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Donald Trump’s Defining Decade

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Donald Trump invoked the 1890s in laying out the agenda for his second term. But from his demand for the Panama Canal to his declaration of a national energy emergency to his order releasing the records of the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the music he grooved to at his inaugural balls, Mr Trump, in his first days back in office, has instead evoked a different decade: the 1970s, formative years for him, and for America.

It was in 1971 that Mr Trump, then in his mid-20s, moved from Queens into Manhattan, taking a rent-stabilised studio apartment with a view of a water tank. He had ambitions to turn his father’s Brooklyn-based business building middle-class housing into something grander. By the decade’s end he would be a millionaire in his own right, married to a glamorous immigrant and a fixture at clubs like Studio 54, with growing celebrity for projects such as his eponymous tower rising on 5th Avenue.

As he exited the 1970s in his mid-30s, the apprentice years of adulthood behind him, Mr Trump, like many Americans, had reasons to be cynical about politics and business, to be fearful of inflation and oil scarcity and urban crime, to be drawn to conspiracy theories, to think America had lost the national self-assurance of his childhood in the 1950s. During what Tom Wolfe branded “The ‘Me’ Decade”, amid revelations of dirty deeds by sainted figures, as Americans more freely embraced and divorced each other, old ideas about duty and service came to seem like frauds. “Forget foundationless traditions, forget the ‘moral’ standards others may have tried to cram down your throat,” advised one bestseller in those years, “Looking out for Number One”.

“The 1970s were daunting and frightening because habits and institutions that had succeeded brilliantly for half a century suddenly sputtered,” David Frum writes in his history of the decade, “How We Got Here: The 70s”. “Never—not even during the Depression—had American pride and self-confidence plunged deeper.” The disillusion, fear and reaction of those years hardened into the worldview that has carried Mr Trump twice to the Oval Office.

At the start of the 1970s Mr Trump met Roy Cohn, the man who probably influenced him more than anyone besides his father, sharpening his reflex to fight all comers for every advantage, as he is doing now as president. A ferocious New York lawyer, Mr Cohn became Mr Trump’s mentor, “introducing him to the netherworld of sordid quid pro quos that Cohn ruled”, wrote Mr Trump’s dogged biographer, Wayne Barrett, in “Trump”. Over the course of the 1970s Mr Trump became the largest individual donor in New York state and local elections. “I can buy a US senator for $200,000,” he once told an associate back then.

Revelations spilling out of the Watergate investigations were teaching all Americans similar lessons, and implicating more than just President Richard Nixon. America’s great corporations for years had evaded the law with donations to politicians of both parties. Not only Nixon had secretly recorded meetings in the Oval Office. So had Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy.

In 1976 Congress for the first time created a permanent committee to oversee the intelligence agencies, and it revealed shocking secrets about coups and assassinations by the CIA. Then came revelations about the FBI. Robert Kennedy himself had ordered wiretaps on Martin Luther King. As suspicions of skulduggery grew, Congress in 1976 ordered investigations into the assassinations of John Kennedy and King. Hollywood seized on the spectre of rot in America’s foundations for the plots of such movies as “Three Days of the Condor”, about CIA murders of Americans, “Chinatown” and the “Godfather” series. Mr Trump’s response in 2017 when an interviewer called Vladimir Putin a killer—“You think our country’s so innocent?”—was straight out of the 1970s.

Government was coming to seem not just corrupt but incompetent. New York City teetered at the edge of bankruptcy as officials struggled to stem rising theft and homicide. “Welcome to Fear City” read pamphlets bearing a death’s head that police officers in casual clothes handed out to tourists in 1975. During a citywide blackout in 1977, chaos swept the streets, resulting in hundreds of injuries to police officers and thousands of arrests for looting. One might well have called it American carnage.

Four years of the condor

Nationally, new laws in the 1960s led to a surge in immigration in the 1970s, and illegal immigration along with it. Backlash was building against new rights granted to non-citizens, as it was against policies meant to advance integration and equality such as affirmative action and busing. Mr Trump first hired Cohn to defend him against a Justice Department suit accusing the Trumps’ company of excluding black renters. Asked at a deposition in 1974 when the first black people moved into one of his projects, Mr Trump replied, “I don’t care and I don’t know.” He was insisting on the same sort of “colour-blindness” he declared in his inaugural address this month to now be government policy.

Mr Trump once lamented that during the 1970s America lost “the feeling of supremacy that this country had in the 1950s”. In the 1970s, ceding control of the Panama Canal divided conservatives. In a televised debate with Ronald Reagan, William Buckley, the founding editor of National Review, said turning the canal over would bring Americans “increased security and increased self-esteem”. Time has proved him correct as far as security goes. But to many on the right the treaty with Panama became an exhibit of the same weakness that led to failure in Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis. Mr Trump’s pledge to retake the canal is a direct assault on the 1970s, and it underscores a basic question about his second term: will he lead Americans to transcend that decade at last, or to wallow in it?

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Economics

Elon Musk says Trump’s spending bill undermines the work DOGE has been doing

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters

Elon Musk criticized the Republican spending bill that recently made it through a House vote, saying it counters the work he’s been doing to reduce wasteful government spending.

In an interview to be aired June 1 on “CBS Sunday Morning,” the richest man in the world and the head of the Department of Government Efficiency advisory board said the “big, beautiful bill” will not help the nation’s finances.

“I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in a clip the program shared on social media platform X.

DOGE says it has saved $170 billion in taxpayer money since it began in January, targeting areas of government waste and redundancy in sometimes-controversial ways.

For instance, it has gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development and reduced staff elsewhere. DOGE-related moves have been responsible for some 275,000 government layoffs, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a consultancy firm.

The sweeping One Big Beautiful Bill Act by contrast, is projected to raise the federal budget deficit by $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The deficit is on track in 2025 to run close to $2 trillion, with the national debt now at $36.2 trillion.

“I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful, but I don’t know if it could be both,” Musk said in the clip.

Trump and congressional Republicans counter that the bill reduces spending in key areas and will generate enough growth to compensate for the tax reductions. The legislation, though, is expected to face strong resistance in the Senate.

For his part, Musk has pulled back his DOGE work, saying he plans to focus on running his companies, which include X, Tesla and SpaceX. Musk had been a frequent presence in the White House since Trump’s election.

In an interview with The Washington Post published Tuesday, Musk said the federal bureaucracy is “much worse than I realized” and that DOGE became “the whipping boy for everything.”

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How young voters helped to put Trump in the White House

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THE 2024 election unfolded like a political thriller, replete with a last-minute candidate change, backroom deals, a cover-up, assassination attempts and ultimately the triumphant return of a convicted felon. But amidst the spectacle, a quieter transformation unfolded. For the first time, millennials and Gen Z, people born between 1981 and 2006, comprised a plurality of the electorate, and their drift towards Donald Trump shaped the outcome.

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Trump hails ‘positive’ step in U.S.-EU trade talks as markets await deal

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U.S. President Donald Trump gestures at the annual National Memorial Day Observance in the Memorial Amphitheater, at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., May 26, 2025.

Ken Cedeno | Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday he welcomed the European Union, after he agreed to delay a 50% tariff on goods from the bloc until July 9.

“I have just been informed that the E.U. has called to quickly establish meeting dates,” Trump wrote in a post on the Truth Social platform.

“This is a positive event, and I hope that they will, FINALLY, like my same demand to China, open up the European Nations for Trade with the United States of America.”

Trump also said Tuesday that the EU had been “slow walking” in negotiations with the White House over a trade deal.

The sudden prospect of even greater tariffs on one of the U.S.’ biggest trade partners rattled markets when it was threatened by Trump last Friday. In a post last week, Trump said discussions with the EU were “going nowhere.”

However, sentiment turned positive on Tuesday amid hopes of a breakthrough. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a post on X over the weekend that the EU was “ready to advance talks swiftly and decisively,” while European Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic said Monday that he had “good calls” with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Europe’s regional Stoxx 600 index slightly extended gains after Trump’s comments on Tuesday, last trading up 0.55% on the previous session, while U.S. markets opened broadly higher.

The 27-member alliance was hit with a 20% tariff on the EU on April 2 as part of Trump’s “reciprocal” tariff strategy, which was then cut for almost all trading partners to 10% for 90 days. Concurrent U.S. duties on autos, steel and aluminum are also hitting the bloc’s exporters.

EU officials have repeatedly stressed that they want to reach a deal with the White House, but that this will not come at any cost. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, earlier this month launched a consultation on tariff countermeasures targeting U.S. imports worth 95 billion euros ($107.4 billion) if a deal is not reached.

CNBC has contacted the European Commission for comment.

On May 8, the U.S. unveiled the outline of a trade deal with the U.K., the first such agreement under the latest Trump administration, although businesses say they are awaiting further details. The deal maintains a 10% baseline tariff on U.K. imports to the U.S., suggesting other countries will face a similar rate at a minimum.

Trump has generally struck a favorable tone toward the U.K. due to its more balanced trade relationship in goods with the U.S. He has accused the EU, however — with which it has a deficit in goods — of treating the U.S. unfairly. EU-U.S. trade is roughly balanced when accounting for both goods and services, according to EU figures.

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