243 - Richard Wolff: Donald J. Trump and the Decline of the United States

Richard Wolff is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor at The New School, where he works on economics in the Marxist tradition. This is Richard’s seventh appearance on Robinson’s Podcast. In his last appearance, episode #230, he and Robinson discussed Richard’s arguments against electing Donald Trump for president, as well as his analysis of the election. In this episode, Richard and Robinson talk about 2025 and the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, as well as what’s to come. More particularly, they discuss the irrelevance of Donald Trump, his domestic and global policies, China, narratives on the right and left, and the future of the United States. Richard’s latest book is Understanding Capitalism (Democracy at Work, 2024).

Understanding Capitalism (Book): https://www.democracyatwork.info/understanding_capitalism

Class Theory and History (Book): https://a.co/d/ht4trZN

Understanding the 2024 Elections (Article): https://asiatimes.com/2024/08/capitalism-mass-anger-and-2024-elections/

Richard’s Website: https://www.rdwolff.com

Economic Update: https://www.democracyatwork.info/economicupdate

OUTLINE

00:00 Introduction

05:48 Three Months Later: Why Did Trump Defeat Harris?

08:34 How the Left Can Defeat Donald Trump

12:57 Donald J. Trump Is a Naughty Boy

15:06 Why Kamala Harris Lost the Election

16:27 Why Trump Won the Longshoremen’s Union (Because the Left Failed Them)

25:23 Is Victor Davis Hanson Wrong About the Elites’ War on the Working Class?

36:31 Did West Coast Elites Cause the LA Wildfire Disaster (Is Victor Davis Hanson Wrong?)?

42:26 Why Richard Wolff Enjoys Tucker Carlson

47:02 Can Psychoanalysis and the Subconscious Explain Donald Trump’s Victory?

54:32 Why Unemployment Tanked Harris in the Election

59:45 Deep Seek, The Chinese Phenomenon

1:05:31 The Astonishing Story of How China Came to Dominate Elon Musk Over Electric Cars

1:13:25 Donald Trump’s Huge Misunderstanding About Tariffs

1:17:44 Donald Trump’s Irrational Bluster Tactics

1:20:04 Richard Wolff Exposes Donald Trump’s Contradictions About Immigration

1:34:23 The Marxist Truth About Why Immigrants Are a Gift to the United States

1:41:37 The Weakness of the American Empire

1:44:34 Why Trump’s Policies Will Increase Illegal Mexican Immigration and Drug Trafficking

1:47:58 Should Trump Make Canada the 51st State?

1:51:04 How Elites Rejected Donald Trump and Created the Man He Became

1:54:45 On Larry Summers’s Debacle at Harvard (And How Donald Trump Did It Better)

1:59:25 Why Donald Trump Wants to Take the Panama Canal (And the Actual Best Reason to Control It)

2:02:33 How American Neocons Failed to Stop China From the World Superpower

2:13:29 How the BRICS Are Drastically Outperforming the American Economy

2:20:14 On Europe’s Impending Economic Doom

2:25:18 Is There a Fatal Contradiction in Trump’s Climate Policy?

2:30:03 On Donald Trump’s Anti-Elitist, Anti-DEI Rhetoric

2:33:20 How Will AI Affect China and America’s Economic War?

2:43:19 How Elon Musk is Only an Unsuccessful Bureaucrat

2:45:04 How China’s Communist Government Is More Efficient than the United States’s

2:48:11 Why the United States Is the Aggressor Against China

2:51:10 Why Trump Thinks We Should Conquer Greenland

3:02:18 On China’s Number One Global Priority

3:09:41 What Marxists Learned from the Failure of the Soviet Union

3:15:23 Some Key Lessons from Marx’s Kapital

3:21:56 On How History Will Overwhelm Trump In the Next Four Years

3:26:30 Donald Trump and the Gulf of America

3:28:28 Why We Should Expect More of the Same from Donald Trump

3:32:26 On His Hope For a Brighter Future From the Left

Robinson’s Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com

Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University.