SEEING RED is an irregular column on Fremantle Shipping News by Barry Healy*. In this piece, Barry considers how Donald Trump’s 2020s seems to have a lot in common with Jay Gatsby’s 1920s and Emperor Napoleon III
On September 17, the ABC news site posted a short video of their reporter, John Lyons asking Donald Trump about his business dealings while president. Lyons was gathering material for a Four Corners report.
Trump at first boasted about his new pleasure dome, the ball room that he is building next to the White House at his own expense. But then came the stand-over tone of a Mafia boss: “In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now, and they want to get along with me.”
The BBC reports that shortly after this exchange an official White House social media post showed the video captioned,Trump “smacks down a rude foreign Fake News loser”. Since then, Lyons has been excluded from White House press conferences.
What is it about Trump’s business dealings that makes him so sensitive, such that he is prepared to hurt Australia to fend off questions?
Karl Marx, in Capital Volume 3 says of the stock market that it lends itself to “pure adventurers.” He says that “its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock-exchange wolves.”
Trump’s response to Lyons was certainly threateningly wolfish.
Extraordinary share trading
The US blog site, Data and Politics in posts on April 11 and 15 this year discusses US stock market speculations that coincided with some of Trump’s wild tariff announcements.
On April 9, at just before 1:01 pm Eastern Time in the USAsomeone (let’s call them “person or persons unknown”)“risked” about US$2.5 million buying short term options on the SPY exchange-traded fund (ETF). An EFT holds shares in companies listed on the Standard and Poor’s 500, which is the stock market index tracking the performance of the leading companies listed on US exchanges.
SPY acquires shares in proportion with the weight of each stock in the S&P so buying SPY options effectively covers the entire market.
Such speculation is dangerous. As Data and Politics notes: “Zero-day options don’t forgive bad timing.” Person or persons unknown risked losing the entire bundle, except it appears they weren’t risking anything at all.
Within thirty minutes of the purchase, Donald Trump posted a statement on his Truth Social account that he was “pausing” for 90 days most of the tariffs that he had announced on April 2. Immediately, the SPY stocks soared on the markets and whoever had bought those options walked away with over $70 million in profit in less than an hour.
But the rain of gold did not end there. Person or persons unknown had also bought 2.75 million shares in SPY itself. Data and Politics says: “If those shares were sold at the closing price of $533.94, the buyers would have locked in a gain of more than $36 per share—earning over $100 million in profit in sixty seconds.”
The blogger writes: “Over the next fifteen minutes, volume remained elevated. If the same rate of trading continued, that window alone could account for more than 41 million shares traded. That means more than $1.5 billion in potential profit—all before the public even knew why the market was moving.”
Two days after these extraordinary events, members of the US Senate Banking Committee sent a letter to the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Paul Atkins urging a full investigation into whether President Trump, his cabinet, donors, or affiliates engaged in insider trading or market manipulation.
The SEC has not yet responded.
Crypto fictitious capital
Trump and his family have dived into the world of cryptocurrency, creating the $Trump and $Melania memecoins. Memecoins are a particularly risky type of crypto derived from internet memes or trends. That is: memecoins are a perfect example of what Marx called “fictitious capital.” According to Bloomberg News, the “value” of the Trump family’s crypto assets is close to $1 billion.
The New York Times published an opinion piece about this in April by John Reed Stark and Lee Reiners. Stark was the chief of the SEC Office of Internet Enforcement from 1998 to 2009 and Reiners is a lecturing fellow at Duke University.
They say that as Trump has built his crypto empire he has shut down the SEC’s crypto-enforcement program. Every one of the SEC’s crypto-related lawsuits, appeals or investigations has been dismissed, closed or “paused.” In fact, the SEC has gutted its Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit, dropped the word “crypto” from its name, slashed its ranks by 40 percent andreassigned its top litigator to the I.T. department.
Stark and Reiners say that Trump’s administration of financial regulation in the USA, especially crypto, “brings to mind a similar moment in our history — the 1920s, when insider trading, market manipulation and lack of transparency destroyed public confidence in the system and helped set off the stock market crash that in turn played a part in the Great Depression. The SEC was created to restore trust and bring order to our capital markets, something it did for the next nine decades.”
The Roaring 20s, tragedy and farce
The 1920s was the notorious decade in US social historyfeatured in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It was an era of corruption and greed, glittering excess papering over crass superficiality and social decay.
It is easy to see commonalities with Trump’s USA. And yet, we should bear in mind Karl Marx’s observation that “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice….the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”Marx was describing the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis Napoleon in France. Louis Napoeon (self-styled, Emperor Napoleon III) formed between a particularly corrupt government 1848 and 1870.
In The Great Gatsby people “were not invited” to Gatsby’s mansion. “They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door.”That is, strangers were swept along in the Roaring Twenties culture of automobiles, jazz, decadence and social fluidity. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,”Fitzgerald writes. Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s famous gilded cage, was built in the Roaring 20s.
In Trump’s USA the glittering Jazz Age has returned but as if in a fun house mirror, upside down and distorted. To get to Trump’s door world leaders and journalists have to crawl and fawn.
Marx said of Louis Napoleon’s period of government that it was “an orgy of stock-jobbery, finance swindlings, joint-stock company adventure—leading all to rapid centralization of capital by the expropriation of the middle class and widening the gulf between the capitalist class and the working class. The whole turpitude of the capitalist régime, given full scope to its innate tendency, broke loose unfettered. At the same time, an orgy of luxurious debauch, meretricious splendour, a pandemonium of all the low passions of the higher classes. This ultimate form of the governmental power was at the same time its most prostitute, shameless plunder of the State resources by a band of adventurers, hotbed of huge State debts, the glory of prostitution, a fictitious life of false pretences. The governmental power with all its tinsel covering from top to bottom immerged in mud.”
That French government created the conditions for the revolution that produced the Paris Commune.
Perhaps Donald Trump should contemplate something else mentioned in The Great Gatsby: “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
By Barry Healy
* Barry Healy is a life-long Marxist who first came to Perth in the 1970s to establish the Resistance young socialist group. He was a founder of the Green Left and currently edits the Culture section of the Red Spark website.
~ If you’d like to COMMENT on this or any of our stories, don’t hesitate to email our Editor.
~ WHILE YOU’RE HERE –
PLEASE HELP US TO GROW FREMANTLE SHIPPING NEWS
FSN is a reader-supported, volunteer-assisted online magazine all about Fremantle. Thanks for helping to keep FSN keeping on!
