Will Trump Destroy the Dollar?
On Memorial Day weekend in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush emerged from his family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, to deliver a warning. Genteel, dapper, blue-blooded, and careful, the presidential candidate cut a decidedly un-Trumpian figure; “he had always seemed a little like Scott Fitzgerald made him up,” an acquaintance once remarked. The setting that weekend sharpened the contrast: In place of the swampy, chandeliered indulgence of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, the Bush-family retreat was quintessential New England. But the content of Bush’s message presages Trump, and his subsequent actions suggest how one aspect of Trump’s presidency might evolve.
Bush’s target was the Federal Reserve, which he feared might strangle the economy and, should he win the election, weigh down his presidency. “As a word of caution: I wouldn’t want to see them step over some [line] that would ratchet down” economic growth, Bush told reporters, masking his warning with patrician courtesy. By today’s standards, it was a milquetoast protest; in last year’s campaign, Trump crudely accused the Fed of keeping interest rates low to get Hillary Clinton elected. But Bush’s meaning was evident. He was using his platform as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to question the Fed’s competence in setting interest rates.
The Kennebunkport warning gave way to a full-blown attack after Bush’s?
