Division, Derision and the Economics of the Thing
March 5, 2026 | Sundance |
Do you remember this moment during
the 2015 republican presidential debates when all of the candidates were on
stage and leading control outlet Fox News (Bret Baier) purposefully asked the
candidates:
…”is there anyone on stage,
unwilling tonight, to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the
republican party, and pledge to not run an independent campaign against that
person. Again, we are looking for you to raise your hand now if you won’t
make that pledge tonight.”
[The moment in video is here] The need for
control is a reaction to fear. The question was intentionally constructed
to create both an optic and a narrative Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and the
republican party were purposefully shaping. Collectively the professional
republicans were desperately afraid Donald Trump would run as an independent
candidate.
I bring us back to that moment because it is the key to understand where we
are even today. This was the core of the matter. This is the “trillions
at stake” aspect. This is the economics of the thing as it first
manifest.
Why did Donald J Trump stand against them all?
For many years before that moment, a small group of us had been outlining
why it was urgent for MAGAnomics to take charge of the U.S. economy; because
underneath both wings of the UniParty in Washington DC was a system that few
understood.
♦ Prior to 2016, the United States Chamber of Commerce (U.S CoC), a private
K-Street lobbying consortium, were the negotiators for every single trade deal
done from the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR).
The U.S. government (USTR, POTUS and Congress) was the trade stakeholder who
signed the agreements; however, the actual nuts and bolts of what the trade
deal included, the terms and conditions, were negotiated by the US CoC.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce represented the corporate interests of their
Wall Street clients. After all, the corporations paid the CoC and the business
model of the CoC is dependent on the corporations.
This is the larger background for how decades of trade agreements ended up
with offshoring, the Rust Belt, diminished domestic manufacturing, and
increased corporate profits. This is the core mechanics of how a U.S.
manufacturing economy was shifted to a “service driven economy.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was writing the trade deals. The CoC would then
fund the politicians who would approve the trade deals. The CoC would also
finance the presidential candidates.
When President Trump ran for office in 2016, his trade, manufacturing and
economic policies were against the interests of the entire business network
that controlled trade. The U.S. CoC poured money into Hillary Clinton’s
campaign and their main GOP partner in the enterprise, Mitch McConnell.
When Trump won the election, he completely shut out the CoC from any involvement
in U.S. trade negotiations. Trump literally put himself, Wilbur Ross, and
Robert Lighthizer in control.
The CoC was apoplectic but powerless to stop this action. CoC President Tom
Donohue could not even get an appointment to see President Trump in the White
House.
The only thing the CoC and Tom Donohue could do was to fund anyone who would
assist them in removing the existential threat that Trump represented. That’s
what they did.
With the CoC removed from influence, President Trump, Wilbur Ross and Robert
Lighthizer began the painstaking process of taking the Wall Street profit
tentacles off U.S. trade policy.
In essence, President Trump put the interests of the American citizens back
into the top priority of the U.S. govt, as it pertained to the biggest of all
big picture items, the U.S. economy. That’s why in 2018 and 2019 the
U.S. economy was on fire with growth.
All of that MAGAnomic background remained in place when President Trump
retook control in 2025, and now we are starting to see the positive economic
effects again resurface. However, that collective UniParty
opposition still remains, albeit significantly diminished by the refusal of
President Trump to move away from America-first policy.
The core of the opposition to all of President Trump’s actions, remains
almost exclusively an outcome of the economics of policy the DC system no
longer controls. It’s about the money. It will always be about the
money. The division we are encountering in the MAGA ranks, is specifically
driven by those same financial interests who opposed candidate Donald Trump a
decade ago.
When it came to trade policy, economic policy, tariff policy and the
confrontation with China, there was not one iota of difference between any of
the 17 republican candidates in that 2016 election.
There was not one degree of divergence from the traditional corporate
economic policy of the 30 years that preceded that moment on stage. Every
one of the republican candidates aligned with the CoC message.
♦ CTH had previously identified our assembly as “The Last Refuge”
specifically because there was no information space, no website, no organized
group, no podcast, no functional assembly who understood the basic problem and
simultaneously rejected the noisy pontificating baseline notion that our status
was doomed to remain as a “service driven economy.”
We rejected that notion here. So too did Donald J Trump, and
subsequently we championed him.
His intention in this MAGAnomic regard has never wavered, flinched or
diminished. President Trump has focused on delivering real, actionable
economic benefits due to a radically shifted policy approach toward jobs, trade
and the underlying blue-collar economy.
As President, Donald Trump has never stopped being Main Street First
in all policy outcomes.
What we are witnessing now with the division, derision and conflict goes
right back to that original set of policy distinctions.
In 2016 we did not use the term “influencers,” but they existed inside every
team for every republican candidate. Dick Cheney’s daughter worked for
Ben Carson. Mark Levin’s son worked for Ted Cruz. The daughter of Fox News
Executive Producer for Political Content, Bill Sammon, worked for Marco Rubio.
All of those campaigns and every person in the professional republican
apparatus that worked inside those campaigns had one very unique thing in
common, they all adhered to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce constructs of economic
policy.
Not a single candidate ever mentioned China as a strategic economic threat
until Donald Trump kept hammering it. Not a single Republican ever said
economic security was national security, until Donald Trump made it core
policy.
Remember this core difference when you see all of these voices who backbite,
bitch, complain and protest that Donald Trump is not focused enough on American
interests; it’s bullshit. It is all bullshit.
Not a single republican candidate ever cared about any of this stuff until
Donald J Trump made it his mission in life to fundamentally restructure the
economics of everything. This is still his primary focus, and if you
watch him work you will see it unfold in the outcomes of every single policy,
even the foreign policy engagements.
President Trump is delivering a global shift, a multigenerational shift, in
the return of U.S. power and financial WEALTH to our nation. And, he’s
unbelievably good at it.
MAGAnomics! The rest is just noise.
