Trump is not kidding about his MAGA agenda, he's dead serious

It amuses me that nearly two months in Trump's second term, his critics see his pronouncements as posturing or clowning. Sorry, folks, Trump is dead serious about his MAGA agenda. All nations will have to find ways to cope with it: either they fall broadly in line (perhaps with some negotiation) or they end up confronting the US and paying the price.

Whatever Trump is attempting now is what he wanted to accomplish in his first term itself. The Washington establishment managed to scuttle his initiatives then. Trump has learnt since and will not be deterred. Peter Navarro, an insider in Trump's administration then and now, tells the story in crystal clear terms in his book, Time to Take Back Trump's America.

I have a BS article on how the MAGA agenda is unfolding relentlessly. 

Donald Trump is a man in a hurry

Say the worst about Donald Trump, but you can’t deny that he has hit the ground running. Tariffs, immigration, the Ukraine war, the conflict in Palestine, slashing jobs in government—the pace of initiatives and executive orders has been breathtaking. 

The US stock market has taken a beating. America’s allies in Europe are dismayed. Leaders across the world are bracing to cope with the impact of the tariffs that Mr Trump has rolled out.  Mr Trump is unfazed. 

Critics see Mr Trump as sowing chaos across the world in pursuing ideas that he hasn’t really thought through.  John Bolton, national security advisor during Mr Trump’s first term and now one of his most bitter critics, says the President has no philosophy or policy—his moves are all about making himself look good.     

Mr Trump’s critics underestimate him,   as they did after his loss to Joe Biden in the presidential elections of 2020. They never imagined that Mr Trump would fight off the “lawfare”- the use of the legal machinery to keep him out of the political arena- unleashed on him by the Biden administration and claim the Presidency a second time. They now find it hard to accept that Mr Trump is simply delivering on his election promises. Sensible leaders aren’t supposed to do that — election promises are meant only to win votes. 

To understand that Mr Trump means business, you must read Peter Navarro’s Taking back Trump’s America, published in September 2022. Mr Navarro was an advisor on trade policy in Mr Trump’s first term and remains one in his present term. He’s widely seen as a trusted confidante and a member of the President’s inner circle. 

Mr Navarro has earned his boss’s trust the hard way. He refused to testify before a US House Select Committee in the matter involving Mr Trump’s attempts to overturn the election result of 2020 and ended up being jailed for four months for contempt of Congress. 

You may read the book for sheer pleasure. Mr Navarro is no hack: he has a doctorate in economics from Harvard and was a professor at the University of California (Irvine) School of Business. He   writes with verve and wit about the intrigues and manoeuvrings within the White House—and he doesn’t believe in pulling his punches.   All that is unfolding now falls neatly into place when you have read Mr Navarro’s narrative. Here is the gist of it. 

Mr Trump was elected in 2016 on the plank of what Mr Navarro calls Populist Economic Nationalism. This included: Restoring US manufacturing by keeping out imports through tariffs; cracking down on illegal immigration; being tough on China; and bringing US troops home from endless wars.

Mr Trump was new to politics and Washington and he made the mistake of appointing Washington establishment-types as key members of his team. These were committed globalists and status quoists, with little use for  use for Mr Trump’s policy agenda. The Trojan horses within the administration used every trick to mislead him and thwart his agenda. Mr Navarro quotes Robert Lighthizer, the then US trade representative, as saying there were only two types of people in the Trump administration: Those people who thought they had to save the world from President Trump, and those who thought President Trump would save the world. For the most past, the former prevailed.

 It was, as Mr Navarro puts it, a case of Bad Personnel and Bad Process making for Bad Policy and Bad Politics. Many of these Bad Personnel were fired down the line. However, Mr Trump woke up to their tricks a little late in the day. By the time the 2020 elections came up, the constituencies that had voted Mr Trump to power were left unsatisfied with the outcomes. It was the failure to deliver on the economic nationalist platform that resulted in Mr Trump narrowly losing to Mr Biden in 2020.

The Biden administration failed to address the root causes of widespread discontent in the electorate, notably the loss of jobs through offshoring and unchecked immigration. In the 2024 presidential elections, the electorate was even more responsive to Mr Trump’s platform of Populist Economic Nationalism, handing him a more emphatic victory than in 2016.

Mr Trump has learnt from the failures of his first term. He has made sure his administration is now packed with loyalists he can count on to carry out his mission, not people who will find ways to stymie his orders or cook up misleading intelligence. He knows very well that, given time, the Washington establishment will regroup and attack. That’s why Mr Trump is a man in a hurry.

Mr Navarro spells out the three legs of the Economic Triangle that will serve to achieve Mr Trump’s vision of MAGA (Make America Great Again). First, strengthen American manufacturing. This is to be done through policies such as high tariffs and Buy American, Hire American.   

The second leg of the Triangle is cracking down on illegal immigration. American workers losing jobs to those who are willing to work for lower pay has been another big cause of resentment in the electorate. The third leg is putting an end to America’s endless wars. Mr Navarro speaks for Mr Trump when he says, “They are futile and pernicious ‘plowshares into swords’ wars that have drained trillions of dollars from the American economy to the benefit of a military-industrial complex and at the expense of modernizing our infrastructure, improving our schools, and lowering our taxes.Think Ukraine.

One thing should be clear enough: Mr Trump’s near-daily references to his agenda are not cheap bullying, negotiating tactics, or theatrics. All that has happened in the past seven weeks is strictly according to plan. Mr Trump is determined to  remake the world order and he knows full well that his plans will be disruptive for the everybody.    He concedes  that there will be short-term pain for the US. 

Optimists had construed this to mean at most a one-time increase in the US inflation rate of one per cent. Mr Trump has since spooked the markets by refusing to rule out the possibility of a recession in the US.  He’s confident the US will eventually emerge the winner from whatever turmoil his policies cause.   

 Recent history suggests that the US has the least to fear from global disruption. In the past two decades, we have had a global financial crisis (GFC), a Eurozone crisis, the Covid crisis, the Ukraine conflict, and a conflagration in West Asia. America’s share of world GDP has risen from 23 per cent in 2008 at the time of the GFC to 26 per cent in 2023. Mr Trump has reason to believe that the US has the economic and political clout needed to remake the world order to its advantage.