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On its face, you would think that the partnership between big business and a developer/salesman peddling a more extreme version of the Bush era tax cut and deregulation alchemy would be a marriage made in heaven.  And for some, it may be, but the overall picture is more complex, for the following reasons:

1.  As I’ve noted in the past, the victory of a chaos agent in November is likely to lead to a worldwide fall in the markets, and a recession;
2.  Any business that relies on exports, or uses overseas companies in its supply chain, will struggle to deal with Trump’s economic nationalism; and
3.  Trump will attempt to use all of the regulatory authority at his disposal to harass his enemies.  Don’t be surprised if he makes a point of regularly “inviting” unfriendly business leaders with  financial interests in foreign countries to the White House for Putinesque public reamings:  the bully pulpit being used by, well, a bully.

Keep your bags packed, Mr. Cook.

This could get really ugly, really fast.

Trump as a salesman believed with some reason that the only bad publicity was no publicity.  That approach carried him through the primaries because his strongest supporters viewed negative comments from the MSM as a badge of honor.  It isn’t working with a general election audience, and it definitely wouldn’t work with him as President.

Trump is notoriously thin-skinned and pugnacious.  He bashes the MSM on a daily basis, and bans prominent journalists from his campaign events.  There is no reason to believe that this situation would improve if he takes office.  You can anticipate that he would threaten libel actions on a regular basis, refuse to communicate with large segments of the MSM, call on his supporters through Twitter to harass reporters he particularly dislikes, and use his regulatory authority in every way possible to deal with journalists and media he views as his enemies.

Think Richard Nixon levels of animosity, only worse.

Violent crime is way down in this country, and the number of hunters decreases by the day, so it is fair to ask why the proponents of gun ownership have become increasingly passionate about the issue, and why gun regulation is such a political flashpoint.  I think I came up with the answer on my way to work today, when I was stuck behind a truck with decals of guns on its back window.

Gun ownership today, to a large extent, is about neither a rural lifestyle nor the practical need for protection; guns are just symbols for the owner’s angry rejection of societal changes which have caused the owner to feel disrespected. In other words, you (Mr. Sneering Cosmopolitan Democrat) may succeed in banishing the Christian God from the public sphere, and the white patriarchy may be on the ropes, but the gun lives, and, in fact, thrives!  So don’t tread on me, or you’ll face the consequences!

The religious right is supporting Trump even though his personal and business life has been the negation of their values because he has promised to appoint judges who oppose abortion and gay marriage to the Supreme Court.  Given his pro-choice past, it is conceivable that he would renege on this promise if he were offered a really good deal on something else that was more important, but that is unlikely to happen, so the promise should probably be taken at face value.

That much is obvious.  The more interesting question, to me, involves the extension of federal power, and how the Court would react to it.  If Trump truly plans to govern as a strong man, he is going to need a Supreme Court that will acquiesce to it.  Will the Republicans on the Court, who have spent the last eight years fighting for federalism against Obama, go along?

It depends.  While Alito and Thomas are reasonably accomplished jurists, on issues that have strong partisan implications, they almost always follow the party line. You could probably expect them to accept the Trump agenda.  Kennedy, on the other hand, is a principled conservative with federalist and libertarian leanings who does not necessarily follow the party line;  that would put him in opposition to the strong man.  The Chief Justice, while a clear partisan, worries about public perceptions of the Court, and has voted accordingly on occasion. Trump could not rely on him 100 percent of the time.

In short, the current Court with a Trump nominee sitting in Scalia’s seat would still present problems for the strong man.  Only the death or resignation of one or more of the left-leaning justices would enable him to govern in the manner he desires.

(This week, I’ll be focusing on the impacts that President Trump would have on American institutions)

Whether you think that Paul Ryan is the idealistic keeper of the flame of pure limited government conservatism, or just a charlatan who uses flim-flam and magic asterisks to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, you have to admit that he stands for something outside of his own ambitions.  In that, he differs dramatically from Trump, whose only real ideology is self-adoration;  the two will mix like oil and water.  President Trump would undoubtedly find much more satisfaction in dealing with the wily, cynical Mitch McConnell, whose principal purpose in life is to keep the GOP in power no matter what it means to the country.

Nevertheless, Ryan is there, and Trump will have to work with him.  My guess is that the two would reach a “grand bargain” of sorts very early in the Trump Administration, to consist of the following:

1.  Congressional support for Trump’s protectionist agenda;
2.  Congressional support for additional funds for the military, homeland security, immigration enforcement, and the wall; and
3.  Trump’s support for the House GOP tax cut plan over his own.

The real question is what would happen to entitlements.  Trump has publicly pledged not to cut programs for the elderly, who are the most important part of his base, while Ryan and the House GOP are determined to do so in order to fund their enormous tax cuts.  My best guess is that Trump would do a 180 on this issue in order to get the rest of his agenda through the system and avoid looking like a pitiful, helpless strong man.  I could be wrong on that, however.

Let’s hope we never find out.

The Rio Olympics are done.

For two weeks we’ve had lots of fun.

We’ll wait for four years

For more drama and tears.

The countdown’s already begun.

I’m as nationalistic about sports as the next guy.  I can’t stand it when we lose the Ryder Cup, which is most of the time.  I can’t abide the thought of losing in international basketball–ever.  It bugs me when our sprinters aren’t competitive against the Jamaicans:  all except Bolt, of course, because he belongs to the whole world.

Why?  It isn’t because winning proves that America is somehow superior to any other country.  It isn’t because I have any compelling desire to put anyone down. It’s simply because sports, like other forms of entertainment, result in the viewer identifying with some, but not all, of the participants, and I naturally identify with the people from my own country, not knowing the back stories of everyone in the field.

If the Olympics make me feel bonded with, say, African-American female sprinters with whom I have little in common except our citizenship, is that a bad thing?  I don’t think so.

The Rio Olympics, last day.

Women b-ball, they truly can play.

Relay teams pick up gold.

Winning never gets old.

Expectations were met, I would say.

There is speculation in the NYT and Vox that Trump’s ultimate objective is not to become President, but to be a right-wing media star, based on his recent campaign hires.  Does this make sense?

Actually, yes.  While Trump’s reputation as an international businessman will be in ashes at the end of the campaign, his bona fides as a pugnacious nationalist celebrity will be beyond question, and there is clearly is a substantial market for his opinions.  He could establish a new TV network with a fairly minimal investment, hire a few paranoid right-wing talk show hosts, and race Fox News to the bottom.  The rest of the programming could be occasional commentary from the great man himself (presumably thundering about the GOP making compromises with Clinton to keep the government running) and infomercials for Trump steaks, et. al.

In other words, he could set himself up for the foreseeable future as Father Coughlin for the 21st Century and make money doing it.  It would be a lot more fun than being President.  If you’re Rupert Murdoch, Paul Ryan, or Mitch McConnell, and you’re trying to make the GOP look sane and respectable in the eyes of the general public after the debacle of 2016, it’s just about your worst nightmare.

The Rio Olympics on Friday.

US men finally come out to play.

Relay team was DQ’d.

Always figured they’d lose.

Could they really beat Bolt?  There’s no way.

As is evidenced by his behavior as a businessman, as well as his statements on the campaign trail, Donald Trump thinks rules are for chumps.  In his eyes, life is an unending series of confrontations in which the powerful prevail, and the weak (or deluded) suffer what they must.

Xi and Putin clearly agree with these views.  The Chinese government rejects the application of international law in the South China Sea and attempts to resolve issues in its favor through direct, separate negotiations with each individual adversary, backed up by the threat of superior force.  Putin, for his part, has torn up the international rulebook in his dealings with Ukraine.

Obama, and all of our Presidents of both parties since World War II, have accepted, and attempted to improve, the existing rule-based system.  The TPP is a perfect example of that.  The issue with a rule-based system, of course, is who is going to enforce the rules, and how.  That is still a work in progress.

Her hiccup on the TPP notwithstanding, Clinton clearly believes in a world of international agreements and institutions.  Whose view will prevail?  That will be up to the voters in November.

The Rio Olympics, last night.

Big guys throwing the shot out of sight.

Usain Bolt is the man.

Run him down?  No one can.

Relay team second time gets it right.

Some of the more idealistic right-wing print commentators have looked deep into the soul of the Trump GOP and don’t like what they see.  In their eyes, the system worked better when the angry white workers were Democrats, and their party supported limited, not swaggering, government.

This argument was, of course, at the core of the Sanders “revolution.”  If Sanders had taken the idea to its logical conclusion, he would have campaigned hard in the Deep South, attended NASCAR races, courted the support of country music stars, and held firm to his position on guns.  He didn’t do any of those things, because it became clear to him early on that their net effect would be to lose, not gain, Democratic primary voters.

Assuming, for purposes of argument, that this is a desirable outcome, how can the Democratic Party become more of a class-based party consistent with Bernie’s original vision?  Or, to put it another way, how can the Democrats win over white working class voters without losing an equivalent number of minorities?

I think there are only two avenues:

1.  The GOP reacts to a cataclysmic Trump defeat by firmly disavowing bigotry and by telling bigoted voters to go elsewhere.  Good luck with that. Those voters are the core of the GOP; while they may present a problem in Presidential elections, they win a lot of local, state, and Congressional elections.

2.  A Democrat with very special qualities succeeds in threading the needle.  He would have to be male, charismatic, and a Southerner, with a clear understanding of, and sympathy for, rural people and rural culture.  He would also need strong roots in the civil rights movement.

In short, he would have to be Bill Clinton (minus the foibles) for the 21st Century.

The Rio Olympics, Wednesday.

Our hurdlers rock!  What can I say?

Our jumpers were great;

Gatlin got there too late;

Eaton’s quest for the gold is halfway.

 

As I noted in a post months ago, a fascist is someone who seeks to impose a reactionary program by extraconstitutional means.  As such, the vast majority of reactionaries are not fascists, but all fascists are reactionaries.

There is little in Trump’s pre-election past which suggests that he started the campaign as a fascist;  after all, he wrote (sort of) “The Art of the Deal,” not “Mein Kampf.”  As his campaign has evolved, however, it has become more and more thuggish and dangerous.  The final straw, for me, was his threat to treat the outcome of the election as illegitimate, and to call his supporters out on the streets if he loses.  That was the point where his coarseness turned into something far more sinister.

Why is this happening?  I hate to harp on this subject, but I think it is inherent in his candidacy.  If you don’t have any ideology except self-worship, and you don’t have any job qualifications, how else can you run except as a putative strong man?  And if you run as a strong man, at what point do you acknowledge the limits our political system puts on you and start showing restraint?

To illustrate the point, imagine a President Trump dealing with a deadlocked Congress and increasingly bold critics.  The man on horseback has been exposed as just another politician who can’t get anything done.  How does he respond? He has three choices:

1. Pull a Palin, and quit;
2. Learn to live with the humiliation of being a failed strong man (i.e., a loser); or
3. Double down on the strong man routine, ignore the Constitution, and shut up his critics.

If I were a betting man, I would put my money on #3.  That’s the problem; even if he never intended to threaten our liberties, his ego will drive him in that direction.