John Ganz

You try to make it legible for people and you try to put your spin on it, maybe advance your politics a little bit, generally try to communicate the truth.

With the actions of the Trump administration, it's very difficult, I find, to give them any coherence because it's so based on Trump's personal whims and his own very idiosyncratic and mercurial way of doing things.

So I often find that when I attribute, you know, some kind of ideological thinking or some kind of project to anything they do, you know, a week from then, the line has totally changed.

You know, usually...

A presidential coalition has tensions, but theirs is in open confrontation with each other all the time, which is unusual.

A president usually undertaking a project like going to war, say, right?

Now, usually, you would imagine, I mean, this is the way we used to think about politics, they would first have their own party very much on board, and then they would use that as a platform to get the rest of the American people on board.

Now, Trump didn't even have his own party on board.

going into it so it's a different type of politics and you know we grew up with and we're accustomed to to commenting on and it very much is is the trump show and he he personalizes everything he is not able to think in terms of systems or abstractions ideas like the market or you don't believe that donald trump can abstract

I don't think he can, basically.

I think basically he is sometimes swayed by conspiratorial rhetoric.

Some people are ideologically conspiratorial because it sort of supports their worldview.

I think that Trump is basically psychologically incapable of understanding things

as processes that don't have a person behind them.

That's the way he's always done business.

He always thinks someone's trying to screw you or you're trying to screw somebody.

And you can see the way he runs the economy.

The idea of a deal is like a one-off kind of carve out where you make some compromises.

Now...

For the behavior of businessmen and firms, that's fine.