Academic futurist Daniel Drezner (photo, left; profile here), writing for Politico (here), has some predictions.
First, brace for much higher inflation. “In a second Trump term, his combined policies of ‘priming the pump,’ looser money, higher tariffs and fewer workers is a surefire recipe for inflation that would make 2022 look tame by comparison.”
“Pump priming” is an expression for politicians stimulating the economy with federal spending, tax cuts, and lower interest rates. When you do it in a full-employment economy like we have now, all you get is higher prices, as more dollars chase the same amount of goods and services.
By “fewer workers,” Drezner is referring to Trump’s plan to deport immigrants. That policy would be economically counterproductive because, “It’s well established that immigration has helped to spur U.S. economic growth, and the post-pandemic influx of migrants enabled our recent economic recovery while allowing inflation to subside.”
There are other reasons why mass deportations are a bad idea; demographics is one. With Americans having few children, the U.S. birth rate has fallen below the replacement rate (i.e., the number of births equaling the number of deaths). That means our population, workforce, and economy will shrink without immigration. America’s labor shortage, a key driver of inflation, would get worse if Trump deported several million workers. A U.S. economy stripped of those workers will have poorer health care, education, and a weaker technology industry.
Another contributor to inflation is trade wars and tariffs. Trump likes tariffs, but they raise the prices of imported goods. Drezner says “the principal victim of Trump’s protectionism would not be America’s rivals but American consumers” and our European trade partners.
“The result would be a United States foreign policy and political economy that would bear a striking resemblance to the period between World War I and World War II — what’s usually called the interwar period. Key Trump supporters valorize this era in American history.” The rest of us remember it for the Great Depression and the rise of fascism.
Drezner thinks Trump would abandon Ukraine and leave the NATO alliance, and pull back from our security commitments in the Pacific and Middle East, resulting in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., and Turkey seeking nuclear arsenals of their own, and increasing the risk of a regional nuclear war.
Meanwhile, a Time article dated April 30, 2024, by staff writer Eric Cortellessa (read it here), is more stark. He wrote:
“What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”
That is truly a frightening scenario, especially if coupled it with soaring inflation and an imploding economy.