American economist Jeffrey Sachs has written a scathing takedown of President Donald Trump, calling him a delusional, psychopathic “threat to the nation and the world.”
He might be a “Manchurian Candidate” who is working as a “stooge” for some foreign power to destroy the U.S., Sachs wrote on CNN’s website Friday, referring to the spy movie thriller.
“Much more likely, Trump is just mentally unstable and narcissistic,” he added, calling the new announcement of tariffs on exports from Canada, Mexico and the European Union part of a “psychopath’s trade war.”
Sachs, a renowned Columbia University professor who heads its Center for Sustainable Development and serves as a senior adviser at the United Nations, said no one expressed “a single word of respect for Trump” during his recent trip to Europe. Their question was: “How did America fall so far so fast?” Sachs wrote.
Trump’s “so-called policies are not really policies,” he added. “Trade wars are on, off, on hold, on again, within the span of days. ... Foreign companies are sanctioned today and rescued the next. ... Global agreements and rules are ripped to shreds. Trump’s garbled syntax and disorganized thoughts are impossible to follow.”
Sachs has bashed Trump’s economic actions several times. Earlier this year, he said the president’s tariffs prove he “flunked economics” and makes “primitive errors because he hasn’t a clue as to how the world economy works.”
Regarding the steel tariffs, Sachs wrote for CNN, “whatever US steel producers might gain from a trade war would be offset by the losses to steel users and consumers, plus the social costs of protecting uncompetitive jobs.”
One of Sachs’ biggest targets has been the massive tax cuts and budget deficit, which he has labeled part of the “war” of America’s rich on the poor. “We cannot afford tax cuts. The idea that somehow has gotten into our heads ... that ‘oh, $1.5 trillion, that we can give away,’ is unbelievable in any serious country,” he told Bloomberg last year. He called the redistribution of wealth in the nation a “populism by the super rich” who “want more and more and more.”
But Sachs’ latest attack in CNN was far more personal about the president. The U.S. has “probably never before had a delusional president, one who speaks gibberish, insults those around him including his closest associates, and baffles the world. We strive to make sense of Trump’s nonsense, implicitly assuming some hidden strategy. There is none,” Sachs declared.
He warned: “Harming our closest allies, raising the prices on key intermediate products, and provoking retaliation cannot possibly deliver higher wages, better jobs, or an improved trade balance.”
The “real answer” is to remove Trump from office using the 25th Amendment to replace him, Sachs concludes.
“Trump is unwell and unfit to be president. He is a growing threat to the nation and the world.
“The emperor had no clothes. This president has no sense,” he concluded.