by Akim Reinhardt
Here’s what a bubble looks like.
I walk into the local convenience store, and next to the two ATMs is a third machine selling Bitcoin. You can slide a bank card into the ATMs and get cash. You can slide your credit or debit card into the third machine and buy a Bitcoin, or a percentage of one if you can’t afford to shell out roughly $65,000 for a whole one.
But you know what you can’t do? Turnaround and use your brand new bitcoin to buy anything in the convenience store where you purchased the bitcoin.
There’s a machine in the store that will sell you money that you can’t use to buy anything in the store.
I’m tempted to say this is my Bernard Baruch moment. The famous apocryphal story is that Baruch realized it was time to get out of the stock market, just ahead of the 1929 crash, when a shoeshine boy tried to give him a hot stock tip. When everyone wants to get in, it’s time to get out.
But this can’t be my Bernard Baruch moment because Baruch made a fortune on the market before it crashed, while I’ve always steered clear of Bitcoin, never having had faith that it, or other block chain currencies, would prove to be anything but a game of musical chairs speculation. I can’t get out if I never got in. Instead, the convenience store Bitcoin machine was just a moment of confirmation. Perhaps something like, it’s been years since you believed in Santa Claus, and then one Christmas Eve you happen to catch daddy drinking the milk and eating the cookies.
Recently, we may have seen less Baruchian sign that yet another bubble is near popping: Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality. It certainly feels like something has changed over the last month.
I was camping in north Georgia when he almost got RFK’d. My friends and I received the news in dribs and drabs.
He was shot? Wait, they missed?
Not knowing any details, but having a decent understanding of right wing authoritarian tactics, we thought it might be a false flag operation designed to make him look like a near-martyr superhero. It seems that wasn’t the case, but the event initially brought about a similar effect.
The immediate aftermath was grim. Biden, already floundering, now seemed doomed. Trump was about to saunter back into the White House. His legion of loyal followers whipped themselves into a frenzied apogee of devotion. A new, anti-democratic age was on the American horizon. The bullet that almost changed everything had narrowly missed, and it seemed the Trump Bubble would continue inflating at a rapacious rate for years to come.
One thing that politics and speculative bubbles have in common is that both are driven by narratives. Stories get told. People believe them. The stories can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Boosted by a bloody ear and a pumped fist, the prevailing narrative of Trump will defeat a fading Biden quickly ballooned into Trump is destiny’s man-child, sprouting wings and soaring with ease to the heavens.
Then Joe Biden stepped aside, and the entire narrative changed.
There was no palace rancor. The party, and more importantly, the Democratic base, eagerly rallied around VP Harris, while those who had their doubts kept them to themselves, realizing perhaps how much was at stake.
Ever since, the narrative has been about Kamala Harris to the rescue, and energized Democratic voters. It has been about Trump struggling to regain momentum and attention. About his running mate, J.D. Vance, not being ready for prime time. About the two of them being “weird,” their mistakes magnified.
It is a new narrative, bolstered by numbers showing Harris tied or leading Trump in most polls. Anything again seems possible.
Of course the reality is that this election is still very much a tossup and could go either way. But the narrative has shifted, and as a result, many voters who were previously hedging their bets are now ready to invest. All they needed was a good story, a reason to believe.
If Harris does pull it off, you might start to hear a loud hissing sound as the bubble begins to deflate. Trump will almost certainly go into full Rumplestiltskin mode, and how many people actually have the stomach for that? Even many who will vote for him this coming November would be weary of another coup attempt, much less a fourth go around in 2028.
And then what is he? Just another noisy trouble maker, a spoiled brat who never grew up, whom a solid majority of Americans don’t want anymore.
Whenever a bubble pops, there are always some steadfast believers who continue to have faith long after everyone else has moved on. And no doubt, if the Trump Bubble pops in November, we will still have in our midst millions of Americans who think he is a genius Superman Baby Jesus savior. But the sizeable chunk of Republican Party politicians and operatives who actually loathe him yet cynically support him as the best way to maintain their own power? They’ll happily move on. Shortly thereafter, voters who’d tepidly supported him will abandon him, followed by those who leave him behind more grudgingly but pragmatically.
And then it will be over.
If that happens, we can go back to an older, more established political landscape of shitty and shittier politicians of the regular variety who routinely degrade U.S. democracy through standard, legal forms of corruption instead of trying to completely overturn democratic institutions and norms in pursuit of autocracy.
I can’t say I long for those days. I just hate and fear these days more. And I have no faith in humanity, so I don’t assume that the Trump Bubble will pop before he undoes American democracy to a significant degree. After all, a lot of damage has already been done and he could very well regain the White House by methods fair or foul. But of late, if I listen hard, I can hear a shoe shine boy hawking stock tips in the distance. I can look at that Bitcoin machine in the convenience store and snicker. And I can smell something in the air: then scent of the United States’ deeply flawed democracy, wheezing and broken, hanging on a little longer.
Of course, before any of that can happen, there’s still the weighted mathematics of the Electoral College to contend with, along with thousands of other variables. But in the meantime, I’m not buying any Bitcoin fractions from the local convenience store, and, for the first time in months, I’m not entirely convinced that Trump will get back to the White House.
Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com
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