Can Trump Turn Back the Economic Clock?
The president thinks he can return America to manufacturing glory — but the cycles of economic history are hard to break.
By Binyamin Appelbaum
Historians make their names by persuading people to see patterns in the chaos. In the late 1970s, the French historian Fernand Braudel thought that one of those patterns was about to repeat. Braudel was a student of the slow-moving currents that shape events. He wanted people to pay less attention to great men like Napoleon and more to seemingly humble things like the potato, a New World import that made it easier for European farmers to grow more food than they needed; this surplus, in turn, gave a wider array of Europeans time to engage in new hobbies like complaining about their rulers. One might say that he regarded the potato as the cause of Napoleon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/magazine/trump-economy-finance-history.html