Interestingly, Trump last week re-tweeted supply-side guru Arthur Laffer saying the precise opposite. In the clip, Rob Schmitt of Newsmax told Laffer that “a lot of people … believe that this market has been over-cooked for a very long time” and that “this needed to cool down.” Laffer replied: “I don’t think you’re right at all on that…. Cooling down the economy, lowering it down, getting at this down, does not help anyone, anywhere, at any time…. The faster we grow, the better off we are.” Laffer is loyal to Trump (the reason Trump re-tweeted the clip is probably that it begins with Laffer praising Trump shamelessly), but Laffer is even more loyal to supply side economics, and according to supply-side economics boosting supply is never, ever, bad; the words “bubble” and “glut” have no place in its lexicon.
In sum: Trumponomics dictates that economic growth based on government spending is evil; that cutting taxes reduces government deficits; that what Bessent sneeringly calls “cheap baubles from China” corrupt the soul; and so does a rising stock market.
There’s a very distant echo here of Burkean conservatism’s mistrust of capitalism as a disrupter of Christian and other traditional values. That strain, which I have elsewhere dubbed “Prosperity Sucks Conservatism,” hasn’t been heard from much since the GOP went all-in on the money culture in the 1980s. President George W. Bush tried to revive it during the 2000 election by condemning the tech boom of the late 1990s as “dulling our sense of urgency, of empathy, of duty.” But I seriously doubt gibberish like that helped him win. It was too obviously partisan sour grapes. People were glad the economy was booming, and you couldn’t persuade them otherwise.