Professor and former United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich worked himself into a frenzy Friday evening, worrying that President Donald Trump is too mentally muddled to be making international economic decisions without meticulous guidance.
Speaking with MS NOW anchor Jonathan Capehart, Reich fretted that Trump’s recent decisions in escalating a trade war with U.S. long-time economic ally Canada suggested something was clicking correctly in his head anymore.
“He doesn't understand [trade] at all,” Reich raged, referencing the extreme backlash the U.S. is facing due to Trump’s tariff war. “I'm afraid he's an economic illiterate. Even somebody who has taken one week of economics, even somebody who has not taken economics, who has just simply observed the world, understands that trade is, generally speaking, a good thing. There's something called comparative advantage. We get the benefits of Canada’s forests, Canada's aluminum, Canada's this, Canada’s that. And they get the benefits of what we specialize in.”
Reich added that it was “really terrifying” to see Trump go off on "crazy statements," like a recent one he posted to Truth Social, pressuring federal agencies to “LOWER THE [interest] RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT.”
“One wonders whether he is losing it or he never had it or he's going to actually make policy based upon these crazy notions, or is anybody advising him at all,” demanded Reich. “I mean, what is Scott Bessent doing as secretary of the treasury, who's job is to at least confer with the president and give the president some economic background. It just worries me, those kinds of crazy things. And of course, what's the American public supposed to take away from this?”
Additionally, Reich feared Trump's corruption will leave a long-lasting stain that will destroy trust in the American economy for years, possibly decades.
“The administration is drenched in a kind of corruption in which big companies are constantly pouring money in places where Donald Trump says they should, including Trump's own family,” Reich said, momentarily losing his words in his frustration “… [A]n economy depends on certain expectations being met by producers, by consumers. Everybody needs to know what the rules are, and everybody needs to know that the rules are going to be pretty stable in the future. And the real underlying problem for the American economy … is that nobody knows what's going to happen next week or next month, or what is simply the rules. It's an arbitrary system that Trump has created, and that arbitrariness is undermining the integrity of the entire economy.”
He added, however, that voters will ‘be judging” Trump on his economy as the mid-terms roll up in November. “The public is not stupid. You can't tell them that they're doing better than they think they're doing.”
