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I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
I think a lot of people (myself included) are mostly worried about Trump's economic policies. The ballooning deficit with no real attempt at austerity is certainly a major issue, but that has been discussed in other comments, so I'll focus on two other ones; tariffs and monetary policy.
The tariffs in and of themselves are not a major issue, but the uncertainty around how they are implemented (and the speed at which they are altered) is. One of the primary things that has made the US a major world player economically is stability. When things become unstable, businesses (and people in general) circle the wagons, stop investing in riskier things, and stop spending. While this all might seem very abstract, there are a lot of concrete examples on this one. The most salient for the average person is the fact that you can no longer reliably mail things to the US. But in the long term, disruption of industrial supply lines is likely to cause a much larger problem, especially in terms of inflation.
The other piece of this is monetary policy, and Trump's attempt to directly control the federal reserve. The reason for the federal reserve's independence is that lowering interest rates is very useful for short term political gain, a fact that Trump seems quite aware of. But in the medium term, the combination of increasing the money supply, putting supply constraints on the whole economy via import duties, and heavy deficit spending is likely to cause large amounts of inflation. And that, more than anything else, is what worries me about the current administration.
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