If you read me regularly you know that I’ve often lamented the fact that Trump and his henchmen are so foolish that they are actually killing the golden goose out of sheer ignorance and hubris. But I’ve never seen it illustrated as clearly as Andrew Egger does today:
Growing up, I never really understood Aesop’s fable about the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s a cautionary tale about greed and hubris: A farmer with a miraculous goose that lays a solid-gold egg every morning gets fed up with passive wealth generation and figures killing the bird will speed things along. But alas: He finds no store of eggs within and realizes he butchered his meal ticket for nothing. The moral’s straightforward, but it never really worked for me as a story. Like, come on: Nobody’s that stupid.
Well, almost nobody, I guess.
As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll get over this pure, dumb fact: Trump told his fans he had to blow up the liberal order because it was the only way to secure the very benefits the liberal order was already bringing us.
Trump insists America needs Greenland as a strategic positioning ground from which to restrain Russia and China in the Arctic. But thanks to the liberal order, this was something we already enjoyed. Through the magic of multilateral cooperation, we were able to treat someone else’s territory as though it were our own for the purposes of military positioning—not by bribing or intimidating them, but because they agreed their interests and our interests aligned.
Trump insists America needs to blow up America’s preexisting economic relationships to ensure America gets an advantageous position in international trade. But America already had such an advantageous position: an orderly world economic system that had lavished previously unimaginable prosperity on America and to the entire globe, with us at the proverbial (and very profitable) head of the table.
It’s not just that Trump had the hubris to think he could hero-ball the country to a better deal by canceling a century of history and starting over. It’s that his own broken personality—his miserable meanness, his dispositional inability to cooperate with and trust others—has always prevented him from understanding what was good about the deal we had to begin with. The idea that multipolar agreements could be better for America, in some cases, than outright ownership—that, say, we already have everything we need from Greenland—he rejects as ridiculous. Ownership, he told the New York Times, is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success. . . . I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty.”
I’m not surprised that Trump would feel this way. He has the disordered mind of a psychologically damaged child. But the fact that so many of his henchmen who surely know better are still going along, perhaps because they think they can cash in before the whole thing implodes or just because they don’t trust their own knowledge or instincts in the face of what they see as Trump’s omnipotent ability to always come out on top, is the real mystery.
They have the most power in this culture when it comes to stopping Trump. They could have done it in a heartbeat and instead they decided to ride with this orange monster. It just proves, once again, that any idea that the Big Money Boyz are so much savvier and smarter than everyone else when it comes to the economy is a huge mistake. Their “animal spirits” run stronger than their brains and something about Trump apparently gets those spirits aroused.
