The Real Reason Trump Is a Threat to the Economy
It’s not just the agenda. It’s also the shambolic, vibes-based way he’s pursuing it.
WITH HIS BROAD SHOULDERS, thick arms, and even thicker New England accent, ironworker David Langlais is exactly the sort of American who is supposed to love Donald Trump’s policies. But Langlais says he is dumbfounded by some of the president’s recent decisions, especially the one that halted work on an energy project off the coast of Rhode Island.
The project is called Revolution Wind. When it is completed—or, more accurately, if it is completed—it will consist of 65 wind turbines generating enough electricity to power 350,000 homes. The steel towers of the offshore devices are more than 400 feet high; the fiberglass composite blades add nearly that much in length when vertical. Putting those components together requires a lot of skilled labor. And that’s where Langlais comes in.
He leads Ironworkers Local 37, whose members have been among the more than one thousand workers building Revolution Wind, which is now 80 percent complete. But in late August, the Trump administration issued a stop-work order blocking federal money that had been subsidizing the project as part of the clean-energy push President Joe Biden and the Democrats began in 2022.
The Danish company building the wind turbines, Langlais told me, is continuing to pay the U.S. workers, evidently in the hopes that the Trump administration relents soon or that a court orders it to do so. But neither may happen, in which case employment could vanish for both the construction teams as well as everybody who was planning on jobs in operations or maintenance once Revolution Wind comes online.
“This is a really good project for [the Ironworkers], a chance to put hours into their health and welfare funds, their pensions—and just providing for their families,” Langlais told me in a phone interview Friday. “They knew they had sustainable employment for several months, whereas now, each day they don’t know if we’re going to say, ‘Hey, today’s your last day . . . you’ve got to go sign up for unemployment.’”
The Trump administration’s official rationale for suspending construction is that the project requires a new review from federal regulators, to “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.” But Trump officials have never specified what those interests are, or why the multiple previous reviews by state and federal authorities were insufficient.
No, the real reason seems to be that Donald Trump simply hates wind power. And it’s not hard to imagine the reasons—even above and beyond his well-known pique about offshore wind turbines visible from his Scottish golf resort.1 For Trump, opposing wind energy could be another way to stick it to tree-hugging libs or to undo a Democratic legacy item—or to signal his class loyalty. In the MAGA cultural universe, getting power from wind or the sun or any other renewable source is somehow less authentically blue-collar than pulling petroleum out of the ground.
Langlais is proof of how silly these arguments are. He first learned to pour concrete when he was a teenager, he told me, working for his father’s small homebuilding business. He got to know about ironworking through his father-in-law, then spent three years as an apprentice learning the trade’s skills—how to weld and cut, how to read a blueprint, how to take safety precautions. After that, he spent seventeen years in the field.
As for his environmental politics, he’s all in favor of drilling. At the same time, he thinks there should be an “all of the above” approach to energy, because he knows that the United States will keep needing more of it—and that the electricity bills he pays as a Rhode Island resident would go down if Revolution Wind were to come online.
“A country that is dependent on foreign nations to supply their energy needs—to me, that’s a security risk,” Langlais said, recalling the administration’s official rationale. “So if the United States can produce all our own energy needs—whether it be oil, coal, gas, wind, solar—to me that’s a plus for national security. We’re not relying on other nations that could potentially cut us off for our needs.”
But what really seems to irk Langlais is the potential waste resulting from Trump’s decision, and not simply because it’s possible the nearly complete wind turbines will end up just sitting out there off the coast, doing nothing, a slowly rusting monument to what might have been.
The Ironworkers invested approximately a million dollars in training members for wind-turbine production, Langlais told me. On top of that, there was special instruction for offshore projects. Workers had to take courses in water survival, for example, at a cost of $1,000 per member. They did so because wind energy seemed like such a promising and obvious area for growth given the rising global demand for energy, and because wind right now is among the cheapest, quickest ways to add generating capacity.
Stopping the investments in progress means giving up on that work, now and possibly for the foreseeable future, as well as ensuring utility bills stay higher.2 And that’s all on top of what undercutting wind support means for the future of the planet.
“This whole thing,” Langlais said, “it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
THERE ARE A LOT of difficult-to-explain elements about Trump’s decision on the Rhode Island wind farm. But the most striking may be the extent to which it undermines what he claims to be his most important goals: making America strong and energy-independent while lowering the cost of living and helping the forgotten working class. It’s just one example of the self-destructive way he’s been making decisions affecting broad swaths of the economy, and of the costs those decisions are likely imposing on the country already.
The flashing signs are easy enough to spot: Inflation is up. Employment is down. Consumers have become pessimistic. For the first few months of Trump’s presidency, there was a pretty big gap between data like unemployment claims (a so-called “hard” indicator) and the confidence Americans have in the economy (a so-called “soft” indicator). That difference has narrowed, and not in a direction that bodes well.
“We basically have a real economy that’s a B-minus and survey indicators that are a C,” University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers told me in an interview. “That’s not such a big gap. It used to look like the real economy was an A-minus while the survey indicators were a C. Now it turns out the soft data was more reliable than you might have thought.”
Still, these economic indicators have their limits. Any one bad monthly number might just be a temporary blip, or the result of skewed or incomplete data. Even when the numbers are accurate, their meaning can be unclear. One reason for low employment figures right now, Wolfers noted, is that the immigration crackdown (which Biden started and Trump has vastly intensified) means there are fewer workers seeking employment.
Those ambiguities are why Wolfers told me “we’re one shock away from a recession, one bad thing away from a recession. That bad thing may have already happened, and may already be working its way through the system, but we’re not there yet.”
Harvard University economist Jason Furman—another sober, widely respected researcher—offered a similar assessment: “The economy has more than a whiff of stagflation but there’s no reason to believe it will necessarily be very severe,” he told me. “But anything could happen with so much uncertainty not just about economic policy but also about our ability to measure the economy at a very high frequency.”
But even if the state of the economy is ambiguous, both Wolfers and Furman said, Trump’s influence is clear. And it’s not a positive one, both because of policies he has chosen and the way he is implementing them.
Tariffs are a perfect example. Most economists will tell you that tariffs are bad for the economy overall, in part by raising the prices of goods.3 And there are plenty of signs that’s happening right now, because the sectors where prices are rising include cars, electronics, furniture, and food—in other words, those dominated by imported goods and domestic goods made with parts from abroad. Also, manufacturing jobs are down.
“I am very confident that President Trump’s policies have played a direct causal role in raising inflation and are likely to do more—probably more confident than I would be about almost any causal policy macro claim,” Furman said.
But it’s not just the financial penalty of the tariffs holding back growth. It’s also the fact that Trump has thrown out so many different numbers for what tariffs will be, sometimes through speeches or announcements, sometimes through tweets and interview quips.4 And it’s the way Trump keeps suggesting he’s open to cutting deals with specific countries—or, for that matter, specific companies—based on non-economic factors like which party’s lobbyist spoke to him last, or who figured out what gift to give him.
Trump’s decisions—and his vibes-based way of making decisions—is taking a toll. “Do you feel like standing up a factory right now or opening up a new business right now?” Wolfers said, imagining how an executive might contemplate a new investment in this environment. “You might say no and it’ll be for a whole bunch of diffuse reasons—it may not quite be uncertainty, it may not quite be tariffs, it may just be . . . everything could blow up on me.”
THE OTHER SELF-DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT of Trump’s economic policy is the way he’s cutting off investment in future growth. That includes his cuts to biomedical and STEM research. And it includes the way he’s treating clean energy too.
Nobody seriously questions that the future of energy is renewables, or that China is now the undisputed leader in producing everything from solar panels to electric cars. A big goal of the clean energy push under Biden was to help U.S. producers catch up, and it seemed to be working. It unleashed a boom in factory production. But that boom is now going bust, with companies halting or canceling projects.
As it happens, many of these projects were in red states. Texas became the nation’s capital for solar-panel production, while Georgia, South Carolina, and Kentucky formed a new “battery belt” for the building of electric vehicles and their parts. It’s the home of a massive Hyundai battery factory in Savannah—the same one where, last week, Trump officials conducted a raid and arrested more than three hundred South Korean workers.
The precise circumstances of that raid are not clear. But it appears the South Korean workers had some kinds of visas—and that the immigration violations, if real, were part of a broader, ongoing dispute over the status of foreign workers in these factories. As more of the story came to light, and the South Korean government fumed, Trump backtracked a bit, offering to let the workers stay—maybe to train U.S. workers. They flew back home anyway.
Hyundai for its part has temporarily halted construction at the Georgia plant and twenty-one others, potentially delaying their openings. And whatever happens with those projects, this incident will likely make it harder to convince foreign companies to start similar projects in the future—a prospect that has occurred to Langlais, as he ponders wind turbine work opportunities for his members.
“What message,” he asked, “does this send to any developer who wants to invest in the United States?”
For now, though, Langlais’s main focus is on helping Rhode Island officials in their push to restart Revolution Wind. He wonders whether it will require giving Trump something he wants. That is how New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, is widely assumed to have gotten Trump to reverse another stop-work order for a wind project off the shores of Long Island over the summer.5
“Ever since this stop-work order came, we’ve been waiting for the ransom note,” Langlais said. “What does he want for us to continue, and finish the last 20 percent of this product to get it online?” This is also the resolution many analysts are expecting, as the climate-focused publication Heatmap reported last month.
That kind of deal-making would mean giving in to cronyism, and accepting economic policy by Trump whim. It would mean acknowledging, reluctantly, that the future of an entire energy sector—one with incredible promise and tens of thousands of employees—could very well depend on whether the president can let go of his outdated views and his personal animus.
But as long as Trump sits in the White House, with nobody checking his power, there aren’t lots of alternatives.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misspelled Langlais’s first name. It is David, not Daniel.
Another Trump administration official who is a longtime foe of wind turbines, and whose opposition seems to have originated in NIMBY anger about spoiled views, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As Jeff St. John of Canary Media noted, utilities have been depending on projects like Revolution Wind to strengthen their weak and aging power grids. Without the new renewables, outages and failures are more likely.
Many economists, going back to Adam Smith, would say the negative consequences of tariffs might be worthwhile for the sake of protecting a particular industry—say, one that’s vital for national security. But over the long run, tariffs will end up propping up less efficient companies and industries while slowing growth overall. And even the help for certain domestic industries can be illusory, insofar as they will rely on foreign suppliers—and, possibly, lose access to global markets if the tariffs lead to a trade war.
The auto industry is a case in point. “The most challenging aspect of this tariff cycle has been the constant, on-again-off-again nature of the policies,” Erin Keating, an analyst for Cox Automotive, wrote last month.
It appears Hochul pledged her support for a Trump-backed natural-gas pipeline, though she has denied making a deal.
I'm in the solar business and I wonder why anyone who claims to care about good paying blue collar jobs would try to shrink our industry and cause more unemployment. You can make over 100k per year in my business without a college degree. You can support a family, buy a house and live the American dream. Why does the Trump administration want to take that away?
Classic Trump DEI move: Dangerous, Egregious & Ignorant.