Don't Get Mad, Get Everything

A Second Trump Presidency is Coming

I don’t really like the position of listening to David Brooks and agreeing with what he’s saying, but that was where I found myself last night listening to a PBS Newshour panel just before the first polls closed.

He told the story of speaking with a publisher of conservative books in the early 90s. The 80s were a heyday of best selling conservative commentary books that all had incendiary titles and often made radical, offensive claims. The publisher told him that the key to selling conservative books was getting liberals mad, having them react, and then conservatives would rush to buy the book out of spite or defense. It’s a winning playbook.

Fast forward 12 hours to this morning, when a reporter called me bright and early asking me to try and explain something to him. Exit polls indicated that one of the biggest issues among voters moving to Trump was affordability. But Trump didn’t articulate a single policy related to affordability—Kamala did. She hit the pain points: housing affordability, food, care for young children, care of elderly adults. She offered specific, targeted policies. He offered none, and in fact the policies he did offer—mass deportation and tariffs—would both make affordability drastically worse. How do you square that?

This election, Americans didn’t vote for solutions to their problems, but someone to blame for them. Immigrants, China, Mexico. Blame has so much more resonance.

Since 1973, the real hourly wages of the bottom 60% of workers has increased a grand total of about three dollars. I wrote a stack about this previously. Three dollars in fifty years! That is an absolute failure. And at no time is that failure more palpable than during an inflation spike, when every aspect of your life gets more and more expensive until you wake up one day and you can’t afford your life any more. That’s not a problem borne of inflation itself, especially when it receded so quickly, that’s one borne from wages, five decades in the making. Our economy has been leaving people behind for a while.

I don’t like to make predictions, because I’m of the belief that there is always room for policy. When you commit to thinking something will happen, you don’t work to prevent it.

But I do have one: Trump will do very little to help the economic status and security of the bottom 60% of Americans for his four years in office. The tariff policy and deportation policy, to the extent that he actually pursues them, have no economic benefit. The most probably policy is that he will extend his tax cuts. They are currently estimated to cost over $4 trillion. I wouldn’t be surprised if he adds another corporate tax cut in there, so add at least a few trillion more to the bill.

We know, from the $8 trillion of tax cuts that we’ve pursued over the past 20 years (in 2001, 2003, 2012, and 2017) that this will not raise wages, affect living standards, help with the affordability of anything, really.

I suspect that the economy will improve, if we can avoid a recession. A growing economy should help increase wages. But the problems—so salient and palpable right now—will still be there.

The reporter ended the call, but it left me thinking.

What do we do for the next four years?

I would never admit to channeling David Brooks, but I was certainly thinking of what he said. Trump is going to do any number of outrageous, awful things, like the Muslim ban, like tossing paper towels to hurricane victims, like felony fraud, like being liable for sexual abuse.

If we get mad, we play into their hands. If we don’t get mad, we risk giving a silent nod to all kinds of horrible policy that is no doubt coming down the pike. We are backed into a corner. But we can’t get out of the corner until we know we’re in one.

I am deeply optimistic person when it comes to the American economy. It’s not perfect, it’s got problems, but truly: we’ve done so little to improve it. There’s so much low hanging fruit when it comes to economic policy, so many things that we can do that would be huge wins for workers and families, and we’ve done almost none of them. And I mean really, really low hanging. One in five American workers doesn’t have a paid sick day and workers can be fired for calling in sick. That’s a start!

There’s so much more we can do, so many policies that can build an economy that works better for people, one that doesn’t leave so many behind. Sick days shouldn’t be a luxury, but neither should retirement security.

To the extent that I have a platform—this substack, my TikTok and Insta, my Bloomberg column—I will be using it to be positive. My goal is to empower people to feel optimistic, to feel like economic insecurity is a policy choice that we can fix, to believe that solutions can work for them. I think when the problem feels so big, it can be hard to believe the solution is possible. But it’s possible.

And for whatever reason, this all combined in my brain with Ivana Trump’s cameo in The First Wives Club where she tells the lead women: don’t get mad, get everything.