Mr. Trump and the Economics Textbooks.

The article focuses on the economic policies pursued by Donald Trump during his second term as President of the United States, beginning in January 2025, and systematically compares them with conventional economic textbook principles. It highlights significant divergences in areas such as fiscal policy, monetary policy, exchange rate policy, trade policy, supply-side economics, and foreign aid. Trump’s approach emphasizes tax cuts inspired by the Laffer Curve, aggressive tariff imposition to reduce the US current account deficit, and challenges to Federal Reserve independence, often contradicting established economic theory and empirical evidence. The article also explores possible reasons for these policy choices, including political strategy and personality, and notes the difficulty in empirically assessing their long-term effects due to confounding factors like technological change. It concludes that Trump’s policies represent a notable departure from mainstream economic consensus and will be subject to future scholarly evaluation. [Extracted from the article]