Tea with Trump

In the movie "Tea with Mussolini," Lady Hester, the widow of Britain’s former ambassador to Italy, retains an admiring faith in Benito Mussolini. She visits him, receives his assurances of safety for herself, her friends, and her family, and proudly recounts her “tea with Mussolini.”

In the chapter "Tea with Hitler" from Tim Bouverie’s book "Appeasing Hitler," the author tells the story of British figures who believed that Hitler could be contained through dialogue and partial agreements.

Donald Trump has accelerated, in the seven months of his second term, the trajectory he began in his first, when he was still surrounded by adults who restrained him. This summer, he pushed even further in the march toward dictatorship that defines his administration.

There is no “Night of the Long Knives” in the United States today, and there is no Holocaust or genocide on the horizon (except the one the Trump administration is endorsing in Gaza). But if you read usually moderate commentators such as Graff, Ziblatt, or Freedland, you will find convincing arguments that comparisons with at least some of the intentions of Mussolini or Hitler are no longer exaggerations.

The United States is the oldest and wealthiest democracy, and the principal geostrategic ally and protector of Europe. It is not surprising that there is great reluctance to face this unpleasant truth.

I would argue that there are at least two types of people who attempt to have “tea with Trump.” One group consists of oligarchs who rationally believe they can benefit materially from him. The other consists of frightened people who fear punishment from a mafia boss.

As for the first group, perhaps one reason economists were surprised by the stock market’s “non-reaction” to threats against Central Bank independence (CBI) is that institutions like CBI were originally designed to “protect” policies from left-wing pressures. When the threat comes from the right, markets often accept it, calculating that they stand to gain more from deregulation and tax cuts than they might lose from inflation or policy uncertainty.

Trump is different from Mussolini and Hitler because the United States in 2025 is different from Italy and Germany in the 1930s. But he is worse than Orbán, Erdoğan, Bolsonaro, or Modi (bad enough as they are). He is more unstable, more powerful, and more unpredictable. He is also worse than Xi Jinping, who at least appears serious and organized. Trump is closer to Putin or AMLO, but likely even more erratic and vicious, with his relentless rhetoric and constant lies.

When Trump returned to the White House, European leaders seemed unsure of how to respond. Now, their strategic choice has been accommodation rather than confrontation. This will have to change if Europe is to survive. If not outright confrontation, then at least a strategy to distance the EU from the current United States is urgently needed.

The Autocrat Who Wants the Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo because Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist, was an anti-nationalist who decided that the Nobel institutions should be shared between Sweden and Norway. The words displayed in the Oslo center that celebrates the Nobel Peace Prize explain that Nobel was even accused of being a traitor by some of his compatriots.

For more than a hundred years, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to many individuals and institutions — among them Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and the European Union. Sometimes, there has been controversy about the merits of certain recipients, or about what some of them did after receiving the prize. But it has never been awarded to someone who openly campaigned for it — which is exactly what Donald Trump is now attempting to do (with the endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu). His selfishness and childish narcissism stand in stark contrast to the values Alfred Nobel sought to promote.

Trump seems to believe he can buy the Nobel Prize. According to The Economist (which notes that Hitler was once a candidate for the Prize, and ironically suggests that European leaders could exploit Trump’s vanity by endorsing his candidacy), “A recent phone call to the Norwegian finance minister, in which the matter of the Nobel reportedly came up alongside threats of tariffs, is another clue.” If he succeeds, it will be yet another prestigious institution destroyed by Trumpism.

Trump’s Orwellian candidacy cannot hide everything that is wrong with “Trump 2.0”: the creation of a police state, relentless nativism and racism, back-room deals with Putin and Netanyahu, threats directed at Canada, Panama, and Greenland, the use of public institutions to attack political rivals, cuts to foreign aid, and the sabotage of international trade. His claim that he has solved “six wars in six months” reflects the same distortion of facts and statistics that is behind the attack on official data and scientific institutions.

The situation in the United States is deeply troubling. The world’s oldest democracy is under threat, and the repercussions reach Europe. This summer, European politicians in both government and opposition have shown sympathy for the anti-vaccine movement (in Italy, inspired by Trump’s health secretary), while racist leaders in England and Spain have targeted immigrants. The vanity of the most powerful elected politician in the world is placing democracy everywhere at risk.

The urgency and importance of a better introduction to economics

Although I’m on temporary leave from academia, I keep an eye on the initiatives to improve the teaching of economics. CORE has almost completed the second original edition of the e-textbook The Economy, and has already published the first chapters of the edition in Spanish (to which I modestly and very marginally contributed). Its adoption and diffusion is more important than ever. It is more and more difficult to find excuses not to adopt it (running the risk of signalling that you don’t have the will to adapt to the new world), given that it is the best material and that so far it is free for students and instructors. 

My now one year in government only makes me realize how important it is to teach a better introduction to economics. What’s happening in the US and the world, and how governments and citizens (especially the youth) react to it requires a critical citizenry and leadership that has the intellectual tools to react to authoritarians and demagogues. The brain of students may explode if they study a traditional textbook and at the same time read an article that was yesterday published in the Wall Street Journal (of all newspapers) comparing Trump’s economic management to Chinese President Xi’s.

Paradoxically, some of the best economists have become better resistance columnists than textbook authors. I suspect they spend more time on their Substack columns or social media posts than revising the new editions that their publishing companies keep chruning out, based on outdated syllabus that help little to navigate the contemporary economy.

Economics cannot be any longer isolated from what those clumsy guys do down the Campus (or the building, in my university’s case) in History or Political Science (or Computer Sciences and Natural Sciences). Supply and demand simple graphs with perfect competition are a very specific case, almost a theoretical curiosity in the real world, but they will be still taught as the general case to the poor first year students that in a few weeks will attend introductory courses that have not adopted CORE yet.

We need policy makers and citizens that understand the importance of data instead of data skeptics. We need a pluralistic complementarity of ideas and traditions (CORE teaches Coase, Marx and Hayek), but no conservative attachment to the rule that a new textbook can only be a small percentage different from previous textbooks, especially in times of accelerated social, technological and climatic change. It is time to respond to the critics of traditional economics teaching without lowering the standards.

Football as a mirror of the global economy

In 2018 I published a book in Spanish (thanks to Alternativas Económicas) broadly about football (soccer) and economics, as a result of a course that I was teaching on the topic: “Pan y Fútbol” (bread and football). Its subtitle was “football as a mirror of the global economy.” The book talked about game theory, referees, coaches and Sports institutions, and what I had in mind with the subtitle was that football was becoming a leading indicator of the tectonic geopolitical changes that were impacting the global economy. That was before the Qatar World Cup, where the President of FIFA Infantino, the successor of the corrupt Blatter and the friend of Donald Trump, shrugged off the implications of subsidizing a corrupt and medieval regime.

The football industry has become gradually globalized in the last decades. First it was its labour market with the almost free movement of players, then it was the globalization of demand, with TV rights of the best leagues and tournaments sold in every continent (and some “national” games such as Supercups played in other nations). More recently, it has been the globalization of ownership, whereby the owners of a local club may come from anywhere in the world. This globalization has allowed the football industry to grow and to provide audiences and spectators with better TV and sporting quality. But given the unregulated and non-democratic nature of the global economy, the price has been an industry more and more plagued by corruption and populism.

Modern football illustrates that success and corruption are compatible (look at Spain), when powerful structures and opportunistic individuals take advantage of their positions to extract rents from a very successful phenomenon (to which success these individuals contributed nothing).

The erosion of democracies and democratic values allows these leaders (many of them as populist as Trump) to show without embarrassment their deals with Qatar, Saudi Arabia or the Republic of Congo. Much of the corporate media benefits from many of these deals, and at most many of them will promote false equivalences showing different views but presenting collusion with autocracies as something legitimate. Like economist Paul Krugman says when some media outlets are confronted with flat-earthers, the headline will be: “Views differ on the shape of the Planet.” And thus we can see in a newspaper owned by a prestigious media organization in Barcelona an interview with a sports minister in Congo with a proven past of criminality (without mentioning this past).

This combination of sportswashing, populism and corruption is allowed by the model of economic globalization that expands when global democracy contracts. The consequence is irresponsible leadership, erosion of institutions and loss of human talent at the club and higher levels. In 2017 I finished my book with some optimistic calls for reform. Today I am more pessimistic. It will take longer than I thought to change the system. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the game while we can (although perhaps we should feel more guilty for it).