Mike the Mad Biologist is right:
We know what JPMorgan's analysts believed: Trump is a fine fellow, and he's one of us -- he'd never do anything that would seriously hurt our interests. We were fine in his first term, so why worry now?
The signs were there, but they didn't think they needed to take them seriously.
They thought the "guardrails" would hold the way they (more or less) did in his first term -- even though the "guardrails" were mostly Cabinet members and others in his administration who challenged or thwarted his worst instincts, and he was making it clear that he planned to stock his second administration with people who would never challenge him. Also, he was afilliating himself with Project 2025, which had a stated goal of firing apolitical career government bureaucrats and replacing them with loyalists.
All the signs were there. Millions of ordinary people didn't put them all together and see the risks inherent in a second Trump presidency -- although, as Mike says above, some of us did -- but we're talking about analysts whose job it is to understand all information relevant to their task of protecting and increasing their clients' money. Why didn't they realize this was a possibility?
In part I think it's because, in the post-Reagan era, we've made it too goddamn easy for the rich to stay rich. They don't need to be on alert for signs of peril because they do okay even under the worst circumstances, and they often do extremely well even if they're only half-trying. Look at the 2008 crash and the Great Recession that followed -- the government made certain that most of them barely got their hair mussed, and many big firms came out richer.
Ordinary people who saw the warning signs knew that Trump could do great damage in their own lives, or in the lives of people they cared about. Rich people who missed the warning signs assumed they'd be fine no matter what, because they always are. That helps explain how we got into this mess.
