As the markets and pundits react to Donald Trump’s enormous upset victory, let me offer my own reactions. As an economist, I will focus on matters pertaining to economic policy.
The Danger of Hubris and Denial. Everybody recognizes that the “experts” and polls were totally wrong. Indeed, I was listening to NPR around 6 p.m. Eastern time on Election Night, and these commentators were all but speculating on President Clinton’s Cabinet. Later, around midnight, I was curious how NPR’s anchors would handle the blow. I am only slightly exaggerating when I say that the explanation was, “Trump motivated more bigots than we expected.”
Yet this type of reaction reflects a complete evasion of the media elite’s own failings. Indeed, part of the support for Trump came from people who are not bigots but are sick and tired of being called names simply for disagreeing about the proper size of government. I didn’t vote for Trump—I no longer vote, as a matter of principle—but I have had discussions with plenty of Trump supporters in the past two years. I don’t know a single person who approved of his boorish comments about women; they were all voting for him despite his obvious flaws as a person.
Look folks, there was no mystery about what Trump was running against. He laid it out clearly in his final ad. The critics dismissing this ad as a “dog whistle” for anti-Semites—as if someone couldn’t have legitimate reasons to criticize Janet Yellen or George Soros—are refusing to acknowledge reality. I’m reminded of the Keynesians who dealt with the surge in unemployment after implementation of the Obama stimulus package—where unemployment with the package was worse than what they warned would happen if the government “did nothing”—by arguing, “Wow, the economy was worse than we realized.” Likewise, after being utterly wrong about this election, many Establishment pundits reacted by saying, “Wow, the United States is worse than we realized.”
