For someone whose whole brand is gaudy—from the Oval Office’s new golden sconces to the planned extra White House flagpoles—the President is starting, as the economy seems to sour, to sound like an advocate for minimalism. Plus:
• Will Leo XIV be a Pope of peace?
• Susan B. Glasser on Trump’s TV domination
• The dynamics behind the India-Pakistan clash
Photograph by Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty
Kyle Chayka
Chayka is a staff writer and the author of “The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism.”
Contrary to his image as a gilt-bedecked billionaire, Donald Trump seems poised to reign over a period of American austerity. In the name of fixing the economy and jumpstarting home-soil industries, the President may raise consumer prices, while cutting down on accessible imports and agitating for a more nationalistic, even localized, culture. It’s not just smartphones that he thinks should be manufactured in the U.S. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, he announced an effort to impose a hundred-per-cent tariff on “any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” (Intermittent capitalization is the President’s own.) Hollywood filmmaking abroad is un-American, it seems. He wrote, “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
It’s unclear what qualifies as acceptable film production; perhaps Dennis Quaid’s laudatory 2024 bio-pic, “Reagan.” Elsewhere, Trump has been hinting at consumerist cutbacks: “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of thirty dolls,” he said during a recent Cabinet meeting. Apple juice, largely imported from China, is also set to become costlier. These public broadsides have hinted at Trump’s vision of a different American materialism: more Cybertrucks, less French wine. The image that jumps to mind is something akin to Taylor Sheridan’s latest, glamorously conservative television series, “Landman,” a portrait of brinksman oil entrepreneurship in Texas starring Billy Bob Thornton, including constant sponsored placement of Michelob Ultra beer. Big cars, bigger trucks, two-dimensional women, recalcitrant men. Or perhaps it’s the kind of film available on the Trump Media and Technology Group’s streaming service, which includes a “documentary” about lizard-like aliens.
Is Trump a secret minimalist, driven to limit the detritus accruing in American houses? In a recent column, my colleague John Cassidy considers the President in the context of “degrowth,” the idea that limiting consumption is inevitable and may lead the way toward combating climate change and runaway capitalism. What Marie Kondo started with philosophy, the President may finish with punitive economic policy: austerity by force, not by choice. Trump’s supporters are grasping for justifications for a volatile stock market and looming price increases. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream,” Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, said in March. In April, the YouTuber Benny Johnson tried arguing that the stock market doesn’t really matter: “You can lose points in your portfolio. It costs you absolutely nothing.” Megyn Kelly described the plan, optimistically, as “short-term pain for long-term gain.” Making money has long been manly in the Trumpian universe, but now so is losing it.
For more: Read Kyle Chayka’s weekly column, Infinite Scroll, about the people and platforms that are shaping digital culture.
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P.S. Robert Francis Prevost, now known as Pope Leo XIV, was born in Chicago—so it’s likely that he has some opinions on the proper way to serve a hot dog. (How do you say “no ketchup!” in Latin?) Read Helen Rosner on the “unbreakable rules” of the Windy City dog. 🌭
Ian Crouch contributed to this edition.
