When President Donald Trump won a second term, the question wasn't whether his economic policy would be different from the first-term version, but how. Two factions have vied to steer the administration's agenda: Conservative populists came with a plan to roll back globalization and empower the working class. And the tech right brought a vision of an accelerated future driven by innovation and disruption. Vice President J. D. Vance announced in March that 'as a proud member of both tribes,' he believed that 'this idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to loggerheads is wrong.' Trump would blend the two visions into a new synthesis that would simultaneously lift up his downscale voting base and unleash technological progress. Three months later, the product that has emerged is not a better iteration of the original Trumponomics, which consisted largely of conventional Republican policy, but a worse one, much worse. It has managed,...
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