Donald Trump announced his presidential run on a strange anti-Mexican platform to great applause.  In an hour long, rambling speech Trump laid out various explanations for American social, political, and economic decline.  The problem with America: Mexican rapists and bad (political) cheerleaders.  If it wasn’t for evil, violent Mexicans and Obama, the U.S. would be as strong as it (n)ever was.

Trump’s announcement was longwinded and incoherent.  The only semi-constant theme through the speech is that government is inefficient and the market is efficient.  This is a tried-and-true slogan of the Reagan Revolution; namely, that the freer the markets the freer the people and that government is the problem, not the solution.  In fact, politics and politicians will only continue to hurt the nation.  There are no quick policy fixes, but there is a great white hope: Trump himself.  He’s a billionaire, a businessmen, and a red-blooded American.  By his own bootstraps, but mainly his $9 billion billfold, he’ll rebuild America and put it back to work.

Trump’s delusions are more than just of grandeur.  His deluded anti-Mexican beliefs are factually inaccurate.  His views on U.S. economic policy are even more contradictory.  He seems to fit a Republican model.  Republican presidential candidates are supposed to parade their private sector bona fides as evidence of understanding the market better (Remember Romney and Cain?).  They will unleash it from the Democrat-imposed mire of regulation.  They will drop taxes on the job-creators and punish the job-killers and the free-loaders.  They will set markets free.  Free-markets will make people happy, not just in the U.S. but across the world.  As markets expand across the globe, there will be less of a need for governments at home and abroad.  It will be in nations’ interests to participate and compete in these global markets.  Since these nations’ economic futures are intertwined, they will minimize conflict and war.  Economic globalization will put an end to wars, ethnic divisions, and intrusive government.  And since America is the greatest nation on earth, they will have the greatest competitive advantage and be the world’s leader again. But what of Trump’s vision?

Globalization, according to Trump’s speech, is the source of America’s decline because it has brought the worst of the world to the U.S.  The U.S. has gained poor immigrants and lost manufacturing.  He would, as president, reverse those outcomes by ending immigration and bringing back jobs.  In his speech he narcissistically expelled:

We need a leader that can bring our jobs, can bring back our manufacturing, can bring back our military, can take care of our vets….We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again. It’s not great….We need somebody that literally will take this country and make it great again….I will be the greatest jobs president that god ever created, I tell you that….I’ll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I’ll bring back our jobs, and I’ll bring back our money.

Strangely, he will bring back American jobs from Mexico and China by raising taxes and building a wall along the southern border.  As America’s Manager-in-Chief, Trump will save the tarnished American brand by reversing over a half century of economic transformation, which his party ushered in and from whose policies he profited.  He will, with a wall, end a multi-century political, cultural, economic, and human migration.  How do we know that Trump can succeed?  He is a billionaire and he has built many buildings in the past.

These are not policies; this is pandering at its worst.  Trump disguises his economic success and need for celebrity by appealing to xenophobia.  Trump made billions in the post-industrial manufacturing economy that his party created and by catering to the foreign economic elite he claims to dislike today.  He will not win the nomination that is for certain. But that’s not Trump goal, nor his political importance. Trump is promoting a political vision that uses racism and xenophobia to explain American decline.  He is appealing to dark, baser motivations in the U.S. that have exploded in the past to bring us some of our worst political and social embarrassments and violent episodes.  While he sits on the fringe of an ever-growing field of presidential hopefuls, he is stirring up, among a certain demographic of working-class white males, deep anxieties born of a post-Civil Rights world.  It is foreigners, people of color, and activist governments who have taken their jobs and money.  Their world, their idea of America, can only be saved by building walls and bringing back old factory jobs.  It’s too simple of a vision to be true.   In Trump’s own convoluted, incoherent words, let’s hope that “the sun will rise and the moon will set” on Donald Trump.

Photo via WalkingGeek