Lock Him Out! (Part 2)

Harry Truman famously had a sign on his desk which read “the buck stops here”. The Donald probably never heard of it, but that doesn’t exempt him from its truth.

The most outrageous break-out of statist excess in US history happened on Donald Trump’s watch with his full complicity. In turn, these Covid-lockdown assaults on normal economic function transformed what was a mediocre economic record during his first 38 months in office into a complete disaster during the last 10 months.

Indeed, nothing like these cliff-dives in economic activity and employment had ever occurred in all of US economic history. Thus, during April 2020 nonfarm payroll employment (purple line) plunged by 20.5 million jobs, while Q2 real GDP (black line) contracted at a 35% annualized rate.

Self-evidently, these declines were literally off the charts of history.

Change In Real GDP and Nonfarm Employment, 1960 to 2020

And it didn’t end there, either. The imbalances, excesses, distortions and malinvestments introduced into the US economy owing to the lockdowns, mandates and Covid hysteria, and then the brobdingnagian monetary and fiscal stimmies designed to relieve these dislocations, plague us to this very day. That is, the long-term trend toward deep impairment of the engine of capitalist prosperity was already bad enough before the Donald’s arrival in the Oval Office, and then Trump-O-Nomics drove the final nail in the coffin.

All of this means, of course, that “the Covid did it” excuse doesn’t wash. Not only did four years of the MAGA economy amount to the worst growth and jobs results since WWII, but the stagflationary blow-off stage now engulfing the US economy is every bit a legacy of Trump-O-Nomics. The Donald inherited an economic mess, and then made it incredibly worse.

So we needs repair to the beginning. The sweeping set of non-pharmaceutical interventions unleashed by the Trump Administration in March 2020 and thereafter constituted a grave affront to constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity. In a just world, those responsible would be exposed, hounded and shamed, and prosecuted where warranted, so that future power-grabbers would forever be reminded that tyranny cannot be imposed with impunity.