Trump's cabinet is half billionaires, half media savvy loyalists. His core competency is a bizarre command of attention and an ability to get away with anything. That also implies being able to do things nobody else can. Maybe Trump believes in Peter Navarro's ideas, maybe not. It's a knob he can turn, it has tons of powerful people trying to call him when he does, and he can convince half the country that it's all part of his master plan and will work out in the end. These people are driven by faith and will ignore the pain if they think China will hurt and they can keep calling Trudeau governor. Why not create spectacle and leverage while you gut the government? If things get too bad the Fed can just lower rates. What is there to lose? The billionaire class didn't want Trump. He is a chaos monkey. And I guess it's not quite right to think of the "billionaire class" as a unified class, since there are probably many spheres of influence and interest between their fiefdoms (which span borders). But they do want things. Trump is uniquely capable of doing those things. Elon Musk is doing those things right now. The Koch Brothers may not like Trump and did not support him directly, but they bankrolled Project 2025. Jeff Bezos may have bent the knee to Trump but he also learned the hard way from MBS that economic and information power only goes so far. Honestly, Zuck's oversized tee shirt and gold chain iteration are a big improvement over the last version. He probably genuinely thinks he's a genius, but I don't think he cares at all whether tariffs will actually help or not. He completely baffles us all, but at the same time we all know exactly how he works. I claim only that he's a useful idiot to anyone able to get on the phone and have him remember their name.
I think it's foolish to presume Donald Trump has "beliefs." The man is as transactional as it comes and so disinterested in external knowledge that Samantha Bee can make a credible argument that he is illiterate. There's a passage in Mary Trump's book in which she, a girl under ten, watches a young Donald come home from freshman year at college, open the refrigerator in the servants' kitchen, pull out a stick of butter, unwrap it and eat it like a candy bar, his eyes never leaving the inside of the fridge. True story? We'll never know. But the people I know who have worked with Donald Trump - been on the plane, been in the penthouse - describe a man with a singular interest in his perceived level of influence. He wanted a wall because China has a wall. He wants Greenland because it's big on a map. If you examine the extended, historical policy positions of Donald Trump, they have been "acquire things and write 'Trump' on them" followed by "diffuse responsibility for failed gambits." That's it. That's the sum total of the man's contribution to society. Trump's first appearances as a media personality are as parody. He has been that guy from the drop: So what you're left with are people who can advance their own agenda through puffery. You're absolutely right in that everyone of any power or influence is looking to MBS. But I think only MBS is savvy enough to maintain his independence by (A) going through Kushner, whom is far easier and cheaper to flatter (B) acting tough in defiance. The rest of them are just trying to protect their money. Nobody around Trump has the independence to challenge him in any real way. That's by design. So what we're left with is a bunch of lickspittles playing I Got Mine. There's nothing deeper than that. Down to the shitfucks from Project 2025, they're all playing Personal Agenda Advancement with a venal old man who probably doesn't know how to read.