5. How about that big tax cut!
4. The good part is in legislation that hasn’t been written yet. It’ll be great. Believe me. Believe me.
3. Obamacare is imploding, so any change would be an improvement, right?
2. We need a win, any win, to prove our party is capable of governing.
And the number one is. . .
1. If we don’t win one for the Trumpster, he’ll bury us with tweets.
If you could find anything in there about improving the health care system for the American people, call me.
On the new special counsel named Bob.
It would seem he’s the man for the job.
Will the Trumpster go down?
A sad end for a clown?
He sure acts like the head of the mob.
Donald Trump assured us repeatedly during the campaign that he would use his unparalleled negotiating skills to liberate us from the innumerable bad deals struck by previous administrations with the rest of the world. Given that he was completely unfamiliar with the foreign leaders in question and the issues, and had actually collaborated on a book laying out his favorite negotiating tactics for the whole world to see, this was clearly implausible from the beginning, but, like the unscrupulous salesman he is, he managed to get the public to buy into it.
Naturally, things aren’t working out as planned. He has already essentially agreed to make America the tip of the Saudi spear against Iran in response to some clever flattery and a promise to buy American weapons. In addition, he has naively placed his hopes of imposing a nuclear agreement on North Korea on Xi, who is almost certainly going to string him along with promises and token gestures in exchange for real substantive concessions from the US. Even some members of his hapless administration are said in today’s NYT to be concerned about this.
And so, the driving force behind Trump University is taking a graduate course himself at Xi University. What’s next? A tutorial on fake news at the Putin School of Journalism.
Czechoslovakia split in two with minimal rancor and no violence. The breakup of Yugoslavia resulted in a ghastly war. Brexit will fall somewhere between those two poles; the point is that the secession process can be whatever the parties decide it should be.
My best guess is that the process will be nasty, brutish, and long (in a diplomatic way), for the following reasons:
1. The British government is wobbly, and doesn’t really know what it wants: Should the 2017 election be viewed as a mandate for a soft Brexit? I can’t tell; neither can the government.
2. The EU’s position is a lowest common denominator, and it’s unreasonable: Getting everyone on board with a negotiating strategy means giving every member what it wants, which is likely to cause major conflicts during the negotiations.
3. The matter is very complicated, from a legal perspective: It may well be that splitting a sovereign nation into two parts is legally simpler than seceding from the EU.
The process is likely to take more than two years. As it becomes more and more obvious that the interim “solution” will be the default WTO trade relationship, the trickle of multi-national businesses moving to the continent will become a flood. The pound will plunge, growth will stall, and things will start getting really ugly in the UK.
A good man with a gun can stop a bad man with a gun. GOP congressmen should carry even during baseball practice.
Bernie Sanders isn’t really a socialist (he wants to break up the banks, not nationalize them), but he clearly does see the world through Marxist, class-based lenses. In his view, Wall Street financiers are responsible for all of the country’s ills; issues involving racism, sexism, religion, and other matters of identity are either the result of false consciousness or are red herrings created by the cunning financiers to divide and conquer. His plan for the Democratic Party is to reject support from the wealthy and to turn the party into a vehicle for working class people by vastly expanding the welfare state. As a result, hordes of previously disaffected nonvoters will begin participating in the political process, white and minority voters will hold hands and march as one, and the Democrats will start to win elections again.
As if. This approach did not win him the Democratic nomination, as the army of the disaffected predictably never showed up, and it certainly had nothing to offer Republicans and independents. The hard facts are that identity politics drive the American electoral system, and are not the product of a Wall Street plot; that Americans are generally suspicious of the welfare state, and only support expanding it when the benefits appear to be “earned” through work; and that issues of culture, barring a conspicuous change of heart from the party, are likely to prevent the Democrats from winning many rural votes in the foreseeable future.
We definitely need a more effective welfare state attuned to the demands of the 21st century, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be larger. The Democrats also need to reach out to rural voters by showing that they accept their culture. What we don’t need is candidates who propose a bunch of poorly-considered new government programs just for the pleasure of making rich people pay for them.
And oh, by the way, someone should tell Bernie that Corbyn might have outperformed his dismally low expectations, but he lost the election by a large margin.
Donald Trump was elected president without the support of the GOP establishment and with few ideological commitments, which gave him unprecedented freedom in choosing how to govern. He had the following options:
As we know, he chose #3, and the American public has been suffering for it ever since. The point, however, is that the decision was not inevitable, or dictated by events. He chose it, and we have to live with it.
Readers of this blog will know that in the ongoing battle between values and interests, I tend to support the interests side, but I view Trump’s foreign policy ideas as a caricature of “realism.” Here are a few more observations on the subject:
1. Attempts to impose American values by force almost always fail. Defenders of the Iraq War always cited to Germany and Japan as success stories, but those countries had at least some democratic traditions, and, more importantly, they were totally shattered and dependent on American goodwill after World War II. Iraq and Afghanistan were left mostly in place after the Bush campaigns. In the final analysis, the level of political and physical destruction caused by the war may well be the difference between success and failure when it comes to nation-building.
2. If you want to rely solely on American success at home to promote our values, don’t disparage our values and run the country into the ground. Trump doesn’t seem to understand what damage he is doing to our prestige abroad by essentially dismissing American exceptionalism and democratic values as a fraud.
3. Values and interests don’t usually conflict. Sometimes they clearly do, as in Bahrain, for example, but mostly they don’t. Our most important alliances are based on both.
4. Sometimes interests have to take precedence, but when they do, we should make it clear that we are engaged in a business relationship. Just because we have to engage with Duterte doesn’t mean we have to tell the world he’s doing a great job with his drug issue.
5. American values are a part of the foreign policy environment that cannot be dismissed. A true realist will keep American values in mind when he makes decisions; they are a factor that simply cannot be ignored. Trump will find this out if he tries to send money and troops to prop up despots in the Middle East.
False equivalence has always been the rhetorical weapon of choice for the American far left. If Stalin had gulags, well, what about our Jim Crow laws? If the Soviets intervened to crush rebellions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, what about Iran, or Chile, or a host of others? If the Russians had the KGB, what about J. Edgar Hoover? And so on.
Oliver Stone is the proud heir to this intellectual tradition. It is clearly his objective to destroy our illusions about American ideals and the rule of law and expose our society for what he thinks it is: a neo-fascist state based, not on democracy and law, but on money and power.
The interesting thing here is that his view of America and Donald Trump’s have much in common: hence, his Putin interviews. The difference between the two is that Trump has no objection to a Social Darwinian America (he just views it as the natural order of things), while Stone dreams of creating a purer America in which the rich and powerful finally receive their just desserts. Good luck with that.
Red states, on the whole, tend to be poorer than average, and receive more federal government funds per capita than blue states. The Trump budget will have a disproportionately negative impact on them. How can that be? Why would Trump cut benefits for his own supporters?
There are three explanations for this phenomenon. First of all, plenty of the red state benefits go to poor minorities who are loathed by the GOP; to that extent, there is no contradiction. Second, as I have noted previously, the welfare state in the US typically only enjoys strong support even among its beneficiaries when the wealth redistributions appear to be “earned.” Third, the sense of tribalism, based on issues of culture, is frequently stronger than economic self-interest. And so, it would not surprise me to see large numbers of poor white working people in red states decrying cuts to government programs that help them, but insisting they will continue to vote for the GOP.
Donald Trump made it quite clear during the campaign that he despises “nation-building.” That’s hardly a surprise; nation-building is long, expensive, thankless, and frequently unsuccessful work. It’s hardly something that would appeal to a man with the patience of a gnat.
Unfortunately, you can’t just blow the Taliban to hell and be done with it as long as they have a refuge in Pakistan. That leaves you with two choices: give the Afghan government the resources to fight and then tell it to sink or swim; or escalate the war and try to strengthen Afghan political institutions for an indefinite, and probably infinite, period.
Obama preferred the first option. It appears that Trump, prompted by the generals, will probably choose the second. Another name for Option #2 is “nation-building.”
Life in the time of Trump
Corruption really stinks.
A million lies
The truth has died
We don’t know what to think.
If you dare to contradict him
He’ll just call your words fake news.
Will we become our enemies?
The nation has to choose.
A few days ago, Trump spokeswoman Sarah Sanders felt compelled to tell the press and the world that “The President is not a liar.” Sanders, like everyone else, obviously knows better, so that statement itself was a lie.
Trump’s entire career can be viewed as a rebuke to Kantian ethics. The questions for today are:
My responses are as follows:
The Comey affair has, predictably, shown off many of Trump’s worst characteristics: most notably, his complete indifference to democratic norms. The question now is, what does it all mean? Will his base desert him? Will he be impeached?
The inconvenient truth is that this episode has only confirmed what everyone on both sides of the aisle already knew about Trump. To his detractors, it proves that he is utterly unfit to be president; to his base, it just shows how powerful and malignant his enemies within the “deep state” are.
He’s not going to be impeached or indicted–at least not over this. Where it matters is in the legislative process; if you’re, say, Susan Collins, and you’re told that you have to vote for AHCA because the GOP needs to win one for the Trumpster regardless of its impact to your constituents, you’re probably that much less likely to go along.
You just have to believe that Theresa May loathes everything about Donald Trump. She needed American support in a post-Brexit referendum world, however, and she has undoubtedly read all those articles about how Margaret Thatcher managed her relations with the, shall we say, less intellectually astute Ronald Reagan, so she chose to suck it up for her country and provide overt support for the Trumpster. In some respects, it seemed to be working.
Unfortunately for her, it didn’t go over well with the British public. I suspect those pictures of her holding Trump’s hand inspired lots of young people to go out and vote Labour. Who could blame them? I probably would have done it, too.