The

The Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood, a slight swerve away from orthodoxy today, three guests, but in the classic two segments. Charlie Eaton and Alina

G. Buduna will talk about the growing role of private equity and hedge fund titans on elite

university boards, and Malcolm Harris will talk about political approaches to the climate crisis.

Before that, a few, very few since time is tight,

words on the tariff gyrations earlier this week. I made my opinion of tariffs clear last

week. I think they're largely destructive and stupid, but I wanted to make another point today.

A lot of analysts, both pro and anti-Trump, are reading grand schemes into the tariffs themselves

and into his on one day and off the

next approach to them. I think this is wrong. Trump has been obsessed with terrorists of 40 years.

A thief and a con artist himself, he projects that onto the whole world, and so he can't see trade

as something that could be mutually beneficial. Someone is always getting screwed, and he wants to make

sure it's not him. As for the grand

plans, he and his inner circle don't have the candle power to devise them. It all looks

reckless and improvised. As the Financial Times columnist Janon Ganesh put it the other day,

he has cunning plans ascribed to him by those who find it hard to believe that dogma, caprice,

and nihilism are factors at the top of politics.

And now we'll look at elites.

It's been amazing to watch snazzy rich universities like Columbia roll over for Trump when they, at least in theory, have the resources to fight him.

A perspective in why this is all happening is offered by my first guests, Charlie Eaton and Alina Jibaduna, co-authors of a paper,

Elite Embeddedness, The Rise of Finan Sears and University Boards as parallel social organizations

published in Socioeconomic Review.

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