Just as awful as they ever were
Bill Cohen at Puck surveyed some of the Masters of the Universe about Trump’s first moves and they are fine with it. Who are these jerks?
One Wall Street executive, who almost went to work for Trump this time around, artfully told me that the president was simply using the Oval Office and the media as his bully pulpit, itself a form of performance art. “Bullies love to see people cower in fear,” he said. “Why be a bully if you can’t do that? So how much of this is just, ‘Justin Trudeau, I’m gonna fuck with him,’ or ‘Mexico didn’t really do shit to stop immigration, time for them to shit their pants a little bit. Let’s get a reset’?”
A former Wall Streeter who did a stint in Washington described the first two weeks of Trump II as “a giant blender” of “fog and chaos” stirred up to distract people from three of Trump’s near-term goals: getting his “idiot cabinet picks” through the Senate; positioning Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to head the O.M.B., to “take the shit out of the budget”; and getting congressional approval for the extension of the about-to-expire Trump I tax cuts. And, he said, Wall Street is on board. “[The tax cut extension] is what they really want,” he explained. “Until he can’t do that, they’re perfectly happy to back him and focus on the things that warm their hearts, like shutting USAID. But if this goes on too long and/or the stock market goes down, they’re not going to be so pleased.”
Oh really? What a great group of guys. They’re also as puerile and idiotic as Trump and Musk:
Wall Street doesn’t like or want tariffs, per se—“There are only losers with tariffs,” the banker said—but many accept them as part of the price of doing business with Trump. Indeed, many machers preferred Trump II over Biden or Kamala Harris. “To me, it was a prisoner’s dilemma,” this person continued before articulating the internal monologue in the highest ranks of the banking industry. “We had an anti-business Biden opportunity, or a pro-business Trump, who may put tariffs on, or may not. But if he puts them on and he realizes they’re bad, he may take them off within 24 hours. So they said, ‘We’d rather deal with Donald Trump because he’ll take our phone calls and we can tell him how bad these are, whereas Joe Biden won’t take our phone calls.’ Corporate America felt like we could sway Trump. We could get to him, and convince him that these tariffs are wrong.”
In fact, other than the blanket pardons for the January 6 offenders, and Trump’s press conference where he blamed the fatal helicopter-jet collision near the Potomac on D.E.I., the donor class on Wall Street is generally happy with Trump II, according to this banker, a reality that much of the media still refuses to comprehend. “There are very good reasons to criticize D.E.I., but in this context, it’s a little insane,” he said, referring to Trump’s post-crash commentary. “And insulting and in bad taste.” On the other hand, he continued, “everyone is thrilled” that the “apple cart” at USAID is getting turned over and that people are seeing who is getting paid what from the Treasury—“sort of all that DOGE stuff,” he said, which Wall Street types are giving “a standing ovation.”
Uh, that is not a prisoner’s dilemma. He must have been high on Adderall and Ayahuasca on the day they taught that at the Wharton School of Business. How much do you want to bet he’s the same guy who celebrated because he can now say the word “pussy” in the workplace again?
It’s not about money anymore:
But given the largely foreseeable chaos of the past few weeks, was there anything else that motivated the Wall Street donor class to lean so heavily into Trump last November, I wondered? “They don’t think being rich is enough,” one of my sources told me. “They think they need to be venerated for being rich, and Biden didn’t venerate them for being rich. The idea that wealth equals merit tends to be appealing to the wealthy. They want wealth accumulation to be seen as making them like Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci. These guys are trying to be Averell Harriman, but they’re going to end up being Bebe Rebozo.”
I think this is obviously right. Recall that after the financial crisis they were all whining like 5 year olds about being criticized for destroying the economy. At heart they’re all whiny little bitches.
Trump is one of those guys. He’s desperate to be loved and actually is by millions of people, cementing his grandiose delusions about himself and his personal power. Musk, on the other hand, has a slightly different need. He’s an edgelord, defined as “a person who affects a provocative or extreme persona, especially online — ‘edgelords act like contrarians in the hope that everyone will admire them as rebels.'” In another life, he could have been a mass shooter. I suspect more of those Wall St guys are like Musk than Trump — overgrown adolescent bullies.
We really have to do something about these people. We let it go way too far and now it may destroy us all.