Opinion

Recently, a reporter spoke with one of the chief architects of Project 2025 using a hidden camera and microphone and learned they’re still in tight with Trump, still planning to run his administration if he’s elected, still planning to gut the guardrails America has placed around capitalism over the past 100 years, and even planning to “pull the ladder up” to make it harder for entrepreneurs and small business people to succeed in America.

Their plan relies on a major reinvention of modern capitalism and is being pushed by people suffering from an identifiable mental illness. To see how they’re hoping to pull this off, it’s important and necessary to first understand that there are two types of capitalism: raw and regulated.

Donald Trump is in a pickle. It doesn’t seem to matter what he does or doesn’t do. According to 538’s national polling average tracker, the former president’s share of the electorate was at 43.5 percent on the day Joe Biden dropped out of the running. Today, in his race against Kamala Harris, his share of the vote is 43.5 percent. All the new movement, as the pollsters say, has been on the Democratic side.

To put this another way, the vice president is the fluid candidate. She can move voters, with good performances and bad. Trump, however, is the static candidate. He can’t move voters at all (perhaps because most Americans have made up their minds). There was no bump after the Republican National Convention. There was no bump after his attempted assassination. There was no bump after Biden became the first incumbent in half a century to decline his party’s nomination.

Twenty-two years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote for The New York Times Magazine about the era in which he and I both grew up, when the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich ran between 74 and 90 percent.

“[T]he America I grew up in — the America of the 1950’s and 1960’s — was a middle-class society, both in reality and in feel. The vast income and wealth inequalities of the Gilded Age had disappeared. Yes, of course, there was the poverty of the underclass — but the conventional wisdom of the time viewed that as a social rather than an economic problem. Yes, of course, some wealthy businessmen and heirs to large fortunes lived far better than the average American. But they weren’t rich the way the robber barons who built the mansions had been rich, and there weren’t that many of them. The days when plutocrats were a force to be reckoned with in American society, economically or politically, seemed long past.

“Daily experience confirmed the sense of a fairly equal society. The economic disparities you were conscious of were quite muted. Highly educated professionals — middle managers, college teachers, even lawyers— often claimed that they earned less than unionized blue-collar workers. Those considered very well off lived in split-levels, had a housecleaner come in once a week and took summer vacations in Europe. But they sent their kids to public schools and drove themselves to work, just like everyone else.”

Back then most business people avoided politics, preferring to stick to running their companies; in large part this was because when the rich seized political control of America in the Roaring 20s they crashed the economy so badly they were shamed into staying out of the political arena.

—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, June 27, 1936

When President Joe Biden was running for reelection, his main pitch was about the danger Donald Trump represented to American democracy and peace in the world. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, she’s shifted the emphasis of the campaign away from that danger and onto the opportunities that lay before Americans if we can just elect enough Democrats to bring them into reality.

Recently, a retired woman seeking advice wrote to MarketWatch’s financial advisor, saying:

“I was ‘financially set’ after my husband died. But my current adviser lost $500,000 over the last few years, and then a new adviser said my portfolio was ‘a mess’ and wants 1.25% to fix it. What’s my move?”

She was the victim of an unethical financial advisor hustling decades of churning commission-based products that essentially transferred her money into his pocket. As she told MarketWatch, “The adviser was paid per trade.”