Category: Uncategorized

Donald Trump has picked as his acting AG a man with few legal credentials and very unusual ideas about the role of the federal judiciary and constitutional law.  He has already prejudged the outcome of the Mueller investigation on TV.  Finally, he apparently served as a paid member of the board of a company that engaged in fraudulent business practices.

Awesome.  For Trump, he’s the perfect choice.  If this guy didn’t exist, he would have to invent him.

If Whitaker wants to keep the job, and there is no reason to doubt that he does, he will have to ignore his legal and ethical responsibilities to the country as a whole and do his master’s bidding to the nth degree.  Like Kavanaugh, he will probably come out swinging, and go downhill from there.  Look out, Hillary!  Better get lawyered up!

And if Trump tries to confirm him, Lindsey Graham will probably be the first person to support him.  That’s where we are today.  As Trump would say, SAD!

Donald Trump understands perfectly that his base, which is disproportionately elderly, passionately opposes cuts in Social Security and Medicare, so entitlement “reform” was always unlikely during his administration.  He has strong proponents of entitlement cuts in his government, however, and he showed a willingness to screw over his base during the campaign to repeal Obamacare, so the possibility of “reform” could not be dismissed altogether.

If the GOP had maintained control of the House, you undoubtedly would have seen at least some effort to “reform” Social Security and Medicare in order to respond to yawning deficits both in the programs themselves and in the budget in general.  That didn’t happen, and “reform” is now off the table for the next two years.  The new GOP plan almost certainly will be to wait until the funding crisis looms, refuse to raise taxes, and force the Democrats to share responsibility for the cuts when the clock runs out.

How can the Democrats respond to this?  By reversing at least some of the Trump tax cuts and using some of the funds to fill in the financial holes in the entitlement programs.  It’s both a conceptual and a political winner.  I will have more on that topic when I discuss the evolving Democratic positions on the welfare state in a few weeks.

 

Donald Trump has been itching to shut down the government practically from the day he took office.  One assumes that he sees the federal government as a whole as the enemy even if he theoretically runs it, and he thinks he will get kudos from the base for being strong and doing battle with the beast.  Mitch McConnell, on the other hand, has been adamantly opposed to a shutdown.   His theory, which was almost certainly correct, was that the public would blame the GOP for a shutdown, given that they controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress.  Shutdowns are also, one hardly needs to say, bad governance.

McConnell has prevailed so far, but conditions will change in January, and there will be some surface plausibility for suggesting the House Democrats are at fault.  Trump will undoubtedly view Nancy Pelosi as an ideal foil.  The newly empowered Democrats aren’t going to give him his wall.  Why not show off your swagger and please the base by shutting it down?

It’s going to happen–very possibly more than once, since Trump doubles down on everything.  One can only hope that the shutdown isn’t accompanied by a debt ceiling crisis, as well.  Shutdowns are a nuisance; debt defaults are a potential economic disaster.

In 2010, the GOP ran largely against Obamacare, and won a smashing victory.  In 2018, on the other hand, the Democrats focused their campaign on protecting Obamacare, and won back the House.  What does this mean?

Very simply, it means the American public is conservative in the true sense of the word–it doesn’t like change very much.  In 2010, Obamacare was viewed by many as a complex, confusing, and unnecessary government intrusion into the health care field.  Today, it’s the status quo, and the public understandably doesn’t want to give it up in favor of some nebulous GOP plan which is almost certain to make things worse, not better.

There are two messages here.  The GOP should finally realize that Obamacare is actually a very moderate, CD-friendly measure which effectively serves as a political shield against a more radical single-payer program.  They should let their campaign against it die without further ado and embrace measures to make it more effective.  On the Democratic side, the proponents of single-payer would have found it easier to make their case in 2020 if Obamacare had been finished off once and for all.  They need to realize that, regardless of what polls tell them, the battle for single-payer will be brutally difficult, and may well be impossible.

Donald Trump is actually right about one thing–he is, in fact, treated differently by the MSM than other presidents.  Of course, that only happened because he lies so frequently and shamelessly.  He left the media with two choices:  they either had to call out his lies or permit themselves to be used on a daily basis as a conduit for “alternative facts.”  They chose the former, and we can be grateful for it.

The other element of this was that, with complete GOP control of the government, there was no opposition figure who could be an effective fact-checker.  With Democratic control of the House, that is no longer the case.  Will the media acknowledge the change of conditions and go back to the old, more comfortable rule of putting the onus of protecting the record on Nancy Pelosi?  We’ll see.

Not surprisingly, based on yesterday’s press conference, the change hasn’t happened yet.

On the 45th President Trump.

He fought for the reds on the stump.

Blue wins in the House

Made him grumble and grouse.

We just hope he’s the next to be dumped.

In one of the least surprising developments in recorded history, Trump fired Jeff Sessions by tweet less than 24 hours after the midterms.  He will now look for an AG who will act, not as the nation’s lawyer, but as an instrument to weaponize the criminal justice system in his own interest.  That’s not speculation.   It’s a given.

The nominee, regardless of who it is, will give the right answers about political influence in the system to the Senate, which will confirm him, just as it confirmed Kavanaugh.  Then we will find out if he was lying or not.  Maybe he will be telling the truth;  some of Trump’s people, like Christopher Wray, actually do have professional ethics.  Maybe he won’t, in which case we will be heading down the road towards a banana republic, and impeachment will be the only remedy.

I don’t know how this turns out.  I just know what’s at stake, and it scares the daylights out of me.

The new Democratic majority in the House is unlikely to make any serious attempt to impeach Trump, but they are certainly going to subject him to a very high level of scrutiny.  That will include a demand for his tax returns.  He has made it clear that he has no intention of giving in on that issue.  Litigation will ensue.

Trump is going to put a lot of faith in the willingness of what he will see as his new Supreme Court majority to protect him from the House.  The Chief Justice, on the other hand, is going to remember how Chief Justice Burger managed to get a unanimous vote out of the Court on the Watergate tapes issue.  He is very sensitive to the public perception of the Court as a purely partisan body, and the last thing he needs is a series of 5-4 votes protecting Trump from a variety of public records demands.

Will he succeed?  That will be one of the key questions over the next two years.  On this point, I make no predictions.

We forget this sometimes, but Donald Trump lost the overall popular vote, and ultimately prevailed only by winning several Rust Belt states by a very small margin.  A normal politician would respond to that by focusing his message on swing voters.  Trump is anything but normal, however;  his sole interest is in base mobilization, partly because he thinks it works, but partly because it’s fun.

Last night unsurprisingly proved that base mobilization alone will not produce victories consistently on a national level.  No matter how the GOP spins the facts, the bottom line is that they did poorly in the Rust Belt states that are almost certainly going to decide the 2020 election, and the loss of the House means their legislative agenda is effectively dead.

So how will Trump respond to the new state of affairs?  His options are to:  (a) change his ways and try to govern on a bipartisan basis, probably starting with a new emphasis on a real infrastructure bill; (b) maintain the status quo and hope for a different result; or (c) double down and try to change the facts, which could well include a war, government shutdowns, constitutional crises, and additional efforts at voter suppression and violations of civil rights.

I think you can go ahead right now and write off (a).  The other two are realistic possibilities.  The one I really worry about, obviously, is (c).  If I were a betting man, that’s the one I would pick.

There is an interesting article about the rise of the far right in the former East Germany in today’s NYT.  The gist of it is that the factories closed after reunification, the women moved away and took services jobs in the west, and the men who remained are screaming about immigrants and joining the AfD.

Merkel is a particular hate figure among the angry men because, as a successful woman who left the east, she embodies their loss of status.

Sound familiar?  If you read yesterday’s post, it should.

Life in the time of Trump.

Election day is here.

We’ve waited for this day to come.

It’s been two painful years.

Will the voters restrain Trump

Or will they set him free?

No one really knows for sure.

We’ll have to wait and see.

It is generally accepted that globalization and technological changes are primarily responsible for rising inequality and stagnant wages for workers in this country.  It occurred to me yesterday, however, that the impact of computers has actually been more pervasive than that, and from a political perspective, has been even more toxic.

The increasing use of computers in manufacturing has changed the nature of  work that has traditionally been done by strong, skilled men.  What computers do, essentially, is devalue both physical strength and the kind of craftsmanship and expertise that results from years of experience.  That means the job you had twenty years ago can be done today by a technician or even by (banish the thought!) women.  That in turn results in a loss of status and self-esteem.  Your wife may well earn more now than you do.

What do you do if you’re a man in this position?  You find someone to blame;  complaining about computers obviously isn’t very emotionally satisfying.  Illegal immigrants!  Foreigners!  Feminazis!  Minorities!  They’re all picking your pocket and taking cuts in line!  Something has to be done!

And so you wind up driving a big black pickup truck with a Trump sticker and a Confederate flag and spewing black smoke in the face of everyone else on the road.  You still have your testosterone and your swagger.  It’s all that’s left to you.

 

Ross Douthat is a traditional, moralistic Catholic, so you would expect him to have serious reservations about Donald Trump, and he does.  He calls Trump a “dictator on Twitter,” which is a slightly less punchy version of “man on golf cart.”  He despises his white nationalism, his corruption, and his lies.  You can count him as an ally of the Never Trumpers.

More than anything else, however, Douthat is disappointed in him.  In his view, the Trump presidency presented an opportunity to break from the usual GOP tax cuts for wealthy businessmen and support a truly populist plan which emphasized benefits for struggling workers.  With that change, a slightly more morally acceptable position on immigration, and more discipline on Twitter, Trump could be riding high in the polls.   Instead, he chose the worst of both worlds:  overt white nationalism and authoritarianism in rhetoric and support for plutocracy in actual deeds.  He will pay the price for it on Tuesday in spite of the roaring economy.

Is Douthat right?  No, because he has an unrealistically rosy view of GOP voters, who quite knowingly chose Trump over Marco Rubio, his favored candidate, in 2016.  Trump continues to throw racist red meat to his base because it is what they demand.  He supported tax cuts for business because he has a genuine affinity for other wealthy people and because the GOP simply does not think it can survive without the support of its donor class.

The fundamental premise of the GOP is that the PBPs get tax cuts, deregulation, and lots of official respect for their supposedly unequaled contributions to the nation’s welfare, while the Reactionaries get vocal moral support against real and imagined opponents of white Christian America and friendly Supreme Court appointments.  Trump is delivering both.  For Douthat’s version of the GOP to exist, the PBPs would have to accept Reactionary economic policies, and the Reactionaries would have to give up racism.  It won’t happen unless and until the GOP as we know it evolves into something completely different, which would probably require some sort of national catastrophe.

Michelle Obama famously advised Democrats to take the high road in dealing with Trump.  Opinion within the party is clearly divided on this subject.  Was she right?

Yes, because:

1.  You can’t possibly win a race to the bottom with Trump.  He has no limits.
2.  What does “going low” with Trump mean, anyway?  You don’t have to lie about him, or even try to spin his misdeeds.  The facts will speak for themselves.  Making irresponsible comments about them will just cost you swing voters.
3.  Most importantly, the enemy is Trumpism, not Trump himself;  his engine is fueled by the fear and anger of millions of voters.  “Going low” is not a way to purge the system of this disease.  It will be a long and difficult process, and it has to start with providing reassurance to Trump’s more fanatical supporters that while they are not the American default, they will always have a valued place in our country.

On Tuesday, there will be only one meaningful question for voters in congressional elections–do you prefer a Trump checker or a Trump enabler?  For the Democrats, it doesn’t matter if you support single-payer or just the public option, or whether you want to abolish ICE or not, or whether you think a carbon tax or cap-and-trade is the best way to combat climate change, because none of that is going to happen in the next two years.  It’s just about doing whatever we can to leash the beast and save the country.

The dynamics of 2020 will be very different.  While Trump will be on the ballot next time, paradoxically, the election will be less a referendum on him and more of a choice between two competing visions for America.  The economy will matter more, but it will almost certainly be in worse shape than it is today.  Finally, the GOP will be defending far more Senate seats than it is on Tuesday.

The task of defining the party’s positive vision for America starts with its presidential candidates, and begins on Wednesday.  I will be turning my attention to that issue in this blog, as well.