Trump's cabinet isn't as anti-Wall Street as voters might want to believe | Robert Reich

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : Trump has never understood much about economics, but he knows two things: that high interest rates can throttle an economy (and bring down a president's party) and that high stock prices are good (at least for Trump and his investor class).
54% : Yes, and here's a hint of what it is: on Friday, Trump picked Scott Bessent to serve as US secretary of the treasury.
45% : Stock and bond markets constitute the only real constraint on Trump - the only things whose power he's afraid of.
45% : In short, tariffs will rattle stock and bond markets, doing the exact opposite of what Trump wants.
40% : The Republican-controlled Senate starting 3 January won't restrain Trump.
38% : Why did Trump appoint the "business-as-usual" Bessent to be treasury secretary?
37% : So Trump has appointed a treasury secretary who will soothe Wall Street's nerves - not just because Bessent is a Wall Street billionaire who speaks its language but also because the Street doesn't really believe Bessent wants higher tariffs.
37% : The Street apparently thinks tariffs won't rise much when other countries respond to the bluff with what Trump sees as concessions.
35% : Over the last two weeks, Musk has convinced Trump to appoint bomb-throwers Robert F Kennedy Jr to health and human services and Pete Hegseth to defense and to put Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of cutting $2tn from the federal budget.
31% : So, as a practical matter, is anything stopping Trump?
31% : Trump doesn't want to do anything that will cause bond traders to raise longterm interest rates out of fear of future inflation and he wants stock traders to be so optimistic about corporate profits they raise share prices.
29% : The man Trump has tapped as US treasury secretary was only recently derided by Elon Musk as the 'business-as-usual choice'He's got control over both chambers of Congress, a tractable supreme court, a political base of fiercely loyal Magas, a media ecosystem that amplifies his lies (now including Musk's horrific X as well as Rupert Murdoch's reliably mendacious Fox News) and a thin majority of voters in the 2024 election.
23% : But even if Democrats take back both chambers, Trump and his incipient administration are aiming to wreak so much damage on America in the meantime that Democrats can't remedy it.
14% : Yes, Trump overreached with his pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.