Why Trump is unlikely to follow through on key economic promises

Steve, welcome to 2025 everybody. We are imminently going to see the swearing in of Donald Trump as president of the United States for the second time, a non consecutive two terms for Donald Trump. And one of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about as I review the economic proposals have Donald Trump is that there are really two possible paths forward. Path number one is Trump does the things he promised to do economically, and it tanks the economy. Why do I say that? Because his proposals have been studied endlessly and tried in other places and they hurt the economy. We’ll get to that in a moment. The second possibility would be that, despite all of the promises Trump made about tariffs and tax cuts and all these different things, that he’s going to not actually do those things, because someone will get to him five minutes before he was set to implement them, as is often the case, and say, these are bad ideas. Sir, please don’t do them. Let’s go through some of those policies, and I’ll tell you why I believe this is what will happen the tariffs. Donald Trump wants massive tariffs, huge numbers on Chinese imports. He’s talked about 5060, 200% we never know what the real intention is. But he wants blanket tariffs on Chinese imports. He’s talked about tariffs on China, Canada, Mexico and other countries, the reality is, when you put tariffs in place like these, it’s an import tax. It’s passed along to consumers. Here, prices go up. Trump ran on your prices will go down. Tariffs lead to prices going up. It’s just the reality. It’s just the way that it is. If Trump implements it, then people will pay more at the grocery store and everywhere. The alternative is abandon the policy altogether and take the political loss. But maybe that’s not so bad for Donald Trump tax cuts. Trump did massive tax cuts for the rich in corporations in 2017 he wants to bring the corporate tax rate down even more. He wants to extend the tax cuts for the rich. This raises the deficit. This is not going to make things cheaper, and if anything, it will make things more expensive by taking out investment that folks may make on the demand side basis, that would improve technology efficiency and maybe bring down costs, they will then use the fact that the deficit is going up to justify cutting more social programs. This is bad for the average person. Number three, the mass deportation that Trump wants to do. The reality, whether you like it or not, whether you find it morally problematic or not, is that there are industries, including agriculture, transportation, construction, there’s a bunch of these different industries that rely on immigrant labor, some of it disproportionately legal immigration, some of it more undocumented immigration. Whatever you say about that’s wrong, or that’s right, if you do this mass deportation, not only will the deportation plan itself cost a lot of money, but all of a sudden those industries will be struggling for workers. They will all of a sudden have to pay more, meaning they will pass those labor costs along to the end user. Trump’s mass deportation will also increase prices. Now, as if that weren’t enough, we then get to, what about the Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security aspect of this, even though Trump has insisted, no, I don’t really want to touch that. We all know and we recognize that there’s no way to cut two or two and a half trillion dollars without touching some of those programs, you just can’t do it. And so if that happens, Trump may hit some of his followers with higher costs at the cash register and reduced benefits from some of these programs. What is the alternative? The alternative is the sort of line that many of us have become accustomed to when it comes to Donald Trump, the alternative is not doing it at all and saying I didn’t do it because Democrats stopped me wouldn’t make any sense. Republicans control the White House, House and Senate, not doing it at all and never mentioning it again, and saying, look, the economy is good. Well, maybe it’s good because you abandoned every single one of the policies you proposed. The other alternative is you do some of it, and it hurts the economy a little bit, but you say, I could have done more, were it not for democratic obstruction. We control stuff, so I was able to do a little bit of it, but not as much as I wanted, and the extent to which the economy didn’t do so well is because of the people who stopped me from implementing these policies, the fail safe for Trump, the sort of get out of jail free card for Trump is that, historically, his followers don’t really hold him accountable for his failures. They want to find a. Democrat to blame. They want to find an Obama or a Biden to say it’s your fault that Trump didn’t do this stuff, or it’s your fault that the economy is no good. So if history is an indicator, if Trump does the economic policy, it will be very bad for the economy. If he doesn’t, he will be failing on his promises, but usually he doesn’t get punished for that, and that’s why I think it’s the most likely outcome, right?