Donald Trump tells a town hall in Pennsylvania before swaying to the rhythm as the event veers into a bizarre, impromptu music session. Video / AFP
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
It was during a sit-down interview with ThreeNews’ Samantha Hayes. He told her not only that he thought Trump would win the election on November 5, but that “on balance” he wanted Trump to win because he would be “better for the economy”.
This was not the only time recently that Key has shared his economic theories.
That is not true. As Key would know, economists agree the main cause of those trends is the restrictive monetary policy of the Reserve Bank. The bank acts independently of the Government and would have pursued its policy whoever was in office.
Key’s praise for Trumponomics is similarly odd, especially as he said he doesn’t even like some of it.
Take international trade. “I spent a lot of time with Barack Obama trying to get TPP [the Trans-Pacific Partnership] across the line, and we did,” he told Hayes. “And the very first thing Donald Trump did was rip up that free-trade agreement.”
True that. In 2016, just months before Trump did the ripping up, Key said in a speech that TPP would “boost our economy by at least $2.7 billion a year by 2030″.
Sir John Key and Barack Obama in the Blue Room at the White House.
Trump now proposes steep tariffs on imports, a policy that will damage New Zealand and ramp up tensions around the world. Trade wars create real wars.
Key knows this is bad. He said the Economist had calculated the tariff policy would have “the single biggest impact of reducing the standard of living for Americans”.
But despite this, he thinks Trump will be good for the American economy. Hayes repeatedly asked him why.
He said Trump favours “more market-based solutions”, although tariffs are the very definition of an anti-market solution.
Well, Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 did slash taxes, but mainly for corporates and the wealthiest Americans. It also added US$100 billion a year to the national debt.
Key used to be a stalwart for reducing national debt.
Donald Trump campaigning in New York. Photo / Doug Mills, the New York Times
“My main point,” Key said, is that he was on centre-right, so was Trump, and they support business, “which takes risks and creates jobs”.
Really? A few weeks before the interview, Reuters reported a Goldman Sachs analysis that showed job growth under Kamala Harris would likely be 10,000-30,000 a month higher than under Trump.
Goldman Sachs also said Harris’ plans for new spending and expanded middle-income tax credits would boost GDP, while under Trump’s tariff and immigration policies GDP would contract, thus threatening a recession.
There’s another big economic issue facing America right now. In Florida and other states damaged by hurricanes this year, fewer than 5% of homeowners have flood insurance. This has triggered mortgage defaults, which will only rise.
A climate-denying President will not be much help with that.
Key didn’t comment on climate resilience, but he did say Trump has “probably got a freer energy policy”.
“Freer”? Trump wants to power up fossil-fuel energy and sideline renewables and efficiency measures.
During the interview, Key agreed Trump says and does “outrageous” things, but he shrugged off questions about them.
“I support the centre-right,” he said several times, whereas Harris is “quite left wing and left-wing economics in my view has proven to be spectacularly unsuccessful”.
Perhaps he’s thinking of Venezuela, but that’s a silly comparison.
Harris wants to tax the wealthiest a bit more, create jobs, extend healthcare, uphold rules-based international trade, reform the gun laws and apply some common decency to the treatment of migrants and women.
Oh, and uphold the Constitution, the rule of law and the integrity of the electoral system.
Kamala Harris campaigning in Detroit: What is it Republicans are so afraid of? Photo / Saul Loeb, AFP
Those are not radical policies and should hold no horrors for the John Keys of this world.
They don’t seem to for most New Zealand business leaders. In the Herald’s recent Mood of the Boardroom survey, 82% of respondents favoured Harris as the next president. Trump appealed to only 4%, with 10% unsure and another 4% preferring “other”.
Key’s out of step with them, and he contrasts markedly with Liz Cheney, the former leading Republican who supports Harris because she hasn’t let tribalism cloud her thinking. Key’s argument, essentially, is that Trump might be a tyrant or a buffoon, but it’s okay because he’s the right’s tyrant, the right’s buffoon.
Let’s not forget we’re talking about an unabashed racist, a deeply misogynist, erratic, vengeful, narcissistic bully. A convicted criminal.
Trump is a menace to democracy who reacted to losing the 2020 election by apparently trying to incite an insurrection. He still insists he didn’t lose and says he will punish those who stood in his way then or stand in his way if he is president again.
Former US military leaders like Mark Milley and John Kelly, who know him well, call him a fascist. Kelly says Trump wanted troops to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. His former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, says if he wins it’s “a toss up whether Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin will be more pleased”.
Trump is not “centre-right”. He’s nowhere near the centre of politics. Former political leaders who say he is should know better.
The American novelist Marilynne Robinson, a conservative Christian, wrote recently: “Trump has proved that law can be scorned without consequence ... and he has established a breadth of latitude for scurrilous and threatening speech that can only be of profound use to every scoundrel who succeeds him.”
Moral clarity: it’s not that hard.
And another former National Party leader has also shared his thoughts on Trump.
“If we’re going to see the big powers enter into a more protectionist and trade-war kind of environment, it’s a disaster for us as an export-orientated economy,” said Todd Muller last week.
“We’ve had this period of post-war stability, which has benefitted New Zealand immensely. And a world that is upended by a president that spends more time attacking Europe than he does Putin is not good for us.”
Economic and geopolitical clarity: it’s not that hard, either.
There’s something else: Key complained in that interview about the way “entrepreneurial capitalist culture” gets stifled by regulations.
He said, “Go back and look at 2016-2020 ... Chris Liddell spent a lot of time ... actually cutting huge amounts of red tape out of the system. That’s where I think Donald Trump is good for the economy.”
Liddell, a New Zealander and friend of Key’s, was Trump’s deputy chief of staff and is a former top executive with Microsoft and General Motors.
There are three groups who will benefit from a Trump victory.
The second is the fossil-fuel economy, including General Motors. Trump’s climate denialism will give it a ridiculous late reprieve.
The third group – here’s where the “red tape” comes in – is the billionaires of Silicon Valley.
Slate reports that at least 60 billionaires have donated to Trump, many of them in tech and fossil-fuel industries and the investment banks that prop them up.
Not all the tech bros are on his side: Bill Gates is a prominent Harris supporter. But most are. Elon Musk is Trump’s cheerleader-in-chief, donating at least US$75 million of his own money, raising countless more and turning X (Twitter) into a Trump campaign machine.
Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk campaigning this month for Donald Trump. Photo / Ryan Collerd, AFP
Why do these tech titans even care about the election? Aren’t they already the masters of the universe?
Musk and his mates don’t want to pay higher taxes, despite being the best-placed people in the world to do so. But paying a bit more tax isn’t actually going to hurt them.
What they really want is to be free from regulations – that red tape – and the threat is real, because the rest of the world is starting to understand the dangers of social media and AI.
So they’re buying their freedom to keep doing what they want, even though it may mean the collapse of American democracy.
Ukraine may be crushed and the Ukraine war may expand into Europe. American women will be denied the chance to regain abortion rights and Trump will attempt to unleash his barbarous plan to expel 15-20 million undocumented migrants.
“Middle-class” and poor Americans will not get the relief Trump promises them. And the world may warm past the tipping points that make catastrophe inevitable.
The Silicon Valley billionaires could stop a lot of that. But they don’t care. Not really. They’ve got boltholes, or plans for them, on this planet, or the Moon, or Mars.
And they know there’s money to be made, so bring it on. The greater the collapse and the freer they are to exploit it, the greater the opportunity. Next week when America votes, this is the real power play.
