Trump Juche

Imagine you owned a car company, and that company was experiencing a bit of an image problem. There are two ways you might go about fixing it.

One is to stop doing the things that caused the problem. Stop giving wink-wink Nazi salutes, stop calling supporters of Ukraine “traitors,” stop gutting federal agencies to no obvious end except as trollish culture war theater.

The other is to stage a live televised infomercial for your product in the White House driveway with the president himself reading the sales pitch off of handheld cue cards.

It seemed significant to me that Donald Trump and Elon Musk chose the second route yesterday, beyond the obvious reason that it’s laughably corrupt for the head of state to use his office to advertise his top adviser’s business. Laughable corruption is priced in with Trump; to reproach Republicans with a “what if Democrats did it?” hypothetical is to resume a game the right forfeited years ago.

The significance of the presidential Tesla infomercial was how it reflected Trump’s instinct to solve economic “problems” by injecting himself into them. The United States has a trade imbalance with Canada? That’s nothing that a few on-again off-again on-again White House tariffs can’t remedy. Congress has appropriated money wastefully? That’s nothing that some dubiously legal executive impoundment can’t undo.

Tesla is becoming despised by everyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Greene? That’s nothing that Donald Trump acting as the company’s new spokesman can’t fix.

Which raises an interesting question. Who was the Tesla infomercial aimed at, exactly?

For obvious reasons, a consumer who has chosen to boycott Elon Inc. out of disgust for Musk’s MAGA politics won’t be persuaded by the president. I think Trump’s pitch was directed at Republicans, offered in essentially the same spirit as his endorsements in congressional primaries. In order to make America great again, I need you to vote for this candidate—and to buy this comically ugly Cybertruck.

The appeal isn’t primarily commercial. How could it be when he’s been trash-talking electric vehicles for years? It’s political. He’s asking right-wingers to spend tens of thousands of dollars on Teslas to bail out the richest man in history from the financial repercussions of having alienated most of the country. In case the setting didn’t make that clear, Trump elaborated in a Truth Social post afterward—bizarrely accusing left-wingers of boycotting Tesla “illegally” and vowing to buy one of Musk’s cars himself to support DOGE’s work.

He won’t be able to drive it, but so what? This isn’t about driving. It’s about making America great again. “When somebody is a great patriot, they shouldn’t be hurt,” the president said yesterday of his decision to buy one of Musk’s cars. “He’s a great patriot.”

The idea that MAGA supporters should buy not just American-made cars but a particular make of car in order to advance the nationalist cause is a weird, totalizing approach to politics. (Spare a thought today for Ford and General Motors.) Not only does it introduce Donald Trump’s political needs and Elon Musk’s financial needs into kitchen-table decisions, implicitly it nudges the president’s fans to sacrifice for the greater good. Rather than buy the car you really like, shouldn’t you take one for the team and spite the godless left by choosing an Elonmobile instead, fellow patriot? 

That appeal to patriotic sacrifice isn’t the only one that Americans have heard lately from the president and his toadies, though. The lower the stock market sinks and the more tenuous his reputation for an economic Midas touch becomes, the more the White House sounds like it’s promoting what we might call “Trump juche.”

Self-reliance.

Juche is the governing philosophy of the Kim dynasty in North Korea. The basic idea is self-reliance: Only by remaining economically unentangled with other countries can the glorious North Korean nation resist imperialist influence and remain independent.

It’s Stalinist autarky. And it’s worked out exactly as well as the phrase “Stalinist autarky” would lead you to assume.

One way that the Kims have kept the population docile amid mass privation is with pitiless violence against dissenters, a communist favorite. But the culture of juche also conditions North Koreans to remain obedient despite terrible hardship and global isolation. Because the leader controls everything, and because he’s worshipped fanatically and unquestioningly, personal suffering becomes a form of patriotic sacrifice to advance his vision.

Donald Trump is no communist and America is too rich to experience privation during his presidency. But he did, by his own admission, fall in love with North Korea’s leader and seems to have picked up a few of his boyfriend’s habits, as happens with lovers. He cultivates fanatic obedience among supporters, he aims to maximize personal control over everything happening in government and the economy, he’s obsessed with self-reliance, and he disdains alliances—except with illiberal North Korean chums like Russia and China.

Why, he even sounds a bit like a commissar bleating about crop yields in some of his Truth Social posts.

Trump juche imagines an America that’s autarkic, alienated from the West, dominated by an all-powerful leader, and backed by a population that’s willing to endure hardships foisted on it by that leader as noble, necessary sacrifices to realize his vision of national greatness.

Listen to some of the president’s cronies talk lately about the rising cost of living and the declining price of stocks and you’ll hear distinct juche-ian echoes. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Americans to expect a “detox period” economically as Trump DOGE-s and tariffs his way to prosperity, for instance, and at one point callously declared that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” (Bessent is worth $500 million.) Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went one better by advising consumers worried about egg prices to buy chickens and raise them in their backyards, taking the concept of self-reliance to its logical conclusion.

Other Republicans (some even before the election!) have rationalized the economic pain with vague assurances that, somehow, some way, it’s all worth it. House Speaker Mike Johnson compared Trump’s tariff helter skelter to the initial break in a game of billiards, justifying sending balls rocketing in every direction without any sense of where they’ll end up as a necessary “shake-up” before the economic game can begin. A Trump voter interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about Americans’ retirement savings melting down analogized the policy chaos to a splint that helps a broken bone heal correctly. It’s unclear why she thinks the metaphorical bone was broken in the first place, but no matter: “If you set it, it’s going to hurt, but it will be stronger than it was before.” 

Asked about the possibility of a recession, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went as far as to say “it’s worth it” (before adding that a recession would be Joe Biden’s fault, of course). There are important fiscal goals, like a solution to our debt crisis, that might reasonably justify risking an economic downturn—but we’re not getting that solution from Trump, lord knows.

Some MAGA boosters have even tried to justify the recent economic pain on non-economic grounds. One commentator cheered the president for trying to build an economy based on love of country and encouraged business leaders to thank him as their market capitalization erodes. A Newsmax host saluted Trump for having the “balls” to undo the “globalist economic agenda,” reducing America’s basic welfare to theater for the president’s bravado. On Tuesday Lutnick turned up on television to boast that his latest supposed victory in the pointless, destructive trade war he started with Canada is proof that “you can’t tackle Donald Trump.”

Trust our leader. Admire his boldness. Accept the suffering he’s inflicted on you, and the suffering he may yet inflict, as a patriotic duty. Believe with all your heart that what he’s doing will lead to greater American prosperity even though no one can say how. Ignore the fact that most of the rest of the world’s wealthiest countries are royally pissed off. We can achieve self-reliance if only we have the will.

Backlash.

That’s Trump juche. Judging by the market’s recent performance, I suspect this week’s slide will be remembered as the moment investors realized that the White House is serious about it and reacted accordingly.

Disillusionment is beginning to turn up in polling too. On Wednesday CNN released a new survey that found the president’s job approval down to 45-54, but more notable was his rating on the economy. Trump scored consistently well in that metric in his first term, never drawing majority disapproval of his economic policies. That’s now changed: He’s down to 42-56, his worst number ever, and falls further to 39-61 when respondents are asked how he’s handling tariffs specifically.

His friend Elon stands at 35-53 on favorability, by the way, in case you’re wondering how likely that Tesla infomercial is to pay off.

All presidents live or die politically by the state of the economy during their term (ask Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) but the issue holds special potency for Trump. For him economics is the Great Redeemer, the issue that almost singlehandedly gave American voters the excuse they needed last fall to overlook his moral, civic, intellectual, and temperamental unfitness for the job and to roll the dice on him again. His TV image as a business genius who’ll bring economic growth with him to the presidency was seemingly borne out by the pre-COVID numbers in his first term, and voters didn’t forget.

So long as that Midas touch continued in his second term, minor details like extreme graft and authoritarian power grabs could be overlooked. This feels like the week when Americans began to consider the possibility that he doesn’t have that touch after all, that Trump 2.0 might not deliver the same results as Trump 1.0, that Never Trumpers had a point when they warned that he’d burn the country to the ground without the comparatively responsible advisers of his first term around to restrain him.

The selloff on Wall Street might be investors’ way of stepping up and trying to restrain him in their absence. If his new deputies are too stupid or too cowardly to make him think better of tariffs, maybe Trump having to watch his reputation as “the economy president” go up in smoke will sober him up.

But if it doesn’t, and he continues to tariff his party into economic and political disaster, the cope from populists will be interesting.

It’ll proceed in stages, I expect. The first stage, which we’re seeing now from the likes of Bessent, is that the current downturn is temporary—or “transitory,” to borrow an ominous term that bedeviled the last administration. But if it drags on and starts to seem not so transitory, Trump apologists will shift toward emphasizing Mike Johnson’s rationale that the disruption is necessary, even intentional. It’s all part of a plan, eight-dimensional chess. In juche America, we sacrifice now to reach prosperity later.

That might work for a while but Lutnick’s cavalier nonsense about a recession being “worth it” won’t cut it for swing voters. At some point, if the pain keeps up as the midterms approach, MAGA will begin looking around for scapegoats.

There’s no shortage to choose from. Biden is an obvious target: The economy he left Trump was more terrible than expected, we’ll be told (falsely), and in any case it was propped up by extravagant spending like the COVID relief bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. Populists will also seek fall guys within the administration to take the blame instead of the president, with Howard Lutnick an early leading candidate for patsy-in-chief. 

Trump himself, though, will probably do what he does best and resort to gassy theories about a conspiracy to bring down his administration. The “globalists” sold off their stocks en masse knowing that a market dip would wreck his popularity, he’ll say, or the Ukrainians did. His scummiest fans online will detect the hidden hand of Hebrews behind the decline. You know how it goes by now.

But maybe I’m wrong and the right will remain at the “Trump juche” stage of cope for longer than expected. It would make sense. Nationalists are tribalists and their movement is a cult, so it won’t offend them nearly as much as it would offend conservatives to sacrifice a meaningful portion of their wealth to some peacetime political project spearheaded by their hero. If forced to choose between admitting they made a catastrophic error by trusting Trump’s economic judgment and smiling serenely while he immolates a chunk of their retirement savings, many will reassure themselves that it’s all part of a plan and will go down with the ship.

Many—but not enough to prevent a Republican electoral bloodbath. Which, it pains me to say, feels a tiny bit unfair to the president.

Be careful what you wish for.

“The people who voted Donald Trump back into office wanted him to bring back 2019,” Charles Cooke wrote at National Review on Tuesday. “They did not sign up for a trade war with Canada, the resurrection of William McKinley, or an endless game of red light/green light that tanks their 401(k) and makes it harder for their kids to buy a house.”

That’s all true. But they did sign up for chaos, broadly speaking.

They couldn’t have known the form that chaos would take. I’ve written about Trump nearly every weekday for the past 10 years, for example, and even I didn’t anticipate his “51st state” insanity toward Canada. I assumed he’d wreck NATO and end the Pax Americana but I didn’t foresee it happening in the first six weeks. I expected a trade war but did not imagine the main theater would be North America.

Trump is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get, but there’s a high likelihood it’ll be nutty.

The problem with the “we didn’t vote for this!” argument is that the president was a loud-and-proud tariff enthusiast in his first term and as a candidate last year. In fact, as time has gone on, his faith in tariffs as an economic panacea has grown to quasi-mystical proportions. This is a man so besotted that his thoughts turn to them as a solution to child-care costs, who imagined them perhaps even replacing the federal income tax against all logic and basic math. 

It’s hard to fault him for assuming that the electorate gave him permission to get crazy with the protectionist Cheez Whiz.

Frankly, it’s hard to fault for him assuming that the electorate gave him permission to get crazy, period. Americans didn’t sign up for the resurrection of William McKinley but they did sign up for placing an unstable, conspiratorial coup-plotting criminal atop the executive branch. Government by whim, relentless policy chaos, gleeful norm-breaking, and Trump as the daily “main character” in all facets of public life: That’s what Americans signed up for, undeniably. Everyone old enough to vote last November 5 was also old enough to remember January 6.

So why should we fault the president for assuming that they signed up for Trump juche? It’s the endgame of his brand of politics, placing the leader at the center of everything and expecting sacrifice in the name of whichever goals he, in his paternal wisdom, sets. You may not have envisioned Teslas being hawked on the White House lawn but don’t you dare claim you’re surprised.