.S, when they are making it in third World countries using cheap labour?

What would be the point for the multinationals and the billionaires?

Why would the media support Trump, if it meant the companies that pay the media for advertising, will probably lose money, if they either have to move manufacturing back to the U.S, or lose money due to tariffs?

Can someone please explain why the multinationals, billionaires, or the media would be backing Trump.

I mean really.

But as you say @Smurf1976 the wheels are in motion and the penny is dropping, the Western countries have to change, the globalisation era is over, the West has milked it to death, now it's time for change.

Before it's too late IMO.
 
Knobby22 said:
China have not said anything. Want to make him sweat.
Click to expand...

I'm not one to quote myself, but I will, since I posted this on the more obscure thread "China a Failed state and a Rogue state to the rest of the World". I think it's undecided as to which leadership is doing the most sweating in this stand-off. This video uploader is ethnic Chinese and apparently is not in doubt.

 
finicky said:
This video uploader is ethnic Chinese
Click to expand...
I'll recommend the vid . It's a cracker. Don't miss it , folks .
Surprised that he doesn't speak the lingo ! Further surprised , well disgusted really , that You Tube has blackballed his translator . They 'd be quite at home in Xi 's authoritarian kingdom , you'd think , but no . You Tube not allowed there .
 
The answer is because all the rich in America are greedy bastards who use debt to become richer using borrowed money in stocks, bonds and leveraged products and invariably get bailed out by the Fed when the markets go a**e up.

No government has ever refused to bail them out for over a hundred years, so they believe they are bullet proof and want more, and more, and ....

gg
 
And the billionaires invest that debt in Chinese and third world production making, computers, phones, televisions, washing machines, air fryers, air conditioners and everything else they sell in Western countries for a mega profit.

So why would they be backing Trump? he actually wants to reduce their margins with tariffs and relocating production to the U.S.

They are rich, Trump is suggesting making them poorer, Trump is into real estate and hotels, he wants everyday Americans to be rich, that way his hotels make money.

It is in Trump's best interest to get the U.S manufacturing back on its feet, that way Americans can afford to pay for what Trump sells.

He doesn't sell computers, phones, t.v's etc made in China, he sells accomodation and entertainment to middle class Americans, they require reasonable jobs to spend money in Trump establishments.

As we say, this ain't rocket science.
 
I said they were greedy, not smart. He promised them giveaway tax reductions. They don't think beyond their noses. As long as markets and bonds keep on going up and they can borrow cheaply they will keep on backing him.

They don't care about main street and they don't share.

gg
 
The billionaires and multinationals don't pay tax, or at least minimise it to the max.

The mega rich want Trump out, the last thing they want is their profits hammered by tariffs or by losing market share.

Apple phones, Ipads, Apple Macs etc made in China. lol
145% import tariff, Samsung made in South Korea 10% import tariff, why would the U.S company like that?

Well they could actually make the Apple product in silicon valley, but lose probably 30% markup on making it in China, WoW they would love that. NOT.

But hey they love the guy who is trying to shove it down their throat? Of course.

Even if Trump gets a deal up with China, whereby they fully float their currency, the profit for the multinationals will fall, there is no way the rich in the U.S want Trump to win this.

The rich and multinationals want the West to keep printing money, until they eventually go broke, until that happens the rich are cleaning up.
When it all turns to $hit for the West the rich just move to where ever life is good.

Meanwhile Trump and the U.S entertainment and gambling moguls, are left with ghost towns, like Las Vegas would become because the middle class are unemployed and in debt to the eyeballs.
Like Australia will be when we have a population of 50 million and we are all living off iron ore revenue.
 
Last edited:
He also wants to apply as much pressure as possible to the Fed to nudge them to ease interest rates, given he is trying to eliminate huge amounts of wasteful government spending, which could easily push the US economy into recession.
Click to expand...
- Christopher Joye
 
I suppose part of it is societal. They see themselves as a continuation of a civilisation that never existed, spun at them via movies, Fox and entertainers. Most of them couldn't go for a crap without a bodyguard.

Just reading back on my comments I forgot to mention MAGA who are as dumb as sh*t and have most to lose from tariffs and trade wars. the latter are the best destroyer of middle and working class assets going.

Then again, they are Americans. It's like wondering why the people in PNG prefer to slaughter the next tribe with a pfoof through a pipe dart gismo rather than mining and developing their country. Or are the dart gun pfoofers in South America or Africa.

Somebody should report me for being off topic.

gg
 

It's not the rich who will pay to move manufacturing to the US, it's the poor by paying multiple tariffs on everyday living expenses, and then Trump gives the rich large tax breaks. Trump is never going to crap on the people that funded his campaign to get him in the white house.

Trump's already gone to the trouble of defunding any agency that helps workers with rights, so they can be exploited by large corporations even further. Elon had govt agencies after him for unfair dismissal, and Trump went after the agencies.

The populace will be led by the carrot while the rich line their pockets. Nothing has changed from previously; it's just a different scenario.
 
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