Actions v. Words

One of the biggest differences between Donald Trump and other politicians is that Trump does what others only talk about.

It’s become a popular sport to dig up video clips from lefty politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama, who once upon a time said things about subjects like trade, tariffs, government spending, and immigration that sound a lot like Donald Trump or Elon Musk today. Here, for example, is Obama on the subject of rooting out “wasteful spending” in “a systematic way.”  Here he is on immigration.

People who say, “Oh, they’re just hypocrites,” are, I believe, misunderstanding the situation. It’s possible—even likely—that hypocrisy comes into the equation.  More important is their assessment of political reality.

In the introduction to his translation of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, Harvey Mansfield observes that Machiavelli believed that to understand political situations correctly, “one must not listen to the intent of the words people use but rather look at the necessities they face.” Most politicians accept the political chessboard they inherit. They are prepared to make moves—even dramatic ones—on the given field of play. They are unwilling or unable to change or challenge that field.

As a theory about the way science actually works, I think that the process Thomas Kuhn describes in his wildly successful book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is completely wrong. Kuhn drowns the logic of science in its history and sociology. He neutralizes the idea of truth and the cognitive machinery we employ to arrive at the truth in order to champion a relativized view of science in which there are no discoveries, only “discoveries,” no refutations, only “refutations,” no proofs, only “proofs,” no real progress, only the substitution of one model for another. The triumph of relativism in Kuhn’s philosophy of science explains why his book instantly became such a hit with literary critics, sociologists, anthropologists, and other humanists beset by science envy. The philosopher David Stove performed the definitive anatomy of Kuhn’s brand of cognitive sabotage in his book Scientific Irrationalism.

While Kuhn’s model of science is logically flawed, one of its images is highly suggestive of how politics unfolds. Kuhn says that the practice of science is an agglomeration of certain techniques, questions, and assumptions about the world. Taken together, this deposit describes the actual practice of what he calls “normal science.” There are always tensions and anomalies in the edifice of normal science, however, questions we can’t answer, eccentricities we can’t explain. When these tensions become aggravated enough, a “paradigm shift” (how the humanists loved that term!) occurs, and normal science gives way to a period of change, tumult, and revolution.

As I say, as an account of science, the Kuhnian model is woefully deficient.  Among other things, it leaves the question of truth and its first cousin, probability, wholly out of account—or, rather, it willfully rejects the question of truth as a naïve atavism.

But inadequate though it is as a theory about the practice of science, it has great relevance to the practice of politics.  The taken-for-granted field of politics is akin to what Kuhn describes as “normal science.”   At any given moment, most politicians play ball on the field and with the equipment they have inherited. They look to exploit, not usually, to expand the Overton window of political possibility.

Donald Trump is different. He does what others say is impossible. Some commentator (I forget who) recently employed a quip attributed to Winston Churchill about Trump.  Churchill is supposed to have said that U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was “the only bull I know who carries his china shop with him.” Apparently, Churchill did not say that. But it is a memorable image, and one can understand why someone would apply it to Donald Trump. He has been in office fewer than 100 days, yet look at the disruptions he has instigated. On his first day, he abolished all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs throughout the federal government.  He also forbade simply renaming those programs in order to carry on their racist, inequitable work by subterfuge. He insisted that universities jettison their coddling of racist and anti-Semitic policies as a condition for receiving federal money. As of this writing, hundreds of millions of dollars have been withheld from Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and other elite institutions for failing to abide by this directive. He tapped Elon Musk to help him identify and eliminate waste and fraud in the government.  The revelations are stunning.  It’s almost as if the U.S. government had evolved into a machine to serve politicians at the taxpayer’s expense.

This last week, Trump got around to one of the main things he campaigned on, his “favorite word,” tariffs. The stock market cratered, the establishment recoiled like a scrotum in icy water, and the acrid scent of panic was everywhere. I wrote about the tariffs the morning of what Trump called “Liberation Day” before the market opened. I expected market tumult but was taken aback by the ferocity of the market reaction.

Still, I continue to believe that we should give Trump’s strong medicine a chance to work. I think that the commentator Tanvi Ratner is correct: the tariffs “aren’t a trade tweak,” she wrote, “they’re the first move in a full-spectrum reset.” As the stock market declines, investors flee to treasury bonds, forcing the yield on those bonds lower. This year, almost $10 trillion will need to be refinanced. Every basis point that the yield declines translates into a billion-dollar annual savings in loan repayment. Thus, a 0.5% drop, she points out,  would save $500 billion over a decade. As of this writing, the yield has declined about 0.7 points.  That’s a lot of money saved.

As a friend of mine observed, Trump’s tariffs are less a matter of economic policy than they are a matter of statecraft.  Just a few days ago, Scott Bessent, Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, discussed Trump’s strategy in an interview with Tucker Carlson. Their ultimate aim, he said, is to strengthen the middle class by helping to get spending under control and by equalizing the international economic playing field.  Will it work?  Time—and it won’t be a lot of time—will tell. I think that the investor Bill Ackman was spot on in his recent post on X.  “Trump’s strategy is not without risk,”  he noted, “but I wouldn’t bet against him. The more that markets support the President and his strategy, the higher the probability that he succeeds, so a stable hand on the trading wheel is a patriotic one.”

An important characteristic of a great leader [Ackman continued] is a willingness to change course when the facts change or when the initial strategy is not working. We have seen Trump do this before. . . . Trump cares enormously about our economy and the stock market as a measure of his performance. If the current strategy works, he will continue to execute on it. If it needs to be tweaked or changed, I expect he will make the necessary changes. Based on the early read, his strategy appears to be working.

To me, Ackman seems right about all this.  And I think he is also right in his concluding exhortation. “Let’s help him succeed. It’s the least we can do.”