Thanks For Joining the PTA

That is, the post-Trump-agenda.

There are many legs to the Trump resistance movement. One, which this Substack tries to help with (as does Krugman, Baker, the Contrarian, and many others) is to reveal and expose the damage being done by Trump’s economic agenda. This is, of course, not just essential but increasingly so, as it is as clear as it is predictable that the administration has launched a major effort to control and suppress the facts that are now showing the cracks they’ve caused in the economy they inherited.

Another is the legal fight, a struggle with many dimensions. Basic human and civil rights are being violated daily. At the same time, trade laws, ethics rules, self-dealing restrictions, politically independent functions (the Fed, BLS), and basic constitutional laws are being violated or under siege. This critical legal work is especially challenging as checks and balances from Congressional oversight all the way up to the Supreme Court have been deeply compromised.

It is thus clear that Trump, as have others throughout history, has cracked the code for building an authoritarian regime out of an allegedly democratic system, or more precisely, exploiting the democracy rulebook and existing norms to move our system his way. Just to cite one example, consider his using emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs. There’s not even the slightest hint of such an emergency, but as long as there’s no one to stop him, he can, at least thus far, do so.

So, please do not interpret what comes next here as any pulling back on these two resistance legs. Exposure of the Trumpian economic harm and the legal fight to stop him are more important than ever.

But there is a third leg: the formation and elevation of the post-Trump-agenda, or the PTA. The PTA is necessary for both political and policy reasons.

Politically, there’s a decent chance, I’d say better than average, that Trump falls prey to the same anti-incumbency outcomes that have consistently been tanking leaders in countries across the globe, with few (though notable) exceptions. Yes, he’ll always have the MAGA base, but the voters that put him over the top may turn on him as it becomes increasingly clear that not only is he failing to make their lives more affordable; he’s making their lives less affordable!

Yes, they’ll do everything they can to rig the election and hold onto power, but if—and I recognize it’s an “if,” not a “when”—the system holds, Trump could very plausibly sent packing…again.

What then?

This brings us to the policy part of the PTA. The sheer incompetence of their regime may bring them down, but unless the next regime begins to address the underlying economic problems (of course, not solely economic, but that’s my lane), the cycle will continue to repeat.

A good place to start is the affordability agenda, one I’ve written about in numerous places and am continuing to do so with excellent co-authors. I’ve suggested yet another three-legged stool (setting up the policy stools around the kitchen-table issues seems like a worthy effort!): building faster and cheaper (the Abundance leg), direct subsidies where key goods/services are unaffordable to middle- and low-earners (housing, child care, health care), and greater competition in sectors where industrial concentration provides dominant firms with excessive market power that hurts both wages and/or prices.

These days, we talk about affordability almost exclusively through the price side of the equation, but when I came up, cutting my teeth at the Economic Policy Institute, the wage side of the equation was recognized as central. In this space, the PTA must embrace full-employment macro that generates broad-based, real gains, educational access, occupational upgrading and upward mobility (which implies an AI agenda), and union power. Industrial policy, on which we were making progress in the Biden years, also fits here.

Then there’s repairing the damage done by Trump’s budget bill. This requires reinstating safety net protections and reversing the tax cuts, especially at the top of the scale. Though some have suggested that in the name of much-needed revenue generation, the PTA should keep Ts tariffs, I couldn’t disagree more. See affordability, not to mention stagflation.

Next, there’s institutional rebuilding and reform. Here, Trump has shown the way, in reverse, of course. The PTA should be perfectly comfortable borrowing Trump’s retribution theme: those who accommodated illegal actions, including street kidnappings, must face stark consequences for their illegal actions. Independent agencies, including regulators and the central bank, must regain their independence and be staffed with competent leaders, not admin plants. More prosaic institution reforms should include ample financing of our statistical infrastructure (and we probably need to build up new rules to prevent the executive from trying to hack the statistical system), reversing the reckless DOGE tear-downs, and building guardrails against Trump’s profit-center approach to president-ing.

Again, taking a page from Trump’s book, while it’s always better and more lasting to legislate the above ideas, if Congress remains unopen for business, the PTA should do what it can without them.

I recognize that there is a contradiction herein: I’m arguing for adding some restriction to the all-powerful executive while using, in a Trumpian manner, those extensive powers for good, as opposed to evil. And in policy terms, I’m cruising at 40,000 feet. It’s a lot easier to say “affordable housing” than it is to pencil out plans that will work in this space.

But it’s none too soon to starting crafting the PTA in earnest. This work must be done alongside the tracking-the-damage and fighting it out in the courts. But it must be done. As listeners to Let’s Do Lunch know, I do not accept nihilistic “resistance is futile” nonsense.

Our nation has come through worse struggles than this one, and while Trump and his minions have garnered very significant powers which they daily abuse, they are not particularly smart. Like I said, affordability concerns consistently top polls, yet they’re all in on sweeping tariffs and swimming in de’Nile re tariffs’ inflationary impact.

But history is clear that residents of false realities eventually fall prey to actual reality. People know that when you shoot the messengers, you’re trying to hide something. People react thermostatically (i.e., they want to turn down the heat when it gets too hot) to illegal deportations of members of their communities whom they know and trust.

So, welcome to the PTA, which you will increasing see developed on these and, I hope, many other pages.