John Ganz

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.

At scale, you have to have rules.

So you can't have a million different rules for each type of business.

There has to be some rules across the board, which is why the terror policy looks so incoherent.

And why most of his policies look so incoherent is because he basically doesn't have the conception of the economy as a system.

He has it as a conception of

okay, this guy's in my ear, wants a break for his business, and I want this business to do that.

It's just a consistent kind of making of carve-outs and making exceptions, and you can't have nothing but exceptions.

It's just total chaos.

That's about right.

I think that he, I mean, we all don't exactly have a perfect idea of our self-interest, but his instincts lead him sometimes, I think, to make mistakes in his political career because his idea of his self-interest is extremely narrow and not very subtle.