21 December 2018

The Good that Could Come from Trump

Every month Trump seems to find a new way to turn the volume up to 11. He's such a cluster of cruel and stupid, confident and confused, bad instincts and indigestion.

As I write this on Christmas day, the country has
- No Secretary of Defense - No Attorney General - No Secretary of the Interior - No Chief of Staff - The S&P 500 is down 24.4% since 1 October - The federal government is shut down

And yet there is one thing good thing that could come out of his presidency.

Trump is Loki. He's the trickster god whose role is to disrupt the status quo. Trump is intent on blowing things up.

Given his continual assault on everything from notions of what it means to be polite to the basics of markets and democracy, he is leaving us with one gift. Once he is gone, no proposal that defies tradition will be immediately dismissed. His legacy could include an openness to new proposals that probably wasn't there before he came.

If I'm right that we are transitioning into a new economy as different from the information economy as it was from the industrial economy before it, then we will need to challenge some things from the status quo. I think that Trump will have made it easier for us to do that.


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