New York Times best-selling author David A. Stockman is the ultimate Washington insider turned iconoclast. He sounded the alarm on US deficit spending and special interest domination of both parties in the Triumph of Politics (1986); warned in The Great Deformation (2013) about massive public and private debt and the Fed’s unhinged money printing and bailouts; and exposed the imperiled American economic dream in Trumped! (2016).
Now in Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of MAGA, he debunks Trump-O-Nomics and the perils of Washington’s addiction to perpetual wars. Stockman says Trump is headed for a great big fall from the imminent crash of a 30-year financial bubble, which he condemned on the campaign trail, but foolishly embraced once in office: “The Donald is not remotely the force of nature he’s been made to seem by the Trump-obsessed media. To the contrary, he’s actually a political flyweight, megalomaniacal incompetent, and bile-ridden bully who stumbled into the Oval Office against all odds; and then lucked-out a second time – bragging about the last gasp of a failing business cycle expansion that had ‘recession ahead’ written all over its forehead”.
Stockman says the Great Disrupter’s lasting contribution will be to discredit “Imperial Washington’s self-serving bipartisan consensus in favor of permanent war, unchained entitlements, fiscal incontinence, debt-fueled consumer spending, rampant corporate financial engineering and endless bubble inflations at the Fed.”
Stockman warns “the twin fiscal menace of the Warfare State and Welfare State” will be Trump’s undoing. After taking the $2 trillion per year of uncontrolled entitlements off the table, Trump “then added insult to injury via his unfunded $1.7 trillion tax cut and massive defense and domestic spending web increases. The result was a guaranteed $20 trillion explosion of the Federal debt over the coming decade.”
Mark Jeftovic is the founder of SpokenTome Media.