I think Nicholas Grossman is right. In a piece for Arc Digital, the professor of political science at the University of Illinois wrote that Wall Street is now learning the hard way what happens when you insist on looking at the president through the lens of “misplaced faith.” 

“This collective miss is more than just guessing low. It derives from a larger analytical failure in the financial industry and much of the business community: a refusal to see Donald Trump as he is. Instead, they assume an imaginary version of him, a Trump they can support — more strategic, less impulsive, someone who thinks like them,” he said.

He went on to say this “Imaginary Reliable Trump … is reminiscent of another dumb, ultimately disastrous Wall Street groupthink: the 2000s housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis. … Then as now, their belief in their own superior savviness — along with social pressure against challenging the prevailing sentiment as long as there are short-term profits — led to a catastrophic error. But if anything, the current one is worse. The housing bubble error was excessive faith in their own abilities. With Trump, they put their faith in a conman.”

I think Professor Grossman is right, but I also think he’s being kind, which is to say that I think he doesn’t go far enough in judging the corrupt intent of so-called titans of finance, and I think he doesn’t go that far, because he’s a generally agreeable man. For your sake, and perhaps his, too, I’m going to be a generally disagreeable man and say that the reverse is not only possible but on the whole more likely. 

I think they knew exactly what Trump is. I think they believed they were going to get even richer as a consequence of that knowledge. And I think they knew, because they recognized themselves in him. 

To be sure, they might have had reservations due to his campaign promise to implement tariffs, but those reservations were not strong enough to overcome their greed, arrogance and collective stupidity. 

They believed that Trump was about to pull one over on the American people and that they could get a piece of that action. We can call this “excessive faith” or we can call it foolishly expecting honor among thieves, then complaining after the fact when the scam backfires.

Truth be told, Wall Street types are nothing special. Oh yes, they want us to believe that they are super-duper smart, that they are the best and the brightest, and that we can totally trust them with our money. 

But it turns out they are just like every other Trump voter who wanted more than anything to be just like him, the whitest white man that has ever lived, and be the exception to all the rules, including the terms and conditions hidden deep in the fine print in deals with the devil.

And just like every other Trump voter, they are now shock-shocked! to discover three months later that not only are they not the exception to the rule, they are the rule itself. Trump fleeces everyone. He betrays everyone. He’s treating these best and brightest the same way he treats the rubes and yokels that these best and brightest look down on, adding insult to the injury of losing billions to Trump’s tariffs.

I don’t think what we are seeing in reporting from Wall Street is confusion, or even betrayal, so much as the slow grinding realization that what’s been done cannot be undone, and what we are hearing are merely the mewls of helplessness that come from such a realization. 

Someone has to stop him, a banker told the Times. But Barack Obama isn’t here. No one is coming to the rescue. Their only hope of finding a way out of this scheme is pushing further into it, probably by bribing the president into “cutting regulations” and “making government more efficient,” which is code for: look the other way while we commit crimes and if we get caught, fire those who would investigate them. 

The deeper they go, the more tightly they will be bound to Trump, as he would then be the only thing standing between them and future criminal prosecution, a fact that would put him, in their eyes, above the law itself, which would in turn give him more power over them. 

There’s a golly gee attitude coming out of Wall Street right now, as if elite and highly educated finance experts had no idea Trump would implement tariffs when he campaigned on them virtually nonstop. The temptation is to say that of course they knew, they were just in denial, and now their imaginary Trump is being trumped by the real thing.

But that leaves out the possibility – I would say likelihood – of corrupt intent. They put their faith in a conman because they themselves are conmen who managed in the end to con themselves into believing that the consequences of their choices are for other people, not them. The question is: why do the rest of us keep trusting them with our money?

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