Trump and rent seeking

The best analysis I have read so far about Trump's economic worldview and what it would do to the US: (from Adam Davidson):

In recent weeks, hearing Trump talk, I’ve realized that his economic worldview is entirely coherent. It makes sense. He is not just a rent-seeker himself; his whole worldview is based on a rent-seeking vision of the economy, in which there’s a fixed amount of wealth that can only be redistributed, never grow. It is a world­view that makes perfect sense for the son of a New York real estate tycoon who grew up to be one, too. Everything he has gotten — as he proudly brags — came from cutting deals. Accepting the notion of a zero-sum world, he set out to grab more than his share. And his policies would push the American economy to conform with that worldview.

Many economists and political scientists now think that the United States economy has shifted, over the past few decades, toward one in which a higher proportion of the economy comes from so-called rents: Wall Street’s maneuvering through the regulatory process, ‘‘free-trade’’ deals whose thousands of pages of rules wind up proscribing winners and losers. The left, right and center of the economics profession all agree that reducing rent-seeking behavior, and improving overall growth, is essential if we want to ‘‘make America great again.’’

But this descent into a rentier economy would only accelerate with a mentality like Trump’s in the White House. The native-born population of the United States is aging rapidly; without immigrants the nation would quickly face a disastrous level of debt. Middle-class workers may be struggling now in a changing economy, but a clampdown on global trade would only make that worse. Any health care reform that revolved around the president’s ability to ‘‘deal’’ would inherently be one more prone to corruption. In a rentier state, every ambitious person knows that the way to become rich and powerful is to grab the sources of wealth and hold onto them, by force if necessary. It’s no accident that, around the world, rentier states tend to be run by unelected dictators — the ultimate dealmakers in chief.