Portside

Donald Trump discovered today that while he can order the tides to stop rolling in, he can’t get the tides to comply. The tides, in this case, came in two distinct but related waves. The first was the markets—not just on Wall Street, not just the S&P 500, but the underlying American, and even global, economies. The second was public opinion, the American people, who feared that that first wave would hit them with tsunami force.

Trump thought he could surf them both. Instead, he got wiped out. He is, however, a buoyant SOB, who got wiped out in 2020 but was able to resurface. That said, even in his increasingly authoritarian mode—let’s hope, especially in his increasingly authoritarian mode—he can be stopped.

Consider, then, who and what stopped him, as well as who and what didn’t. If congressional Republicans had roused themselves to exert some oversight of Trump’s tariff coup—after all, the Constitution assigns the tariff power to Congress—then the markets might not have had to go crazy. It’s not as if there were no precedent for the consequences of this kind of nonperformance. If Congress had not failed to do some market regulation in the 1920s, the markets would not have been obliged to fail so spectacularly (aka the Great Depression) that regulation belatedly became mandatory.

The whole idea of creating a government defined by the separation of powers was that the nation could thereby avoid the kind of unchallenged despotism that Montesquieu had warned against, and whose warnings were echoed by the Constitution’s chief author, James Madison. I can’t recall Madison ever warning against unchallenged stupidity, but even the so-called originalists among us must concede that the Founders couldn’t imagine a president so demented and deranged as Trump, or one so set upon a course of action that made sense only in the confines of his brain, and nowhere else.

In a sense, then, democracy checked Trump, as fears of a 2026 Republican wipeout in reaction to rising prices and rising presidential autocracy did manage to induce some trembling in high party circles, from which the White House could not remain totally immune. But much of what’s wrong with America is the grim fact that the forces of capital are frequently more powerful than the forces of democracy, at least since the 1970s, when the checks on capital that the New Deal had erected began to weaken. It was capital, it was Wall Street, that created the global economy of the past half-century, which it structured in a way that saw profits rise and wages stagnate, even though polls never showed majority public support for our signature trade deals. Now, it is capital that is defending that order—not against the forces of democracy, which Trump disdains even more than capital does, but against the nihilistic destruction that Trump spews forth every day.

Trump’s model of government and society is both pre- and anti-democratic and pre- and sort of anti-capital. What’s most important to him is having the power to humiliate everybody else, all those other heads of government who quietly snicker at his ignorance and bombast at G7 meetings, at all those other heads of government who don’t snicker at him, too. The guy wants to be Louis XIV, surrounded by deferential courtiers, by constant bowings and scrapings at Mar-a-Lago, his neo-Versailles. That’s not only not a democratic model; it’s not a market model, either, as markets create multiple centers of power, rigged though they may be. And if there’s one thing Trump has made clear in the first hundred days of his second term, it’s that he wants to wipe out, or at least intimidate into inaction, any other centers of power. Pushed to Trumpian extremes by his tariff policies, his quest for absolute authority not only threatened small-d democrats but also big-C Capitalists, who only now have understood that Trump’s war on any global order in which he doesn’t reign supreme threatens even them (their fortunes, their fortune-derived clout) as well. The notion that Trump might come after everyone else didn’t distress them, but the damage he now threatened to do to their wealth and power distressed them plenty.

Though he doesn’t yet own the courts, Trump does own (with the help of Elon Musk) the Republican-controlled Congress. Try though he may, however, he doesn’t own the markets and he doesn’t own the American people. In a dark winter turned to a grim spring, that should provide some hope.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2025. All rights reserved. 

Read the original article at Prospect.org.: https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-04-09-trump-undone-…

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