Comment by toyg

> a lot of people assume the economic consequences like these have not been understood by the WH

I think you're making the same mistake a lot of observers are making: you're looking at this from an economic perspective, and think those decisions were taken on an economic basis. But that is likely not the case.

The Trumpist movement is entirely focused on political aims: re-establishing old hierarchies of power inside the country, and entrenching them for good. The important work is the slashing and burning of welfare and safeguards for lower and middle classes, putting minorities "back in their place", and entrenching the wealthy into positions of absolute dominance. Everything else is a distraction, to keep newspeople busy and the population focused on recreating an idealized, "Happy Days" 1950 society. Enemies will be created to make you hate, this or that policy will be picked up or dropped just to keep you arguing, and meanwhile the important work is made irreversible. Once you destroy what was built over a century, it will take decades to rebuild them, and meanwhile the New Normal will take root and become impossibly hard to remove.

Fascism and nazism did not move from economic principles - they picked up what they needed as they went, opportunistically, because their main aims were fundamentally political. The Trump II administration works in the same way: the priority is political dominance to achieve political aims at societal level, everything else is tangential and opportunistic.