This is the big one.  The Economic Policy is the distinct and singular policy at the core of Make America Great Again.  The MAGA coalition is centered around the principles of America First economics, and Ron DeSantis has just admitted he does not support them.

CTH has long warned about Ron DeSantis’ economic policy being driven by the donors who fund him.  When he was in congress, DeSantis voted in support of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) for President Obama, and DeSantis voted in support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP).

These are the trade policies supported by the Club for Growth who was congressman DeSantis’ biggest funder.  The Club for Growth also held the pre-announcement donor fundraiser in February of this year in support of DeSantis ’24.

The Wall Street billionaire, hedge fund, multinational corporate alliance, that assembles at Sea Island and funds Ron DeSantis, are fully against America First trade and economic policies.  DeSantis has just made an admission of his alignment with that corporate “globalist” outlook to a private confab of donors in California.

The DeSantis campaign is in full panic and retreat mode now that his establishment position is exposed.  The statements during the secret meeting were leaked.

[CALIFORNIA] […] The Republican snuck in and out of the Coalinga landmark undetected by the public nor the media, by design. He flew in and out of the nearby Coalinga airport, ushered to the back loading docks by unmarked Fresno County Sheriff’s vehicles.

The Central Valley lunch stop for 60 donors — paying $3,300 — was in between a breakfast event in Sacramento, and an evening in southern California.  The only indication that something special was going on was a “private event” sign. Most of the questions for the security guard related to the location of the restrooms.

[…] John Harris, the rancher and entrepreneur, hosted the DeSantis event at his eponymous resort, along with Fresno developer Richard F. Spencer.  Harris was unable to attend, but Spencer did grant a rare media interview with GV Wire.

[…]  The Florida governor also talked about global supply chain problems and China, and “how to make life better for the people here in the United States,” Maher said.  Others reported that DeSantis said Trump’s tariffs were “not effective.” (read more) 

More about the donor event is HERE – “Around 50 people joined DeSantis for lunch at Harris Ranch in Coalinga, which was hosted by Harris Farms Chairman John Harris and Richard Spencer, the owner of Fresno-based Harris Construction.” (link)

In addition, while in California, DeSantis also went to another Big Club fundraiser. “Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis’s Silicon Valley Peninsula fundraiser was hosted by John Hamilton, a real estate investor who has donated tens of thousands to RINOs and former presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and John McCain.” (more)

Ron DeSantis aligning against the core values of America First economics is a HUGE warning flare.  We have discussed this issue on these pages and in every platform we can reach for a long time.  The DeSantis team is trying desperately to recover from sunlight upon their donor influence, but they cannot refute the words of their candidate in support of those donor priorities.

Keep in mind also that Donald Trump recently announced the sweeping “Economic Agenda 47“, which includes baseline tariffs against all imported goods.

♦UNIVERSAL BASELINE TARIFFS: President Trump has announced a plan to replace the Biden system of punishing domestic producers and rewarding outsourcers with a new system that rewards domestic production while taxing foreign companies.

Rather than raising taxes on American producers, President Trump will impose tariffs on FOREIGN producers through a system of universal baseline tariffs on most imported goods.  Higher tariffs will increase incrementally if other countries manipulate their currency or otherwise engage in unfair trading practices. (link)

Candidate Ron DeSantis now stands in opposition to this approach, and the current tariffs against imported Chinese goods which have been exceptionally effective.  So effective, even the Biden administration has admitted their value.

As long as Donald J. Trump singularly represents the only counterforce against this UniParty globalist construct, he will continue to be targeted by the system of financial controllers who fund the political system.  For the sake of brevity, this alignment of multinational corporate and financial economic interests is called the “Big Club.”

As part of the strategic political effort, the Republican wing of the Big Club needs to carve up the supporters of Donald Trump into smaller, easier to target, pieces.  This is where the value of the culture war, what is now considered as ‘wokeism’, plays into the strategy of those who seek to control political outcomes and remove the threat that Trump represents to their financial interests.

In many ways, this is why we are seeing prominent Republican officeholders pushing the culture war as a tool for their own political advancement.  The same Big Club members who are directly fighting against the America-First economic agenda, are the same Big Club members who are funding the Republican politicians to push the culture war.

The corporations, billionaires and multinationals who are funding the Republican candidates do not have any vested interest in the culture war. For them the social issues are a tool, technique or insurance policy to guarantee security of the interest that does matter – their financial status.

There are trillions at stake, literally trillions.  Additionally, decades of their prior investment interests are contingent upon the ‘service driven economy’ being maintained.

Dollars drive the U.S. global trade and financial exchanges.  The multinationals, both corporations and banks, have pre-deployed investments all around the globe.  However, many of those investments are entirely contingent upon the retention of the U.S. economic system they pre-established before the investment was made.  President Donald J. Trump represents the threat to that entire financial system.

Once you understand this, then a great deal of the more nuanced and granular U.S. political moves, almost all of which are funded by the corporations and billionaires who are attached to the global investment process, begin to make sense.

Every non-Trump candidate, funded to create the opposition to America First, is part of this process to use anti-wokeism as a strategy.

With this level of money at stake, do not be surprised when you look at how much is being spent to construct the system that guarantees the continuation of globalism. The money spent in funding the Republican candidates to advance the distracting cultural war pales in comparison to the amount of money at risk in the 2024 election outcome.

We know it works, because we have the results to cite.

It was the Fourth Quarter of 2019…..

Right before the pandemic would hit a few months later, despite two years of doomsayer predictions from Wall Street’s professional punditry, all of them said Trump’s 2017 steel and aluminum tariffs on China, Canada and the EU would create massive inflation – it just wasn’t happening!

Overall, year-over-year inflation was hovering around 1.7 percent [Table-A BLS]; yup, that was our inflation rate.  The rate in the latter half of 2019 was firmed up with less month-over-month fluctuation, and the rate basically remained consistent.   [See Below]  The U.S. economy was on a smooth glide path, strong, stable, and Main Street was growing with MAGAnomics at work.

A couple of important points.  First, unleashing the energy sector to drive down overall costs to consumers and industry outputs was a key part of President Trump’s America First MAGAnomic initiative.  Lower energy prices help the worker economy, middle class and average American more than any other sector.

Which brings us to the second important point.  Notice how food prices had very low year-over-year inflation, 0.5 percent.  That is a combination of two key issues: low energy costs, and the fracturing of Big Ag’s hold on the farm production and the export dynamic:

(BLS) […] The index for food at home declined for the third month in a row, falling 0.2 percent. The index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs decreased 0.7 percent in August as the index for eggs fell 2.6 percent. The index for fruits and vegetables, which rose in July, fell 0.5 percent in August; the index for fresh fruits declined 1.4 percent, but the index for fresh vegetables rose 0.4 percent. The index for cereals and bakery products fell 0.3 percent in August after rising 0.3 percent in July. (link)

For the previous twenty years, food prices had been increasingly controlled by Big Ag, and not by normal supply and demand.   The commodity market became a ‘controlled market’. U.S. food outputs (farm production) was controlled and exported to keep the U.S. consumer paying optimal prices.

President Trump’s trade reset was disrupting this process.  As farm products were less exported, the cost of the food in our supermarket became reconnected to a ‘more normal’ supply and demand cycle.  Food prices dropped, and our pantry costs were lowered.

The Commerce Dept. then announced that retail sales climbed by 0.4 percent in August 2019, twice as high as the 0.2 percent analysts had predicted. The result highlighted retail sales strength of more than 4 percent year-over-year.   These excellent results came on the heels of blowout data in July, when households boosted purchases of cars and clothing.

The better-than-expected number stemmed largely from a 1.8 percent jump in spending vehicles. Online sales, meanwhile, also continued to climb, rising 1.6 percent. That’s similar to July 2019, when Amazon held its two-day blowout Prime Day sale. (link)

Despite the efforts to remove and impeach President Trump, it did not look like middle class America was overly concerned about the noise coming from the pundits.   Likely that’s because blue collar wages were higher, Main Street inflation was lower, and overall consumer confidence was strong.  Yes, MAGAnomics was working.

Additionally, remember all those MSM hours and newspaper column inches where the professional financial pundits were claiming Trump’s tariffs were going to cause massive increases in prices of consumer goods?

Well, exactly the opposite happened [BLS report] Import prices were continuing to drop:

[Table 1 – BLS report link]

This was a really interesting dynamic that no one in the professional punditry would dare explain.

Donald Trump’s tariffs were targeted to specific sectors of imported products.  [Steel, Aluminum, and a host of smaller sectors etc.]  However, when the EU and China responded by devaluing their currency, that approach hit all products imported, not just the tariff goods.

Because the EU and China were driving up the value of the dollar, everything we were importing became cheaper.   Not just imports from Europe and China, but actually imports from everywhere.   All imports were entering the U.S. at substantially lower prices.

This meant when we imported products, we were also importing deflation.

This price result is exactly the opposite of what the economic experts and Wall Street pundits predicted back in 2017 and 2018 when they were pushing the rapid price increase narrative.

Because all the export dependent economies were reacting with such urgency to retain their access to the U.S. market, aggregate import prices were actually lower than they were when the Trump tariffs began:

[…]  Prices for imports from China edged down 0.1 percent in August following decreases of 0.2 percent in both July and June. Import prices from China have not advanced on a monthly basis since ticking up 0.1 percent in May 2018. The price index for imports from China fell 1.6 percent for the year ended in August.

[…]  Import prices from the European Union fell 0.2 percent in August and 0.3 percent over the past 12 months.

[Page #4 – BLS Report, pdf] – BLS press release.

So yes, we know President Trump can save Social Security and Medicare by expanding the economy with his America First economic policy.  We do not need to guess if it is possible or listen to pundits theorize about his approach being some random ‘catch phrase’ disconnected from reality.  Yes folks, we have the receipts.

This was MAGAnomics at work, and this is entirely what created the middle class MAGA coalition.  No other Republican candidate has this economic policy in their outlook, because all other candidates are purchased by the Wall Street multinationals.

America First MAGAnomics is unique to President Trump, because he is the only one independent enough to implement them.

That’s just the reality of the situation.  They hate him for it…