What happens when there are no more serious people?

At this point in the regime, I’ve become aware of the ‘serious people’ discourse. If this discussion was happening during Trump 1, I was unaware of it, but here we are. The general contention of the ‘serious people’ discourse is that MAGA is largely ‘unserious’. I have yet to see ‘serious’ defined in the discourse, but intuitively, in this discourse the quality of ‘seriousness’ is a distillation of all the traits that make someone worth listening to: credibility, reliability, objectivity, motive, self-respect, intelligence, trustworthiness, accountability, etc…

The Seemingly Serious

While your average social-media-informed-liberal may decry the entire Trump regime as full of ‘unserious people,’ the more diligent newsreader will know that there are some very visible and seemingly serious people in his camp. On the economy, Scott Bessent, current Treasury secretary, is a Yale educated hedge fund manager, having been a partner at Soros Fund Management (yes, that Soros) and even an adjunct professor of Economic History at Yale. On commerce, Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. On ‘government efficiency’, Elon Musk, who I include as seemingly serious because he is the world’s richest man and in the popular imagination of the US, there are few things more serious than serious money.

These folks serve an incredibly useful role in the MAGA movement, apart from the literal cabinet roles they serve. From a psychological perspective, they allow a certain class of affluent Trump voters to absolve their conscience of their Trump support.

This swath of the professional managerial class, typically ardently progressive (socially at least), has emerged as supporters of the Trump regime. The two most visible camps are the Silicon Valley Technologist and the Wall Street Financier.

These classes still must mingle in deeply blue cities among the rest of the progressive PMC, and as such, need to find ways to justify their always “begrudging” support for the Trump regime. The structure here is slightly different from the typical “pick the lesser of two evils” defense that most closeted Republicans offer up; here, the support comes from a position of enlightenment.

The Silicon Valley or Wall Street Financier Trump supporter, typically acknowledges that Trump’s rhetoric is vile and that his base is largely uneducated and highly ignorant, but sees the discussion on MAGAists’ rhetoric and cultural grievances as a mind killer. Words are little more than sound waves though, and the benefits reaped by a killer economy and an efficient government will far outweigh any of the damage done by MAGA’s disdain for political correctness. The seemingly serious people act as this class’s answer to: What proof do we have that there will be a killer economy? Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick. And how do we know the government will be efficient? Elon Musk.

These people, and their seeming seriousness, act as a last line of defense for this class of Trump supporters in two ways. Socially, it allows them to appear to be operating in some kind of moral framework: I support and defend the Trump admin because he’ll be good for the economy and this serious person acts as proof. And returning to the psychological, it prevents the self from confronting the Shadow Self.

So what happens when the emperor’s envoys themselves have no clothes? What happens to this class of supporters when Bessent, Lutnick, and Musk reveal themselves to be deeply unserious people?

We could watch this happen in real time last week in the wake of “Liberation Day,” the Trump regime’s long awaited tariff announcement. Prior to this announcement, pointing to Bessent and Lutnick was pretty much all this class of supporters could do, without the strategy yet unveiled. However, the main goals of the strategy were set out by Bessent, reduce the deficit using Tariff income, “reprivatize the economy” by reducing public spending, renegotiate “Bretton Woods,” etc., whatever it was, Bessent and Lutnick are serious business people so the plan itself would be serious.

• Bessent on Tariffs

• More Bessent

Liberation Day

On April 1st, 2025 Liberation Day, Trump reveals a baseline tariff of 10% on all countries, and then a tariff on countries equal to half their Tariff on the US. Quickly, analysts noticed that the tariffs on the US were not in fact real tariffs, but the trade deficit divided by total imports. The equation used itself is a microcosm of this seemingly seriousness:

To the untrained eye, it looks like a fancy mathematical equation, and must be very complex and well thought out given the presence of greek letters. However, to anyone who has studied mathematics, you know you’d never use the asterisk in a paper despite it being technically valid. The equation is designed to lend an air of seriousness to something that is deeply unserious (and potentially devised by an LLM)

After the reciprocal tariff reveal, markets plummeted, yet members of the Trump supporting class in question were online, rationalizing the logic behind the chaos.

“It’s to reshore manufacturing”, “it’s to negotiate advantageous bilateral trade deals”, “it’s to push down treasury yields and refinance the debt”, etc… and at each point the online discourse had settled on a rationale behind the move, the regime changed its policy.

First reciprocal tariffs were suspended for 90 days with China having tariffs. The online discourse among this class coalesced at the ultimate goal being balancing our trade deficit with China and bringing them to the bargaining table, or maybe it was to expedite the reshoring of American manufacturing in high-tech sectors like electronics.

And then an exception was made for electronics, and before the online discourse could even get behind a rationalization the exception appears to have been lifted or qualified by Howard Lutnick.

At this point, I lost track of what-dimension-chess the Trump administration was playing, as did most Trump supporting technologists and financiers.

• It’s to reshore manufacturing: Build a plant takes years, no business is going to build anything when a policy can evaporate in a weekend, let alone a presidential term

• It’s to negotiate advantageous bilateral trade deals: The only trade deals it appears to be encouraging is trade deals excluding the US, between former allies

• It’s to push down treasury yield and refinance the debt: Bond yields shot up

Nowhere was the Financier and Technologist supporter’s inability to explain the position better illustrated than on the “All In” podcast itself, during a discussion between New York Times writer Ezra Klein and Crypto & AI Czar David Sacks. When Klein asks Sacks, what metrics he would use to evaluate Tariff success, Sacks fails to provide a metric for the duration of the podcast. Meanwhile, co-host Chamath Palihapitiya, also fails to define a metric. These financier/technologist hybrid Trump supporters continued to try and parse the hidden strategy and relitigate old trade deals, even turning to ChatGPT for answers instead of facing the music.

As if attempting to parse the hidden strategy of the seemingly serious was not a red flag enough (not to mention consulting AI), financier and technologist Trump supporters continue to ignore the signs that Bessent and Lutnick themselves are deeply unserious, or the most charitable, serious people who are incapable of behaving seriously as part of the Trump administration. Their credibility is shot, they are unreliable, completely unobjective by nature of being Trumpian, of unclear motive, lacking self-respect through their regular Trump sycophant humiliation rituals, untrustworthy, and clearly unaccountable. At the very least, I don’t doubt that they are somewhat intelligent, and likely suffer from the same affliction as most technologist or financier Trump supporters.

Jungian Implications, an Analysis

And so where does that leave our technologist or financier Trump support? The coherence of trade strategy and obvious economic gains were clearly afforded without proper judgement, the market realized this.

These clades of supporters finds themselves in the Trump camp without the enlightened defense they once had; there are no more serious people to point to. Socially, how do they justify continued support to their yuppie friends and colleagues? As a friend of several Trump supporters, I’m left asking, what even is it that you believe in?

Why do they continue their support in the face of this absurdity?

A generous read, is that psychologically, this typically well-educated member of the PMC cannot reckon with their shadow self, the part that subconsciously loves the racism and hatred spewed by MAGA, and must continually construct new seeming serious defenses of their Trump support in order to prevent acknowledging their shadow self’s existence. To accept their place among the swaths of tiki torch burning, confederate flag flying, election overturning fascists on the right would represent an ego death.

Rationalizing the irrational is much easier than confronting the shadow self, and so unfortunately, the answer to what happens when there are no serious people left? Not much, just increasingly higher dimensional chess.