What connects Donald Trump’s approach to trade, tax and government spending? Is there a Trumpian theory of economics – Maganomics? Trump, like most politicians, would doubtless reject any claim that he was following a particular ideological blueprint, but then, as John Maynard Keynes said: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
It’s certainly difficult to attribute Trump’s policies to the intellectual influence of any one strand in economic thinking. The most obvious frame is the dual one identified by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, who describes it as a combination of economic nationalism and the techno-right. The former, represented by long-term Trump confidantes Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, wants to rebuild America’s traditional industrial strength behind tariff walls while deporting as many immigrants as possible; the latter, represented of course by Elon Musk, to engineer a great leap forward into an AI-enabled libertarian future.
