With all apologies to Danny Kahenmann for that title, I am genuinely surprised by the pushback to podcast, columns, even tweets that even mention Donald Trump in passing.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be.
I should not expect partisans to read past the headline. The fast twitch response by definition is an emotional, not contemplative rational reaction.
I understand these things, have researched and read and written about them for years. And even still, the pushback has the ability to surprise.
Yesterday’s column, snarky as it was, had a legitimate business meaning:markets have figured out that Trump is a paper tiger when it comes to his making threats to the companies and their executives he dislikes. When these firms get trashed by Trump, they mostly become Market-Beaters. It was not that way during the period between the 2016 election and 2017 inauguration, when Trump would regularly send companies spiralling down in value.
No one has stronger conservative bonafides than Bruce Bartlett, from working with Congressmen Ron Paul and Jack Kemp to working in the Ronald Reagan White House and the George H.W. Bush Treasury Dept. The pushback to his podcast was a mix of both thoughtful discussion and some off the wall lunacy.
Bartlett had mentioned Nazi Germany in his discussion of media propaganda, and called Fox News the “media arm of the GOP.” The pushback to that was as fierce as it was misguided.
However, if you want to make me (a Jew) believe you were offended by that because you (a Jew) lost family members in Auschwitz, then perhaps you should learn to spell the name of that particular concentration camp correctly . . .
Previously:
Invest and Profit With the POTUS Indexes (January 10, 2018)
A light-hearted but not entirely silly way to think about stocks in the Trump era.
Betting Against Trump Was a Market-Beater (January 10, 2018)
The companies the president disparaged have done much better than those he favored.
MiB: Bruce Bartlett wants you to Stop Believing Fake News
