For Project Syndicate: Sanewashing the Trumpists is in general a big mistake, for it carries you much further away from understanding what is actually going on. Today’s fallen victim of self-delusion is, I think, the very sharp Gillian Tett…
Gillian Tett, I think unproductively, sanewashes the Trumpists. While she accepts that “many, if not most, mainstream economists might say that, in fact, elements of it are either crazy or doomed to fail”, she is certain that she sees “some element of a new framework”:
Gillian Tett: Conversation with Ezra Klein: ‘They want to ensure… the dollar remains supreme…. But… they also think that the dollar…overvalued… has made… industry less competitive…. The so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord… [would] weaken the dollar and… America offering… tariff relief… military protection, being allies and… swapping long-term U.S. debt for other forms of debt. It’s extraordinarily bold… a very dramatic break… a coherent plan… a new framework… remak[ing how]… countries cooperate…. Ask countries… to divide… into red, yellow and green buckets. The red are… foes…. The green are the friends… come inside the system to cut deals and be free of terrorists and get military protection and be part of a Mar-a-Lago Accord…. And the… yellow ones… do… transactional deals… <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gillian-tett.html>
However, whether you could build up American manufacturing via dollar-manipulation agreements without blowing other, more important foundations of American prosperity to smithereens—that is not a question we need to consider.
Your chances of doing that are zero without a coherent plan.
And, despite what Gillian Tett says, there is no coherent plan.
There is simply a chaos-monkey cage, filled with screaming chaos monkeys.
We all know this. We know what the “coherent plan” would have been, after all:
