CAMBRIDGE – While the end of World War II 80 years ago ushered in an age of reason, Donald Trump’s return to the White House has ushered it out. His MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement promises to take a wrecking ball to the postwar global economic order, raising the question of what will replace it. “America First” seems to appeal to a wide spectrum of constituents, from blue-collar workers in the heartland to Big Tech “broligarchs.” But what does it mean in practice? Is there any method to Trump’s madness, or does he believe, like Mao Zedong, that “Everything under heaven is in chaos; the situation is excellent”?
At his second inauguration, Trump announced a new American “golden age,” which presumably would be achieved by delivering on his campaign promises to end inflation, impose new tariffs, expel undocumented immigrants, cut taxes, and radically reduce the size of government. But mainstream economists were quick to point out that achieving these contradictory objectives simultaneously will be difficult, if not impossible. After all, tariffs, deportations, and tax cuts are all potentially inflationary.
What are we to make of MAGA economics – or what is variously referred to as “economic nationalism,” “Trumponomics,” or “populist economics”? Is it the progeny of economics, or something else entirely? Economics traditionally has comprised coherent schools of thought: neoclassical, Keynesian, monetarist, and Marxian economics, for example, follow a certain internal logic. But MAGAnomics is an intellectual grab bag.
Start with Trump’s emphasis on tariffs, which represents a repudiation of neoclassical economics’ commitment to free trade and a return to mercantilism or the heterodox developmentalism of the left. Meanwhile, “industrial policy” – active government interventions to support strategic industries, which are typically associated with government-led planned economies – somehow coexists with the echoes of anarcho-libertarianism implied by the war on the “deep state.” Likewise, whereas the rejection of austerity and tolerance for deficit spending smacks of Keynesianism, the focus on deregulation and tax cuts harks back to Ronald Reagan and trickle-down economics.
Thus, MAGAnomics is simultaneously considered to be “pro-business” (corporate tax cuts and deregulation) and “pro-worker” (reindustrialization, reshoring, and anti-immigration). By rejecting the logic of Ricardian comparative advantage, Trump rejects the supreme criterion of neoclassical economics: efficiency. Yet he supports the mission of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). While some commentators have attempted to position MAGAnomics as a descendant of Hamiltonian economic philosophy or the paleo-conservativism of Pat Buchanan (who mobilized “white anxiety” to push Republicans to the right of Reagan), many others see it simply as the result of a long-standing dissatisfaction with globalization.
MAGAnomics has undoubtedly absorbed arguments from Trump’s senior counselor for trade, Peter Navarro (a protectionist China hawk), Robert Lighthizer (a free-trade skeptic), Oren Cass (a conservative champion of the American worker), and Stephen Moore (a talking head and consummate Trump flatterer); and it has been institutionalized through organizations like the Heritage Foundation (Project 2025). But unlike traditional schools of economic thought, MAGAnomics operates as a pastiche of contradictory doctrines and impulses crammed together under the banner of nationalism and grievance politics.
Trump’s brand of economic nationalism resonates not because of any theoretical coherence, but through its emotional appeal. The currency of MAGAnomics is not analytical rigor; it is affect – wounded pride, humiliation, and, above all, anger. Legions of experts and academics, especially economists, have struggled to rationalize what is fundamentally an emotional phenomenon.
That is why the best explanations may lie outside of economics. Consider sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on the “deep story” of Trump supporters: how they see themselves as waiting in line for the American Dream, only to be cut off by outsiders and elites, women and minorities. Here we find the psychological basis for MAGAnomics’ appeal, even when its policies are inconsistent or contradictory. Trump reframes their pride as having been “stolen,” and urges them to channel it into blame.
It is ironic, to be sure, that neoclassical economics, so rigorous and elegant, has met its match in an intellectual mash-up. But this is consistent with a defining feature of MAGAnomics: its animus toward experts and elites. In replacing the technocratic logic of postwar economics, it redefines the American worker not as an economic agent in a model, but as a symbolic figure in a larger struggle against “globalism” and cultural displacement. Its power lies in its ability to channel collective frustrations into a political agenda whose purpose is not economic stewardship but cultural messaging.
And yet MAGAnomics has been eerily effective in shining a light on economics’ unresolved questions: its distributive implications (who wins and who loses), its disciplinary boundaries, and its treatment of issues like personal identity and affect. For all its internal contradictions and polarizing and reactionary policy implications, MAGAnomics forces these issues back into the center of the conversation.
MAGAnomics may not qualify as a school of economic thought, but economists need to recognize that it is no mere aberration, but rather a symptom of the deeper, longstanding shortcomings of the orthodoxy that prevailed in the aftermath of WWII. A reckoning is in order, not just with Trumpism, but with the assumptions that made it possible in the first place. Many are blaming MAGA’s rise on the Democratic Party’s disarray; but the economics establishment may be even more at fault. Until and unless economists get their discipline’s house in order, the MAGA madness will be here to stay.
Antara Haldar, Associate Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, is a visiting faculty member at Harvard University and the principal investigator on a European Research Council grant on law and cognition.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
www.project-syndicate.org
