Insights from Your "Trump Whisperer"

President Trump is back — and his second term is already off to a roaring start.

Today, I’m playing the role of your personal “Trump Whisperer” to let you know what you can expect from the President, the economy, and the markets in the year ahead.

Watch my video below for the full story:

Video Transcript:

Hello and welcome to Moneyball Economics. I’m Andrew Zatlin, and we now have a new president, a new presidential administration, and a whole new way of doing business.

That’s right.

We voted for a change agent. We have a change agent, and when change agents enter the picture, a lot of predictability goes out the window. So the question you’re probably asking is, how do I “Trump-proof” my portfolio? I have an idea which I’ll share at the end, but let’s talk about what Trump is trying to do and how some of it is going to be predictable. And at the end of the day, it’s very, very positive for the US economy.

He is trying to reshape domestic and global policy, and for better or worse, he’s going to succeed in reshaping it. Whether it gets him to the end goal, whether we bypass a lot of unintended consequences, not clear, but let’s talk about Trump and what he’s bringing to the table.

He is a change agent, and that means he is not looking to build consensus.

Quite the opposite.

He’s looking to make changes and he doesn’t really care about the opposition.

He’s not going to spend time building consensus. That means he’s going to be moving fast. Not a lot of preparation, not a lot of predictability. It also means that there’s going to be a lot of overreaction because that’s what the opposition does in a Trump Derangement Syndrome kind of way.

And then last, they don’t really understand what Trump is doing.

I’m going to make sure you understand, I’m going to be your Trump whisperer today so you can get a little bit better handle on what the next four years are going to be like. But suffice it to say, a lot of change, a lot of change happening quickly, and a lot of impactful change, all of which is designed to make the economy strong.

And remember when we’re talking about Trump, most people underestimate him. Okay? They think he’s a buffoon, and that works to his advantage, but it also means a lot of people get too surprised. That means a lot of market volatility. Alright?

As your Trump whisper, I want you to understand that what Trump is trying to do is to restore a vibrant US economy. That means he’s looking at all the spending we’re doing domestically and globally and trying to assess a basic fundamental truth. Are we spending in ways that get us where we want to go? Connect the dots.

He’s basically approaching the US as a fruit tree. You prune it. Sometimes you got to cut back and you fortify it, you add nutrients. And by pruning and fortifying, you start creating a lot more long-term growth. But let’s remember a lot of winners and losers, he’s not going to be as supportive of the EV market.

He’s going to be more supportive of oil, okay? A lot of winners and losers, and that’s where we want to look for our opportunities. But it’s unpredictable. A lot of things have been said, but will they pull it off?

For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He wants to go after Big Pharma’s spending on advertising to consumers. They spend $30 billion a year, and if he’s successful, well that’s 30 billion a year. That doesn’t go to companies like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and so on, winners and losers. But the big picture, there’s a central theme here.

What are the priorities and are we achieving them effectively? Right?

It’s not just a forcing of this is what we should ask our school systems to do. This is what we should ask our healthcare systems to do. It’s also the second part, okay? If that’s what we want them to do, are we doing it effectively?

Okay, so for example, Obamacare, you cannot give healthcare to everybody, which is what Obamacare is, without also addressing the costs of delivering that healthcare. That was a huge piece that was missing. And as a result, we’ve had this massive cash grab by the healthcare industry.

You can’t allow millions of people to come in to do the hard work in the US while simultaneously paying US workers not to work because that’s what jobless claims are and other benefits of our system.

You cannot have it both ways. We’ve tried and it just works against common sense. It adds burdens to us as taxpayers. And those are just two examples of some domestic activities, shall we call them?

Let’s look at an international one…

Look at the World Health Organization, the who. They’ve got a $7 billion budget annually. They employ 28,000 people. And the last big win that they had was in 1980 when they abolished polio almost 40 years.

They really haven’t done a lot since then.

And so as a result, if you’re Trump, you’re looking at this bloated bureaucracy, 28,000 employees, you’re not sure what exactly they’re trying to achieve, and the US is bearing about a third of the cost to support it. 20% of that budget comes from the US directly. Another almost billion dollars comes from the Bill Gates organization.

Hey, where’s Europe? Where’s China? Right?

They have economies our size or close to it.

Why aren’t they kicking in more?

Why do we have this unequal sharing of the burden of costs? Okay?

This is not a corner case. We see this with the way Trump addresses NATO and the defense spending there. We see it all around the world. No more freeloaders, no more free rides, no more taking advantage, and the US continuing to fulfill that is the Trump theme.

As he looks domestically and internationally, he’s brought in people to look at the priorities, review how effectively we’re achieving them, and time and time again, we’re finding the priorities are not aligned with what we think they are, and the delivery is incredibly bureaucratic and just horrible.

Look at the California fires for example.

They were 100% worsened because the government stopped focusing on the priority of preventing fires, and instead they focused on social causes. There’s no way to deny that. And that’s just, again, one example.

It’s not a corner case. It is the core case, the way Trump is going to start working his administration to be focused.

So essentially, I’m saying three things.

One, Trump is going after scope creep. What are we supposed to do? Let’s start with the priorities. If there’s time, we will address other issues.

So the second is bureaucratic inefficiency. Government’s far too bloated, too many companies are bloated. Okay? So now he’s going to go after that bloat.

The third is basically fundamentally economics, right? By doing all this, we are not just focused on being effective and producing more. We’re doing it efficiently. It’s good for the economy.

In essence. Think of it this way — we have been acting, a lot of people have been acting like the money out there from the government’s, like a trust fund situation where you can spend it all day long and don’t worry about it, okay?

Spend the interest, keep the principle, except we’ve already gone through the interest and we’re cutting into, and we cannot afford to continue to do that. So Trump is coming in and he’s basically pulling back on all the freebies and saying, we need to start rebuilding the principle. We need to focus on getting more capital.

This is a big deal.

This has long-term ramifications.

We haven’t really seen these kind of major changes 50, 60, 70 years. We have social security out there from the thirties. We have stuff out there that’s been there for a while and hasn’t been revisited. Circumstances, times have changed.

It’s time to revisit a lot of where we are spending our money and asking the hard questions.

Are we getting the best bang for the buck? Or even should we be spending it on those things with that mandate that Trump has coming in, he’s going to steamroll opposition.

So whatever he wants, he’s going to get.

Now, is he going to succeed every time? No, but that’s not the point. The point is he’s going to shift thinking in the country. He’s going to make people start looking at how we’re spending, what we’re spending on, and a common sense will, I think, reestablish itself.

So it’s the end of the woke period. How do you play this?

Well, first of all, understand that everything he’s doing will overall be positive, net positive for the economy. Again, winners and losers. But overall, you want to be long. The stock market, the economy grows, the stock market will grow.

And the second is you can juice your portfolio.

You can do a straddle play using options where you’ve got puts and calls, and basically what you’re doing is focusing in on those swings that happen. When Trump makes a declaration and people panic or the market loves it and it goes up, you make money one way or the other.

Listen, this is going to be a great year.

It’s going to be a bull market. Let’s maximize what we can do. We’re going to start looking at specific sectors. A lot of it’s going to be best guesswork on the Trump whisperer these days, trying to interpret and predict where he’s going based off of his mindset and off of what I see in the economy.

That being said, we’re in it to win it. Zatlin out!