Money for Nothing and Your Chicks For Free

The Trump economy is going to make us all crazy--but it is going to hit the voters who fell for his grift hardest

Brokers taking and executing buy-sell orders as the stock market plummets on Friday, October 25, 1929: it was the second day of panic-driven selling. Photo credit: Associated Press/Wikimedia Commons

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As you may have noticed, much of the great work of the Trump administration happens on the weekends or in the middle of the night. The most recent shenanigans are that President Donald J. Trump imposed 25% tariffs on key trading partners Mexico and Canada on Saturday, and a 10% tariff on China; while First Friend Elon Musk spent the week turning digital drawers upside down to see what would fall out.

All this bullshit began to, as they say, “roil the markets,” over the weekend, and we woke up this morning to a newly volatile economy.

Let’s start with what the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal called “the dumbest trade war,”one reminding the President that “bad policy has damaging consequences, whether or not Mr. Trump choose to admit it.” Although the Mexico tariff was paused earlier today because of a tentative deal with President Claudia Sheinbaum to deploy troops[s to her northern (our southern) border, China seem to be all FAFO (fuck around and find out) at this point. Before a deal was struck to pause the tariffs later in the day, Canada announced a 25% tariff on all electric vehicles and a range of other products. Former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who hopes to be Canada’s next Prime Minister, has urged Canadians to boycott all American products and suggested that Ottawa slap a 100% tariff on Teslas.

The often ketamine-powered Elon Musk may have barely noticed the barb aimed at him because, while Trump was going “Wheeeeeee!!!!” with the economy, Elmo and a squad of twenty-somethings (whose names Wired magazine published in this piece) were taking the federal government apart like a Tinker Toy. Whole government web pages are coming down, some to be scrubbed of insidious words like “gender,” others never to be seen again. Data is vanishing. People who do vital work on behalf of the American people are locked out of computer systems which the MuskRats then plunder.

Musk is also showing that you can destroy whole agencies by locking its workers out of their accounts. For example, USAID, which was created by Congress, and is funded by Congress, is being effectively shut down by Musk—someone no one ever voted for or vetted. The Associated Press reported yesterday that, by accessing sensitive Treasury systems, Elmo—who has a vast virtual empire—has gained access to data on all of us that would have taken decades to scrape from our social media activity. He has also gained access to our social security numbers, tax returns, and census questionnaires. If you answered “yes” to a question about whether you were gay married, they can now find you without the cumbersome business of going through state records.

Make no mistake: these are crimes, crimes authorized by President Donald J. Trump and carried out by Elon Musk, sometimes with the permission of sitting cabinet secretaries. It remains to be seen whether—as lawsuits go into motion—the Supreme Court really meant it that it is constitutionally impossible for the President to commit crimes in the course of regular business.

Which brings us back to the reasonably well-functioning economy Trump is driving into the ground, The confluence of two weird policy agendas—one legal (the President has the right to impose tariffs) and one whose legality will surely be litigated for months and years to come—caused markets to tumble in Europa and Asia, while the American stock market went into a brief free-fall. The Dow has now reasserted itself (in part because of the Mexico pause) and is down only about a tenth of a point from the Friday close.

Is Trump going to crash the economy? You’ll be glad to know that it’s not as easy to do that as it once was. The baseline case is, of course, the 1929 Crash, a multi-day event that launched the Great Depression, but there were three separate “panics” in the 15 years after the Civil War ended. The 19th century was also rife with recession and panic. The Panic of 1873 triggered a 6-year depression, while the 1890s saw two separate panics.

I won’t bore you with the details, but these—as well as the stock market crash in 1929— occurred because of a lack of regulation and speculative bubbles in existing markets. Then, there was the exploitation of credulous people (not unlike today’s MAGA voters), who were periodically fleeced of their life savings by shady banks and schemes that involved collaborations between corrupt politicians like Donald Trump and a rising class of oligarchs.

But they also require a class of ordinary Americans—in today’s world, MAGA voters—who have made themselves available for exploitation, disappointment, and ruin because they think prosperity will come to them because an Elon Musk or a Donald Trump flips a switch or produces a new path to wealth. Whether that is sacking the civil service or creating new, unstable currencies built on air ($Trump anyone?), they truly believe that there is some path to money for nothing and their chicks for free.

John Kenneth Galbraith put it nicely in The Great Crash: 1929 (1959): the collapse of prosperity at the end of the 1920s occurred, not just because of rank speculation and an unregulated stock market, but because ordinary Americans “were also displaying an inordinate desire to get rich quickly with a minimum of physical effort.” The new consumer born out of the wreckage of World War I “proceeded to build a world of speculative make-believe….a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.”

Sound familiar? Well, guess what: after 1929, they stopped believing.

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Short takes:

• Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth seem eager to drum people out of the military for being queer, trans, female, or of color—but here’s the problem: there aren’t enough physically fit Americans to meet recruiting goals as it is. “In 2022 and 2023, the Army missed its recruitment goal by nearly twenty-five per cent—about fifteen thousand troops a year,” Dexter Filkins reports at The New Yorker. “It hit the mark last year, but only by reducing the target by more than ten thousand. The Navy has also fared badly: it failed to reach its goals in 2023, then met them in 2024 by filling out the ranks with recruits of a lower standard; nearly half measured below average on an aptitude exam. The Army Reserve hasn’t met its benchmark since 2016, and the ranks are so depleted that active-duty officers have been put in charge of reserve units. Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy.” (February 3, 2025)

• Over at The Atlantic, Franklin Foer has a terrific piece up about attacks on the federal civil service that we have not seen since the Red and Lavender Scares of the 1950s. And there are differences: during the Cold War, both Truman and Eisenhower distanced themselves from these purges, and they were done in the name of national security. Today, just being a civil servant makes a person worthy of persecution by Donald Trump. “I’m constantly amazed by how many smart professionals idealistically commit to careers in government with the knowledge that they will earn far less than they would at, say, a law firm or in management consulting,” Foer writes. “With long careers, they acquire expertise in archaic but essential fields—poultry exports, vaccine policy, the administration of economic sanctions. Their wisdom makes fair-minded governance possible.” (February 2, 2025)

• Elon Musk seizing the keys to the government payment system would not just potentially permit him and a group of teenaged assistants to cease funding any federal program without Congressional action, it would allow him to help his friends and hurt his enemies “Musk could also get his hands on the `Do Not Pay’ system that lists individuals or contractors the government has blacklisted, theoretically granting him control over whom the government does business with,” Lindsay Owens writes at MSNBC. “Government contracts have been central to Musk’s $400 billion net worth; his companies have signed billions of dollars’ worth of government contracts. He could easily place his rivals on the Do Not Pay list or turn the spigot back on for friends who have been blacklisted.” (February 1, 2025)