The New Yorker Radio Hour
How Donald Trump Is Trying to Rewrite the Rules of Capitalism
Tue, 6 May 2025
For a long time, Republicans and many Democrats espoused some version of free-trade economics that would have been familiar to Adam Smith. But Donald Trump breaks radically with that tradition, embracing a form of protectionism that resulted in his extremely broad and chaotic tariff proposals, which tanked markets and deepened the fear of a global recession. John Cassidy writes The New Yorker’s The Financial Page column, and he’s been covering economics for the magazine since 1995. His new book, “Capitalism and Its Critics: A History,” takes a long view of these debates, and breaks down some of the arguments that have shaped the U.S.’s current economic reality. “Capitalism itself has put its worst face forward in the last twenty or thirty years through the growth of huge monopolies which seem completely beyond any public control or accountability,” Cassidy tells David Remnick. “And young people—they look at capitalism and the economy through the prism of environmentalism now in a way that they didn’t in our generation.”
Full Episode
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For decades, economic arguments in this country, in the broadest sense, were usually over taxes and spending. But for a long time, Republicans and most Democrats alike have been in favor of free trade, the idea that the global flow of goods and services should be as open as possible for the
Even if it hurt some workers, the prevailing economic wisdom was that free trade was a necessary aspect of capitalism. Now, this was and has always been contentious. Unions have fought agreements like NAFTA. Critics say that the globalized economy led to deindustrialization in much of the country and that that deindustrialization, as we know, gave real fuel to Donald Trump's populism.
Trump has been a longtime proponent of tariffs, and he seems to relish the prospect of a major trade war with the Chinese. Those positions reached their fruition with his highly chaotic tariff rollout recently, which of course tanked the stock market and put us near the brink of a global recession.
Even many Trump voters have told pollsters that they disapprove of this tariff policy, at least its chaotic nature. A new book by John Cassidy, our staff writer, takes a long view of these debates. It's called Capitalism and Its Critics, a History. Cassidy has been covering economics for The New Yorker for a long time, and he writes our weekly column called The Financial Page.
Now, John, I think most people in America think of capitalism almost... as the eternal natural order of the universe somehow, like the weather. But it has a real beginning, and that's where you start your book. So how did capitalism start, and what did it replace?
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