Friday, March 29, 2024

Bloomberg View Notices: Trump Loves Gold

Donald Trump speaks at the 2016 Republican National Convention (photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)
Donald Trump speaks at the 2016 Republican National Convention (photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)

Bloomberg View‘s Timothy L. O’Brien recently provided a colorful and insightful feature entitled “Donald Trump Loves Gold and Don’t You Forget It.”

Therein O’Brien provides an opulently illustrated, lengthy litany of the many, many gold-themed elements to Donald Trump’s campaign and life:

Donald Trump had lots of gold on hand for his center-stage speech at the Republican Party’s nominating convention Thursday night.

There were the huge gold towers flanking the jumbotron.

There were cool gold stairs leading up to the stage, and a warm gold hue behind the power display of the TRUMP name:

And the speaker’s podium itself was limned in gold:

Almost everybody else at the convention got cool, neutral shades when they visited the main stage, even Trump’s wife, Melania….

Except for Ivanka Trump. Ivanka got the gold, too:

Gold surrounded Trump in Cleveland because Trump has always coveted gold. He’s not the first guy to love gold, of course, and in a nod to his predecessors, he titled one of his books ‘Midas Touch.’ But Trump loves gold in his own special way.

There follows another dozen striking examples of the gold motif in Trump’s life.

O’Brien concludes with a question and an observation:

What might be the policy implications of Trump’s obsession with gold? He’s thought about returning the U.S. to the gold standard. ‘We used to have a very, very solid country because it was based on a gold standard,’ he told an audience in New Hampshire. ‘It would be very, very hard to do at this point and one of the problems is we do not have the gold — other places have the gold’.

Political logic, both at voter and official levels, is based more on cognitive heuristics than linear logic. With an eye for the telling detail, O’Brien herein offers something more than mere idle speculation as to how Donald Trump might proceed to make America great again.

Note also as written in my Forbes.com column recently:

Trump’s prospects for winning the presidency would benefit from elevating the gold standard as a campaign issue.  According to a 2011 Rasmussen poll 44% of the 1000 likely voters polled favored the gold standard. Only 28% opposed.

The gold standard unites the GOP. This is a stated Trump goal. …  It enjoys strong support from mainstream Republicans, conservatives, and tea partiers.

Bonus: the gold standard splits the left. Rasmussen discovered that gold enjoyed outright majority support of African Americans and members of labor unions. The ethnic and labor left, unlike the nomenklatura left, favors gold. These are two major Democratic constituencies crucial to Trump’s electoral strategy.

And:

Donald Trump clearly enjoys an intuitive appreciation of the gold standard. He has been misinformed as to whether we have enough gold to restore it.

We do. America, Germany and the IMF together have about as much gold reserves as the rest of the world combined. America has well more than that of Germany and the IMF combined.

Ask a preeminent gold standard advocate such as Reagan Gold Commissioner Lewis E. Lehrman.

Read Jack Kemp’s Gold Standard Act of 1984, as good today as when first formulated.

Restoring the gold standard would not be at all hard to do.

To make America great again simply go for the gold.

Ralph Benko, internationally published weekly columnist, co-author of The 21st Century Gold Standard, lead co-editor of the Gerald Malsbary translation from Latin to English of Copernicus’s Essay on Money, is American Principles Project’s Senior Advisor, Economics.

More From The Pulse