A Unified Field Theory of Trump

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, March 07, 2025

 

Because of travel, sleep deprivation, some minor anger issues, a changing news climate, a form of writer’s block that makes the color chartreuse smell like goat cheese, the threat of CHUDs, and a flare-up in my decades-long Tong war with a radical faction of Up With People (Yes, it still exists!), I tried to write Wednesday’s G-File three times. And I finally gave up on it, relegating it to the apocrypha of the Goldberg Extended Universe along with Episode 11 of The Remnant, the Couch’s origin story, Reagan 35x, the Cosmo Interviews, etc.

 

Note: This is a very long G-File. So if you want to skip ahead to the section on the logic of nationalism, that’s fine. I just need to get a bunch of stuff out of my head.

 

The “news”letter I wanted to write was on a very basic point that I wrote about not long after Trump was sworn in. Markets aren’t loyal and markets can’t be intimidated. Oh, you can definitely intimidate or appeal to the loyalty of individual businessmen. You can bully or bribe individual businesses, even whole sectors of the economy (for a while). But the market is a different thing.

 

One of the points conservatives and, especially libertarians, have been making for a very, very long time is that there is a difference between being “pro-business” and “pro-market.” You can heap favors on various industries or industrialists. You can punish them, too. It happens all the time. But the market isn’t a person you can get on the phone. To be sure, you can frighten markets. You can also fuel irrational exuberance. But eventually rationality comes back in. That’s because markets are constantly seeking alpha the way rushing water follows the path of least resistance in search of its own level. Stupid subsidies or taxes create opportunities for advantage and someone will find it and the rest of the market will follow quickly behind. You can shout “Buy American!” and you can even subsidize buying American, but if buying Mexican yields a greater return, the market will do it all the same.

 

The reason this is relevant these days is that Trump doesn’t really listen to people—at least not to people who tell him things he doesn’t want to hear. But he does listen to the stock market. One can easily argue that he cares too much about the stock market: Wall Street isn’t Main Street and all that. But the fact remains he thinks the Dow and Nasdaq are the EKG of his presidency. And as problematic as that may or may not be in terms of economic policy, I think it’s a good thing politically. When it comes to the Trump administration, we are very low on guardrails and grown-ups that Trump respects these days. So having the markets scream at Trump like he’s John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, “You’re going the wrong way!” is actually an important check on his ambitions.

 

In the Lost G-File, I went on at great length about Hayek’s “knowledge problem” and the “Fatal Conceit,” the role of prices as signals, and all that sweet, sweet free market stuff.

 

But the point I wanted to get to was that supporters of the market system tend to talk about prices as crucial tools for policy, but because most of the people making that argument (which I agree with entirely!) focus on the economic goods of market-based price systems they pay less attention to the fact these systems are crucial tool for political goods, too.

 

Bad economics tends to be bad politics. Bond markets have probably done more to save the republic than all of the op-eds ever written. But while you can argue with pundits, you can’t get the bond market on the phone.

 

Sadly, bad economics can still win the day. That’s because humans are more than homo economicus. You can bribe voters with bad policies (see: price controls, rent control, the home mortgage interest deduction, SALT, etc.) that are good for them but bad for the economy.

 

You can also convince the voters that bad policies are necessary for non-economic reasons. On Tuesday night, Trump declared that “tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs, they’re about protecting the soul of our country.”

 

I think that’s nonsense, of course. But Trump needs to say stuff like this, because even if tariffs are economically necessary in the aggregate (not my view!), he still understands that they will hurt many people (particularly people in his coalition). That’s true of virtually any meaningful economic policy, they all create winners and losers. Wise policy makers grasp the trade-offs and act accordingly. Trump is telling the hurt people to suck up “the little disturbance” to save the soul of America. This is just the latest version of a very old argument that many presidents have invoked to defend statist policies: “Economic patriotism.”

 

It’s worth noting that “economic patriotism” has long been rightly understood as a left-wing or progressive concept. If policies—the Green New Deal, Obamacare, etc.— were obviously great for everyone’s bottom line, you wouldn’t need to appeal to patriotism to sell them. In the last decade, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders have all floated versions of it. Woodrow Wilson’s war socialism and FDR’s New Deal were both sold as the point of praxis between best policy and highest patriotic principle. Now that argument has become bipartisan.

 

Tariffs are taxes, by any definition. If Obama said we need to raise taxes to save America’s soul, virtually every MAGA voluptuary of high tariffs would have heaped scorn on the statement. But Trump has convinced these people that tariffs are magic.

 

If you’ve been following the news, particularly if you’ve been reading Scott Lincicome or Kevin D. Williamson, none of this is particularly new to you. So I want to switch gears and look ahead.

 

The logic of nationalism.

 

On January 9, Nick Catoggio made an observation that had me slapping my forehead. Even before he was sworn in, Trump made it clear that he was keen on territorial expansion. He started talking about taking Greenland and the Panama Canal. Linguistically, he seized the Gulf of Mexico for America. He invoked “Manifest Destiny” as part of our dawning Golden Age. He floated the idea, first seemingly in jest, of acquiring Canada as a state. (Peter Navarro recently pressed for trade negotiators to push for moving Canada’s border—and not southward.) These musings shocked a lot of people, and not just those who voted to secure the border and lower egg prices.

 

“‘Here We Go Again’: Trump’s Territorial Ambitions Rattle a Weary World: A distant era of global politics, when nations scrambled to grab territory, suddenly seems less distant,” proclaimed a headline in the New York Times. From The Economic Times of India: “Trump revives ‘Manifest Destiny’ dreams of US territorial expansion.” (Since then, he’s added Gaza and Mars to the list of acquisitions he’s contemplating.) And if you think all of this is just fun stuff for MAGA podcasters to guffaw over, it’s worth noting that Canada isn’t laughing.

 

That was the context of this observation from Nick:

 

Expansionism has always been associated with national greatness, so much so that I’m strapped to think of a successful nationalist regime with the means to do so that hasn’t eventually sought to grow its borders. … To a voter who’s eager to make America great again but not particularly clear on what that means, acquiring Greenland probably sounds like a no-brainer. An America that’s gobbling up land is necessarily becoming greater, right?

 

The reason I slapped my forehead over this observation is that I’ve been saying for years that nationalism has no limiting principle. It recognizes no limits on national or nationalistic will-to-power. And yet, it never occurred to me that the people bleating about ending forever wars, and following a restrained realism in foreign policy would be so amenable to the idea of territorial expansion as the inevitable next phase of the movement, should it get back into power. This despite all the stuff about Trump being the modern Andrew Jackson. I could kick myself.

 

Now, the key phrase in Nick’s observation is, “the means to do so.” Because most nationalistic movements were also socialistic movements, most nationalist regimes don’t have the wherewithal to conquer other lands. But given the opportunity, the idea becomes attractive. Who can doubt that if Castro had the ability, he wouldn’t follow Mussolini’s example and find some Caribbean Abyssinia to invade? Actually, now that I think of it he (sorta kinda) did.

 

Which raises another hindrance to nationalistic expansion these last few decades: The American-led international order which held as a core principle that territorial expansion through force is unacceptable.

 

Trump, the would-be steward of Greenland and Gaza, has little use for that principle. He’s said that Russia has fought hard for the land it took in Ukraine, so it would be unreasonable to expect them to give up all of it. And, he thinks it’s unreasonable for Ukraine to make a fuss about all of that.

 

So what does this have to do with tariffs and economic patriotism?

 

It’s easy to understand why you might think they’re unrelated. There’s a tendency, even among principled critics of Donald Trump, to look at everything he does in isolation. (I wrote about this a couple weeks ago.) His purges at the Pentagon are debated independently of his purges at the Department of Justice or the U.S. Agency for International Development. I understand the desire not to get swept up in blanket condemnations of everything Trump does. Indeed, I have had precisely this desire. But the fact remains that these things are not disconnected in his own mind. Trump’s policies and ideas may be incoherent out in the sunlight, but in the unlit cavern of his own cranium they all fit together. The stalactites of economics and the stalagmites of culture or foreign policy fit together like one seamless, toothy grin.

 

The unified field theory of Trumpism is that Trump is right—about everything—and he has the final say on what counts as right, patriotic, moral, etc. Therefore, people who disagree are not merely wrong, they are enemies of Trump and by extension America. Against tariffs? You must not care about America’s soul! Believe in the rule of law? No man who saves his country can break the law.

 

Something wicked this way comes?

 

All illiberal movements emphasize the group over the individual. That’s axiomatic. Liberalism is grounded in individual liberty and individual rights, including economic rights.

 

To be fair to some social democrats and progressives, being in favor of statist economics didn’t mean they were against the full suite of liberalism. They merely argued that economics was a different realm. They believe you can have strong protections of political liberties, just not economic ones. That’s the tradition, broadly speaking, of Wilson, John Dewey, FDR, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, et al.

 

Among the problems with this sort of thinking is that economic liberty is not so easily disentangled from liberty full-stop. What you use your money for is bound up with the exercise of your rights—from free speech and association to what you do with your property.

 

Another problem: People who think that economic liberty is just different from other forms of liberty focus on cooperation or the group. They believe that competition is unhealthy, profit-seeking is greedy, trade is zero-sum, and success is proof of cheating against the common good.

 

The decisions of the market become subjected to a kind of moralistic anthropomorphized conspiracy theory. That’s how it’s worked for the last few centuries. Left-wing autocrats and socialist cabals saw the failure of the economy to cooperate with a political program as proof of villainous, disloyal, unpatriotic, and greedy conniving by the sinister string-pullers and profiteers who refused to put the needs of the nation, the organic community, “the people,” or the “soul” of the nation ahead of their own self-interest. What’s preventing Medicare for All and the Green New Deal? “Millionaires and billionaires!”

 

That’s how Jacobins, Marxists, Bolsheviks, socialists (national and international) and conventional progressives talk. Often the enemy of the collective will was the individual, which is why “individualism” itself has been a kind of bogeyman for the left for ages. Self-interest is the enemy of cooperation. “It should be the effort of all civilized societies to substitute cooperation for competitive methods,” Herbert Croly insisted.

 

This assumption serves as the bedrock language of all forms of socialism and nationalism, hot and cold, strong and weak, left and right. It’s why Woodrow Wilson wanted to move beyond our “Newtonian” constitutional system and replace it with a “Darwinian” one that “evolved” to fit his vision, which saw the “body politic” as an organic whole in which every institution and individual worked cooperatively like different organs and cells in the same body. It’s why William James advocated for a government and politics as the “moral equivalent of war.” It’s the cult of unity. And, thanks to the iron law of oligarchy, everyone recognizes that since not everyone can make every decision collectively, we need a “leader” to make decisions on behalf of the common good, the collective will.

 

Because the cult of unity is really just a form of power worship, all movements built around cooperation rather than liberty inevitably become movements about who should make decisions on behalf of the romanticized “we” and “us.”

 

This vision has infected much of the right. It’s why Silicon Valley MAGA philosopher Curtis Yarvin’s libertarian neo-monarchist prattle is so popular with the red-pilled right (which I discussed here and here). It’s why illiberals like Adrian Vermeule look contemptuously on competition and market systems.

 

And it’s this vision that so often leads to the persecution of “traitors” in our midst.

 

Enemies within.

 

When Teddy and then Franklin Roosevelt referred to “malefactors of great wealth” they were explicitly saying that economic problems were caused by sinister villains (“malefactor” is just a fancy word for “criminal”) manipulating the economy for their own benefit. It wasn’t all rich people FDR assured audiences, it was just some of them. “I do not even imply that the majority of them are bad citizens,” FDR said. “The opposite is true.”

 

“I am speaking about a minority which includes the type of individual who speculates with other people’s money—and you in Chicago know the kind I refer to,” FDR added.

 

Now, I don’t think this was necessarily a winking reference to “the Jews” (though, given FDR’s own attitudes towards Jews, I don’t rule it out either) but this formulation has an ancient antisemitic pedigree. The rise of resentment toward a money-based economy was heavily correlated with animosity for Jews. “Jews served as a kind of metaphorical embodiment of capitalism,” Jerry Muller writes in The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. “Only a society in which the reality of shared community was dead, it was said, would encourage the self-interested economic activities of which money-lending was the paradigm.”

 

Marx certainly believed that the “Jewish spirit” was synonymous with the ethos of capitalism, which is why he wrote about solving “the Jewish Question” long before Nazism was a thing.

 

My point isn’t to say that all criticisms of capitalism are antisemitic. For starters, there are way, way too many Jewish critics of capitalism for that to be the case. But I do think it’s worth noting the similarities between generic indictments of the free market and antisemitic ones, because they both rest on a conspiratorial understanding of how markets work. When Elizabeth Warren blames inflation on avaricious corporate malefactors—“greedflation!”—she’s asserting that puppeteers are pulling the strings against common good.

 

The scapegoats don’t have to be at the top of the economic food chain either. The Bolsheviks, after all, invented the “kulaks” as their scapegoat.

 

Some of Thomas Sowell’s most brilliant work has been on the role of “middleman minorities” around the world. Middlemen minorities are typically bourgeois ethnic groups—traders, importers, merchants, and money-lenders—that play a crucial role in the economy by occupying niches that connect producers and consumers with needed goods and services. Their industriousness and success are often seen as unfair, exploitative, or unpatriotic. They are “others” within, and they are resented both for their otherness and their comparative success. But they also provide services that the native community failed to provide for a reason. As Sowell put it, “There must be some very profound differences in values and behavior between them and the community they serve. Otherwise, the common affinity of people for their own would lead to the middleman’s role being played by members of the community itself.”

 

This is why, Sowell notes, the diaspora Chinese have been called “the Jews of Southeast Asia,” the Ibos to be called “the Jews of Nigeria,” the Parsees to be called “the Jews of India,” and the Lebanese to be called “the Jews of West Africa.” And then there were the Jews of Uganda: South Asians.

 

As I once said while playing Risk, let’s pause on Uganda for a moment.

 

Some claim that Idi Amin’s reputation as a cannibal is exaggerated. When asked if he ate his military rivals he said, “I don’t like human flesh; it’s too salty for me.” Not exactly a strong denial, if you ask me.

 

Regardless, Amin was a nationalist strongman, which is to say he was a socialist strong man. He completed the nationalization of industry launched by his predecessor. His view of monetary policy can be summarized with one pithy quote: “You are stupid. If we have no money, the solution is very simple: you should print more money.”

 

And people think modern monetary theory is a new idea!

 

Now, I am happy to concede that the differences between Idi Amin and Donald Trump are more profound than the similarities. Trump has an ego, sure, but he hasn’t adopted a title like Amin’s: “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”

 

Trump got into some trouble in Scotland for plagiarizing an aristocratic family crest, but he never claimed to be the last king of Scotland the way Amin did. Trump reportedly has problems with disabled people, but he never followed through the way Amin did, feeding some 4,000 disabled citizens (and a few of his ministers) alive to Nile crocodiles.

 

More relevant: As difficult as it may be to convince Trump his economic program is flawed, I think it’s fair to say it was a much more daunting prospect to tell Amin he was wrong.

 

Amin blamed his failures on the South Asians of Uganda, a vibrant entrepreneurial middleman minority. He expelled all of them as enemies of Ugandan greatness, giving them 90 days to get out of the country with little more than what they could carry. The U.K. took them in, and they applied their skills and energy to becoming a vibrant economic success story. In 1997, the Ugandan government asked for them to come back.

 

Okay, back to the point.

 

Trump’s policy vision is a mix of autocracy, autarky (that’s where nations make all their own stuff), and corporatism. His political philosophy is personalist, patrimonial, and narcissistic: I’m the boss and all good people recognize my wisdom and power. Indeed, recognizing that is what makes them good people. Those who disagree with me aren’t merely wrong, they are traitors and enemies. Trump once said that, “The only important thing is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.” That’s his vision, because that’s the nationalist-populist vision. People who don’t cooperate are saboteurs, wreckers, enemies of the national soul and our manifest destiny.

 

So what does this have to do with tariffs? Simply this: If he ultimately ignores the message from the markets, and presses ahead with his disastrous trade policies, they will not work the way he wants them to. He might reverse course—he’s done so umpteen times since he was inaugurated. But if he sticks with it, he will not say, “Oh all the economists who said I was an idiot were right after all.”

 

He will more likely blame people, businesses, and other enemies within who undermined his vision and stabbed him—and the nation—in the back. We know he thinks this way already. That’s the reason for the purges and loyalty tests, the punishing of unfriendly law firms, and the removal of security protection from Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. It’s why he pardons his corrupt friends, cronies, and goon squads. If you said the election wasn’t stolen, you hated Trump. Earlier this month, when he faced pushback on tariffs he announced, “Anybody that’s against Tariffs, including the Fake News Wall Street Journal, and Hedge Funds, is only against them because these people or entities are controlled by China, or other foreign or domestic companies.”

 

This is the point I want to get ahead of the curve on now. It’s entirely possible that he backs off on his worst trade policies. He probably won’t invade Canada or seize Greenland by force (hugely unpopular ideas). But his trade policies and his ideas about territorial expansion come from the same place, and his possible hunt for traitors, wreckers, middleman minorities, et al., will be a logical extension of the same vision. It’s unlikely he’ll blame the Jews for his failures (though some of his aides might). But he’ll want to scapegoat somebody for his failures, because that’s who Trump is. No matter who gets the blame, you can be sure it won’t be him.

 

And I have zero confidence that the most passionate acolytes of his cult of personality won’t carry water for that vision.