Trump's Treasury Problem

Whoever he hires, he's going to end up hating.

Alexander Hamilton, painted by John Trumbull, 1792.

“All communities,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1787,

divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second; and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they will therefore maintain good government.

This is the Hamilton you don’t meet in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s popular musical. Hamilton was a great man, but his legacy is complex. He was low-born and an elitist. He envisioned the need for a strong central government but mainly to protect capital. His politics don’t map easily onto those of the present day, but Treasury secretaries still tend to approximate his broad outlook, right down to the delusion that the rich have nothing to gain through the acquisition of political power.

We find ourselves in a complex moment. If democracy is at risk, that’s because the voters chose very badly on November 5—probably worse than in all American history. Minimizing the damage is a job that will fall largely to those same elites whom the masses despise. Donald Trump is the beneficiary of this mess, and in general his strategy is to sow chaos (though to what end beyond personal aggrandizement and self-enrichment it’s difficult to say). Yet even Trump understands he’ll need to appease elites in choosing a Treasury secretary, lest the markets crash. Financial chaos is the only kind that Trump can’t abide; Trump doesn’t give a shit about the economy, per se, but he cares a lot about the S&P 500. There are many reasons for this, not least of them that more than half his personal wealth is tied up in his majority stake in Trump Media, a publicly-held company of no intrinsic value—a stake that the billionaire president-elect acquired without spending a dime. Reconciling Trump’s need for a robust financial market in which even meme stocks thrive with his crowd-pleasing plan to slap tariffs of 10 to 20 percent on every import is quite impossible, which is why he’s having trouble choosing a nominee. Whoever he hires he’ll end up hating. That’s the topic of my latest New Republic essay. You can read it here.