Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Offers a Unified Theory of Trump

With his barrage of executive orders and daily challenges to the judicial system feeding a nonstop White House news cycle, few people step back and wonder whether there’s a philosophy guiding President Donald Trump and his closest advisers. The bombastic pronouncements and sometimes entertaining missteps from senior officials and the president himself make it easy to assume there isn’t one.

Yet there is a theory of Trump, of sorts.

Most of the administration’s actions—the questionable crypto dealings, the appointment of unqualified allies to high-level positions, the unconstitutional deportations and National Guard deployments, the ouster of a Latin American ...