Right Message, Wrong Method
NOTES FROM MILAN May 27, 2025
Donald Trump is absolutely right to focus on the abandonment of American labor.
The core idea—that U.S. multinational corporations have extracted value from global labor markets while hollowing out their domestic workforce—is not only politically potent, it’s economically accurate. This imbalance has been tolerated, even encouraged, for decades under the guise of globalization, efficiency, and scale.
What’s changed is not the problem, but who’s owning it.
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A Message That Resonates
Trump’s political strength lies in his willingness to name the thing everyone else avoids:
That the American middle class was sold out by the very institutions meant to protect it—corporations, trade negotiators, and, yes, both political parties.
This message plays incredibly well with his base because it speaks to lived experience: closed factories, lost jobs, and eroded economic identity. It isn’t abstract. It’s real.
But the issue isn’t the message—it’s the method.
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A Strategy That Sabotages Itself
Trump’s approach—escalating rhetoric, tariff threats, sudden reversals, headline cliffhangers—undermines the legitimacy of the very ideas he’s pushing. His style is so combative and erratic that it blunts the policy potential.
Markets, for their part, have largely discounted the idea that any of the big Trump tariff threats will materialize. Traders see the drama, not the delivery. And until there’s actual legislative or executive follow-through, they’ll continue to treat the headlines as noise.
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Where the Democrats Are Missing the Moment
Here’s the real political failure: The Democratic Party should have owned this issue years ago.
Instead, they’ve ceded it—completely.
The result is a staggering miscalculation. By failing to champion domestic labor in a way that is emotionally resonant and structurally serious, they’ve allowed Trump to take control of the economic populist narrative.
But here’s the opportunity: the Democrats can—and should—adopt Trump’s core premise about the erosion of domestic labor, while offering a more thoughtful, less chaotic, more credible roadmap to restore balance between labor and capital.
Policy, not pageantry.
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What I’m Watching
• Markets are clear: They do not expect broad tariffs.
• Capital is still aligned with global flows, not domestic nationalism.
• But the narrative is shifting, and that shift matters over the long term.
The political demand for rebalancing labor and production inside national borders is rising—and the first party that matches emotional clarity with actual structure will win not just votes, but investor confidence.
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More next week.
— Dylan
Worded so nicely. A combination of the left and the right is what appears to be rising or has risen, that is, the common sense center of both parties - a combination of conservative economics with liberal social views (grow your wealth and assist the working poor and the needy). We forget to turn the volume down to a whisper to get clarity so we can distinguish truth from fiction if we hear every word. I close my eyes and listen to the words being spoken and can pick up on information that rings true in my gut. It helps connect the dots. Always.
America: What Went Wrong is an incredible book chronicling the effects of leveraged buyouts, the hollowing out of domestic manufacturing and the rise of legitimized greed and power. Bill Clinton waved this book around during his campaign. Something I found quite intriguing as I was reading it at the time. Once elected, Bill
Clinton never raised that book again.
Thank you for stepping back Dylan. We need you!