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Is your modeling of Trump so poor that you attribute it to deliberately wanting to wreck the US economy, during his own term, because fuck the Democrats?
He's just not very committed to specific ideology, he mostly plays things by ear and gut feeling and he has a good feeling about this one. Sometimes his gut feelings are right and sometimes they're wrong. His feeling about sending those B2s to Iran seems to have been pretty much just upside so far. The dust hasn't settled on the tarrifs but at least it didn't lead to the immediate collapse that his detractors were claiming were coming. Governing outside of ideology is what his voters wanted, "Making America Great Again" is spectacularly vague and non-committal as to the method of achieving it after all, and for what it's worth I don't think it's a particularly bad way of going about it in reality. Pure ideology will get you all fruits of that ideology, the good ones but also the rotten ones. A wise king who can pick and choose which fruits to pluck is the best political system, and with the short supply of wise kings nowadays, a businessman with good instincts is not the worst stand-in. Of course, opinions can vary as to whether Trump has good instincts.
Trump has never been much of a fiscal conservative, so I don't expect him to hold much fiscal conservative views. He seems to truly believe in the power of the state over private enterprise, and mercantilist thought.
This in regards to people who have actually claimed to be small government hands off capitalists joining in without an argument towards merit. They don't seem to have "changed their mind" (if that was the case, they would try to make an argument for central planning) as much as never having a strong belief in their prior claims to begin with.
Ultimately I think that's simply because most people are intuitively centrists or flexible, but that's a tough position to defend in debates, because keeping your options open is also what someone without a plan would say they're doing. But ideology blinds and binds. Whenever a politician is out of power, they argue like ideologues, and they argue that whoever is in power is failling their own ideology by not sticking to it. It's an easy position to stake. Keeping your options open, while smart, makes you an easy target for nasty headlines, anything you refuse to rule out off the cuff while talking to a journalist (and they won't give you time to think) will be held up as "(politician) could/might/is considering doing this stupid thing!" Trump got very good at evading the trap, but most politicians stumble, they either submit and rule out the stupid thing and then they're made to look weak or stupid for having even considered it, or they find themselves driven into defending the stupid thing.
And that's how we find ourselves in a situation where people kind of hates all sides and no politician can really ever seem like just a smart honest person. Because you can't argue the same positions in the opposition and in power.
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