President Donald Trump is trying to manifest his dream economy from its current malaise state by talking his way into one, writes The Bulwark's Andrew Egger.
"As thunderheads gather over the U.S. economy, Donald Trump has fallen back on a familiar claim: Trillions of dollars in foreign investment are pouring into the U.S. thanks to his dealsmanship. And they’re adding rocket fuel to our HOT new Golden Age," Egger quips.
During his Tuesday meeting with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), Trump highlighted "about all the foreign money pouring in," Egger notes.
“We expect to be around $20 trillion, $21 trillion in one year, and that’s many times bigger than — in history the highest number was $3 trillion, and we’re going to be at $21 trillion," Trump said.
"“And I want to thank you, because you’ve agreed to invest $600 billion into the United States. And because he’s my friend, he might make [it] $1 trillion, but I’m going to have to work on him. But it’s 600 — we can count on $600 billion, but that number could go up a little bit higher yet," Trump told MBS.
Egger notes that Trump's cozy relationship with Trump comes despite the fact that it has been proven that the Crown Prince approved the 2018 operation to "capture or kill" Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in brutal fashion.
"Now, MBS didn’t get where he is today—the personal best friend of the president of the United States—with just a few bonesaws," quips Egger, adding that "he recognizes that you have to tell Donald Trump what he knows he wants to hear."
Which explains why MBS replied to Trump effusively, saying, "We believe in what you’re doing, Mr. President, and tomorrow we’re going to announce that we are going to increase that $600 billion to almost $1 trillion of investment.”
“So you are doing that now?” Trump said, "in apparent surprise," Egger notes. “You’re saying to me now that the $600 billion will be $1 trillion? Good, I like that very much.”
"Donny Deals does it again, folks! An extra $400 billion. And all he had to do was ask," Egger says. "The important thing to understand here is that both these numbers—the $600 billion and the cool $1 trillion — are fake. They’re monopoly-money promises."
Egger observed that "the White House’s messaging apparatus treated MBS’s fanciful promise as though it were a check they’d already cashed."
Most of Trump's promises of foreign investment have been empty, according to Egger.
"[Y]ou’d be hard-pressed to find a more speculative, less reliable indicator of actual future economic prosperity than these sorts of vague promises, as anyone who remembers the Foxconn boondoggle of Trump’s first term could tell you," he writes, referring to a highly publicized, but ultimately scaled-back, $10 billion Foxconn factory project in Wisconsin that was touted by Trump as a major success of his "America First" manufacturing agenda during his first term.
This latest, alleged Saudi investment, Egger writes, like the others are "promises Trump is extracting from other world leaders [that] are about as abstract, gauzy, and speculative as it’s possible for a handshake agreement to be."
"This summer, when Trump struck a tentative trade agreement with Japan, the White House printed off documents for the announcement event boasting of $400 billion in promised Japanese investments in America. Then, before the event started, someone—Trump himself?—crossed out “400” with a Sharpie and wrote “500” down instead," Egger recalls.
"When Trump took to Truth Social to spike the football, the number became $550 billion. The rules are made up and the points don’t matter; when the point of the exercise is just to get Trump in a good mood, you’ll let him say any number he likes," he adds.
And while much of this is laughable, Egger notes, "all this would be more ridiculous than alarming if it weren’t for a simple fact: This most contingent and ephemeral of all economic indicators is the only economic indicator Trump seems to trust is real."
Trump's refusal to admit and acknowledge a faltering economy is met with " the same pivot — would a bad economy have all this investment coming in?"
"Trump has cut himself off from every source of information that could theoretically undermine" his "total certainty" that the economy is booming, Egger says.
"He has enclosed himself in a hermetically sealed information chamber in which aides try hard only to tell him information that they know he’ll find flattering. He has sealed his own mind off from macroeconomic indicators, which he believes are cooked," he writes.
And then there's his personal wealth, which has increased by a massive amount since he took office for the second time.
"And, of course, his personal family businesses (real estate and crypto) are going gangbusters as the same people and countries touting fake investments in the U.S. are making real investments into his ventures," Egger says.
Reality has to set in eventually, Egger notes, as Thursday's September jobs report showed unemployment ticking up, and if there is more "black news" on inflation in the coming days as is expected, "it would present a remarkable contrast with Trump’s everything-is-great rhetoric."
But that's unlikely to change Trump's visions of greatness, he writes.
"Then again, last time he got a jobs report he didn’t like, he just fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trump seems unlikely to be shaken out of his beautiful fantasy that the golden age is already upon us. And until he is, there’s little reason to think he’ll take his foot off the gas," Egger says.