In addition to loyalty to the president-elect, the president's cabinet nominees appear all to agree with his thinking on geoeconomics and the role of brinksmanship.
During the 119th Congress, the Trump administration will be unencumbered by judicial or congressional restraint, and the new team’s stated intent is to make full use of that accommodation.
Despite the withdrawal of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General Nominee, Mar a Lago has not indicated a conciliatory approach to reform of the the nation's chief law enforcement bureaucracy.
Former Florida. attorney general Pam Bondi has been proposed for the role, bringing defemsible prosecutorial credentials and reliably astringent conservative bona fides..
National Security Division personnel can expect retribution for the extensive investigations into President Trump's relationships with representatives of the Kremlin, security breaches, and other alleged criminal or salacious behavior..
Bondi has suggested that prosecutors who have filed charges against Trump "will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated," The Washington Post. reports.
Currently employed by lobbying shop Ballard Partners, Bondi has recently represented clients such as the Government of Qatar, General Motors, Uber and Amazon, according to government disclosures and press reports.
As Florida's Attorney General, Bondi led the Sunshine State's successful prosecution of complex ligtigation, including the BP Deepwater Horizon case and the multi-state Perdue Pharma opioid settlement.
Bondi's fealty to the president-elect runs long and deep. In 2013, just days after receiving a $25,000 donation to her re-election campaign from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, then AG Bondi declined to prosecute fraud charges against Trump University.
Her later role as chair of litigation for The America First Policy Institute involved arguing that the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol were victIms of a "two-tiered" justice system, the system she will be tasked with administering.
Nominee for the key administrative position of deputy attorney general is Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, an attorney on Trump’s New York hush-money case, is tapped for principal associate attorney general. Both Blanche and Bove worked as prosecutors in the Southern District of New York before entering private practice where they represented the President-elect.
Given the precendent-challenging approach expected from Trump 2.0, we can expect to see D. John Sauer maintaining a constructiove dialogue the pliant Supreme Court as US solicitor general. Mr. Sauer obtained the groundbreaking ruling on presdential immunity for Mr. Trump in July.
“It’s quite a clear signal that he’s taking the justice department in a direction of loyalty to him rather than independence, which has been the tradition up until now,” Rebecca Roiphe, of New York Law School told the BBC.
President-elect Trump, in a statement on Tuesday said Howard Lutnick would "lead our Tariff and Trade agenda, with additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative."
Lutnick, 63, is the Wall Street executive who rebuilt Cantor Fitzgerald after the 9/11 attacks killed 658 of the firm's 960 employees, including his brother Gary.
Lutnick has vowed to take the nations' trade relations back to the time of Theodore Roosevelt. " When was America great? At the turn of the century, our economy was rockin' [...] we had no income tax, and all we had was tariffs. and we had soo much money..." [see MSG speech]
While that held true in the period before the Civil War, by the turn of the century roughly half of federal revenue came from customs duties and half from internal revenue sources (such as excise taxes). Today tariffs generate less than two percent of Federal revenue.
The left-leaning Progressive Policy Institute, citing World Bank statistics, notes the only countries relying on tariffs for government revenue in the proportions suggested by the incoming administration are those with flawed administrative states, like Gambia, Argentina or Somalia, which lack other means to collect revenue.
Mar-a-Lago did not clarify whether Mr. Lutnick would hold the position of Trade Representative or a subordinate would be named. Customarily the USTR reports directly to the President.
Friday evening the transition team announced that hedge fund operator Scott Bessent will be nominated as treasury secretary, capping a weeks-long drama over the position.
Bessent, whose investment career included work with Jim Rogers, Jim Chanos and George Soros has advocated the use of tariffs as a negotiating tool and as a revenue vehicle.
In an article for Fox News published November 15, Bessent articulated his rationale for a return to mercantilist thinking. Given the billions he has made speculating against reserve currencies, his opinion carries no small weight.
"The truth is that tariffs have a long and storied history as both a revenue-raising tool and a way of protecting strategically important industries in the U.S. President Elect Trunp has added a third leg to the stool: tariffs as a negotiating tool with our trading partners," he writes.
"The truth is that other countries have taken advantage of the U.S.’s openness for far too long, because we allowed them to. Tariffs are a means to finally stand up for Americans.
"Critics of tariffs argue that they will increase the prices Americans pay for imported goods. This, reduced to absurdity, was the Harris campaign’s "sales tax" argument. But the facts argue against this," he continues.
Rejection of the premise that tariffs are a consumption tax starts at the top, with the President Elect's "most beautiful word" musings, and the intellectual basis has been articulated in a recent paper by Stepham Miran of the Manhattan Institute and Hudson Bay Capital.
Tariff boosters note that during President Trump’s first term, the effective tariff rate on Chinese imports rose by 18 percentage points, yet inflation declined.
A 14% depreciation of the renminbi (USDCNY) offset over three-quarters of the tariff impact. Importers also absorbed some costs through reduced profit margins, especially in retail goods.
Miran contends that mechanism will persist, and any tariff increase will be offset by the seller's currency declining. Whether this would hold true at the proposed elevated levels, or with commodities priced in dollars, has not been tested.
A tiered tariff strategy could apply varying rates to trading partners, incentivizing alignment with U.S. trade or security goals. This could create a “global tariff wall” around China, with high-risk but potentially high-reward outcomes if coupled with security agreements.
"Joining a tariff wall with a security umbrella is a high-risk strategy, but if it works, it is also high reward," Miran writes.
To address dollar overvaluation, Miran proposes a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” for coordinated depreciation. Foreign countries could sell U.S. bonds to weaken the dollar, raising interest rates.
To counter this, advocates suggests pairing a currency pact with a duration agreement, where foreign holders extend the maturity of their U.S. debt. Treasury could issue century bonds to replace shorter-term debt.
If (when) foreign governments resist, Miran says, the U.S. could use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 to reduce the appeal of reserve accumulation by "withholding a portion of interest payments on Treasury securities."
These strategic defaults on Treasury debt, or “user fees,” could vary by country., according to Miran. Coordination between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve would manage interest rate impacts and ensure financial stability.
The soundness or workability of the above argument is less important than the fact is is broadly accepted among credible, Ivy-League educated policymakers like Trump, Lutnick and Bessent. As the latter two have made immense fortunes betting on financial volatility, we can expect their tenure in Washington to present a like opportunity.
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