Month: November 2016

I have read a number of articles recently in which Trump’s ideas about foreign policy were described by Europeans as “incoherent.”  I disagree.  They may be inane and dangerous, but they are a perfectly coherent whole.

Trump’s foreign policy will be driven by the following principles:

1.  Mercantilism:  For Trump, life is a series of negotiations in which the winners impose their will on the losers.  In international relations, this logically translates into a fixation on trade balances. The countries that have hitherto been viewed as allies, based on shared political values, are really just competitors who are beating us at trade.  The remedy for that is to stop protecting them until they pay up in one form or another.

2.  Realism:  The Pax Americana, about which I will be writing much more in the future, is based on the willingness of the United States to enforce norms about civilized behavior on an international basis.  Trump rejects the Pax Americana as being a delusion (law is just a cover for power relationships, after all) that we can no longer afford.  Foreign policy under Trump will be about the use of raw military and economic power to gain economic and security advantages, not about the protection of human rights and shared values.

3.  Terrorism:  Trump views terrorism as the principal security threat to this country, and will cooperate happily with any foreign country that behaves in the same manner, regardless of how repressive it might be.  If that means giving these countries a free hand in their own neighborhood, so be it.

While Trump undoubtedly feels a certain affinity for Putin just because he is a fellow strong man, there is more to his attitude about Russia than that.  For Trump, Russia is a natural ally, because it doesn’t run trade surpluses, its human rights issues are meaningless, and it has a strong interest in fighting terrorism. The Chinese trade balance presents a huge problem, but we have shared interests with them on #2 and #3.  The EU, Japan, and South Korea, on the other hand, are not allies, but weak, preachy entities that suck up our money and beat us on trade.  Relationships with our erstwhile friends in the world, therefore, are about to become very tense.

 

So Trump’s been anointed the man.

His word will be law of the land.

Are we really that dumb?

I’m uncomfortably numb.

This isn’t at all what I planned.

There is tremendous anger in the country, but the Democratic Party is effectively leaderless.  Someone needs to step up and find a way to direct the anger in a productive way; otherwise, it could do more harm than good.

The ball is in your court, Bernie.  Carpe diem.

Trump sees every human interaction, from politics to trade to relationships with women, as a zero-sum game in which one side succeeds in establishing its dominance over the other.  His campaign reflected that;  instead of attempting to uplift the country, he ran on a platform of white Christian resentment.

Now he calls for unity, and claims to be the President of all Americans.  What he really means by that is that he wants the minorities that he scapegoated throughout his campaign to shut up and let him do whatever he wants.  It’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t.

As the Chinese curse goes, we will be living in interesting times for the next four years.

10.  Increased inequality as a result of the Trump/Ryan tax and spending cuts.

9.  Shattered relationships with our historic allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

8.  Increased terrorism as a result of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims and indiscriminate bombing of civilians.  IS is already celebrating his victory.  Allah be praised!

7.  Roughly 22 million people lose their health insurance due to the repeal of Obamacare and its replacement with, well, nothing.  The pre-Obamacare insurance death spiral resumes.

6.  Ethnic violence spikes after Trump and Giuliani announce their “war on crime,” which includes explicit approval of racial profiling measures and stop-and-frisk.  Large scale riots are inevitable.

5.  Massive increases in unemployment and the cost of foreign goods due to the Trump trade wars.

4.  A sharp recession caused mostly by interest rate increases arising from the trade war and the big tax cut.

3.  Lost constitutional rights.  Enjoy your Second Amendment rights;  they’re the only ones you will have left.

2.  Climate change is exacerbated as the new administration reverses course and the rest of the world follows suit.

And the #1 disaster is. . .

1.  Nuclear war.  The most likely short term victims are North Korea and Iran. In the long run, making the use of nuclear weapons thinkable will imperil everyone, including us.

If you really want to know how I feel today, go to Youtube and check out one of the performance videos for “American Tune.”  That pretty much says it all.

For about the last 16 months, we have been watching with a mixture of horror, disbelief, and mirth as Trump’s weaknesses–too numerous and glaring to count–have been paraded across our TV screens.  In the end, none of it mattered in the least.   Pious, conservative, rural Americans came to believe that an amoral, bombastic Manhattan billionaire was their tribune, they came out in force to support him, and that was that.

He will say the right things at first, because it is in his interests to do so.  The test will come when he runs into serious resistance, both at home and abroad.  Will he accept the limits put on his power by tradition, the Constitution, and good sense, or not?  We will see, but given his personality and indifference to the truth, there is no reason for optimism.

For those of you who voted for him on the ostensible basis that he is just a rougher version of a traditional Republican–a Romney in wolf’s clothing, if you like–you own him, so we had all better hope that you were right.  If not, the consequences of your decision have been described on numerous occasions in this blog, and I stand by my predictions, starting with the market crash that is already underway.

 

. . . .

What’s happened

Has happened.

What’s coming

Is already on its way

With a role for me to play.

And I don’t understand.

I’ll never understand.

But I’ll try to understand.

There’s nothing else I can do.

 

Fiona Apple, “Red Red Red.”

Fans of “Annie Hall” will remember the scene in the bookstore in which the character played by Woody Allen explains that life is divided into two categories: the horrible and the miserable.  The horrible, according to him, consists of dreadful deviations from the norm, like children with cancer and victims of natural disasters;  the miserable is everything else.  And so, as his line of reasoning goes, we should be grateful if we are merely miserable.

That is essentially how I feel about our choices tomorrow.

Hillary Clinton is not a miserable candidate.  She stands for continuity with policies that have brought us a 4.9 percent unemployment rate, the DJIA at 18,000, very low inflation, reasonable gas prices, and no large scale involvement in land wars anywhere in the world.  Her election will almost certainly be met with the usual tools of GOP vandalism, however:  government shutdowns; impeachment threats; frivolous investigations; debt crises; obstruction on nominations; and the like.  Add sporadic right-wing violence, talk of secession, and incessant complaints about a “rigged” system, and you have the next four years in front of you:  a reprise of 2011 and 2012, only worse.

And that, barring a split in the GOP, is the best case scenario.  The alternative is an ignorant, bumbling, would-be autocrat who will cause a market crash, threaten our liberties, start trade wars, destroy our reputation abroad, and seriously consider the use of nuclear weapons on a regular basis.  He promises “change,” but what we will get is chaos, pure and simple.

I will be watching the returns tomorrow with my heart in my mouth.  I am terrified of what a Trump presidency would mean for our country, and for the entire world.  Please choose misery over potential annihilation and vote for Clinton, for your sake and mine.

George W. Bush didn’t single-handedly cause the Great Recession; not even Alan Greenspan can take credit for that.  In the end, however, a party that believes that tax cuts and deregulation are the answers to everything clearly didn’t have a plausible response to the events of 2008.  The voters could see that, and responded accordingly.

I will address Obama’s legacy in a series of posts in December or January.  For the present, what really strikes me as being significant about 2008 is the beginning of the GOP’s descent into vandalism.  McCain’s program was actually mainstream and reasonable;  among other things, he supported cap-and-trade. By the end of the campaign, however, the crowds were ignoring him and baying for Palin.  The barbarians have been at the gates ever since.

Maureen Dowd hates the Clintons.  She’s disappointed in Obama.  She’s ambivalent about Trump;  on the one hand, she acknowledges that he looks like a menace to polite society, let alone American politics,  but on the other hand, she clearly thinks he’s a clever, charming rogue who would make a much better President than anything in his campaign would lead you to believe.

Think of him as a 21st Century version of Prince Hal in “Henry IV.”

The problem is that Trump is about fifty years too old to be Prince Hal.   In addition, when you combine his mistaken belief that he can run the country in the same manner he does his companies with his ignorance of policy and his inability to accept either defeat or criticism, you have a blundering tyrant–a man on golf cart– in the making.

An orange-haired version of Falstaff, perhaps.  Henry V at Agincourt, no.

The theory is that people who are too embarrassed to admit to pollsters that they’re voting for Trump will put him over the top.  Nothing about this election is normal, so I can’t dismiss this possibility out of hand, but one thing is for sure:  if you can’t bring yourself to admit that you plan to vote for someone, you probably need to reconsider your choice.

The election’s a few days away.

There isn’t much more I can say.

Will our choice be a nut?

My prediction’s no, but

I’d vote early and often, and pray.

My wife was watching “The Wolf of Wall Street” while I was intermittently suffering through the final game of the World Series on Wednesday.  I was struck by two things about the movie.  First of all, from a stylistic perspective, it was remarkably similar to the better “Goodfellas.”  Second, and perhaps more importantly, it reminded me a great deal of Donald Trump.

Trump doesn’t drink, and I have no reason to believe that he relies on drugs other than caffeine, but he is a product of the same kind of amoral, materialistic, self-promoting culture as the protagonists in the movie.  Like them, he invents stories and rips people off without the slightest sense of remorse.  Could we actually put this man in the White House?  It boggles the imagination.

If you’ve ever watched a singing competition on TV, you will know that the host is inevitably fond of saying that “the stakes have never been higher.”  In 2000, by contrast, it appeared that the stakes had never been lower; the country was at peace, and the economy was booming as a result of the tech bubble.  We were in the middle of a golden age.  We just weren’t aware of it, because everyone was fixated on Monica.

The 2000 elected pitted a Southerner running as the ambivalent heir to peace and prosperity against a frat boy from an illustrious family who essentially promised to let the good times roll.  He also told us that his foreign policy would be “humble.”  Guess how that one turned out.

Three comments about the contemporary relevance of 2000:

1. A year ago, I would have told you that Bush 43 was unique in that he could convincingly run both as an insider (his pedigree was impeccable) and an outsider (he clearly and genuinely despised parts of the establishment).  Today, the GOP nominee–the standard bearer for rural culture–lives in a high rise in Manhattan.  Go figure.
2.  The electoral map finally came into focus in 2000.  If a Southerner could not win a single Southern state, even his own, in a time of peace and prosperity, what hope was there for future Democratic candidates?
3.  He rarely talks about this directly, but if you listen carefully, Trump’s candidacy is as much a repudiation of Bush 43 as it is Obama.  The Bush family has every reason to vote against him.