Donald Trump Wants The Economy To Crash—That Means He’ll Try To Make It Happen. By Brian Beutler

As public opinion catches up with macroeconomic data, Republicans will look for new ways to hurt the country

Donald Trump admitted out loud Monday what more less everyone in politics already knew and may acknowledge privately, but few journalists will report as fact: Republicans want harm to befall the United States when they don’t control the government, and will even seek to engineer harm when they think they can get away with it. 

“When there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months,” he said, “because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”

Like most Trump outrages, this one landed with a plink. Mainstream media has so thoroughly internalized GOP degeneracy that many reporters no longer see it as extraordinary. The rest so fear allegations of partisan bias that they won’t incorporate this common knowledge—Trump wishes harm on the country for his own political gain—into their coverage of the campaign or of Trump’s relationships or of policy brinkmanship. 

And Trump will exploit that forced indifference when he starts trying to will his hope for American carnage into reality. 

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I first thought of writing about this last week when I happened upon a segment of Tucker Carlson’s Twitter-native incitement racket asking, “Is the Fed lowering rates to get Joe Biden reelected, or is the truth actually much scarier than that?”

There’s something gratifying about this, insofar as it suggests elite Republicans aren’t confident they can shit-talk the economy all the way to victory in November. For all of Biden’s presidency, the GOP line has been that the economy under Donald Trump was great (if you ignore the year 2020, which doesn’t count) and then became terrible under Biden. Now it seems they’re gearing up to argue that the economy only appears strong because the Federal Reserve is meddling in the economy to help Joe Biden. A welcome evolution.

But it becomes troubling if you’re at all familiar with how Trump and his militant supporters react when reality creates political problems for him: Deny reality, or decry it as a plot against him, orchestrated by shadowy figures who suddenly find themselves in physical danger.

As sentiment improves, and people take a sunnier view of the economy—perhaps even of Biden’s presidency—Trump won’t be satisfied with railing against the deep state, or praying for a recession, or seeding propaganda. He’s going to want to make the actual economy worse. 

Refer a friend

Fortunately, at least as far as I know, he doesn’t have the tools he needs to damage the economy unilaterally. The GOP’s bluntest instrument for sabotaging the economy is the debt limit, but we will not bump up against that again until 2025. 

Trump can and presumably will lean on corrupt foreign leaders to constrain oil supply later this year, but that doesn’t mean they’ll do it, and there may be steps the Biden administration can take to foster gas-price stability ahead of the election.

But what Trump can and presumably will try to do is intimidate Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell into keeping interest rates elevated. Artificially high interest rates would harm the economy, at least relative to its potential, and even if they won’t generate a recession at this level, they do place a damper on public opinion by fomenting a rough housing market. And we know Trump would love that. 

Without vouching for everything Powell has done, he’s been a steady-handed Fed chairman, and has even endured political pressure from Trump the other way around. Ahead of the 2020 election, Trump pressured him to juice the economy for his political benefit—exactly what Tucker Carlson now baselessly claims Powell’s doing on Biden’s behalf. Powell didn’t budge. 

But not everything’s the same this time around. So far as we know, Powell remains an ethical public servant, but the test he’s about to face will be different. For instance, we are currently living through a national epidemic of swatting attacks on government officials, nearly all directed at Trump’s supposed enemies. (Post-It note for later: The fact that Trump’s enemies’ home addresses seem to circulate freely among Trump’s most sociopathic supporters strikes me as a problem.)

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Will Powell be moved by threats of violence? Will he be bend to attacks on his integrity when Republicans accuse him in bad faith of partisan bias for reducing interest rates?

The answer should be no. But if the past few months if not the past seven years have taught us anything, it’s that many public servants, including similarly monastic ones like judges, are susceptible to intimidation and bend to threats.