It was always clear that Trump was going to cast a long shadow over the French election. The question was whether he would help or hurt Le Pen. We know the answer now.
The French were never likely just to fall in line with American populism, but Trump’s bumbling provides another reason to support the establishment. Le Pen apparently has stopped talking about him. She has good reason.
After their crushing defeat in 2008, the GOP leadership met to discuss where they went from there. The question posed was “What is the proper role of a minority party?” The correct answer was “To help the American people at a time of crisis,” but that clearly never occurred to Mitch McConnell. Instead, the response was to obstruct the Obama Administration in every possible way in the hope of discrediting activist government and becoming the majority party.
The GOP consistently engaged in kamikaze tactics to prove that Obama and the Democrats couldn’t get anything done. While these tactics endangered the nation and richly deserved the scorn they received from the establishment, they ultimately succeeded; Republicans control the presidency and both houses of Congress today. The ultimate outcome, however, was not exactly what they expected.
Paralysis during the Obama Administration was supposed to lead to a GOP president determined to shrink the size of government. Instead, it created the demand for a man on horseback, who is currently being thwarted by the same people who threw bombs during the Obama years. How ’bout them apples!
The Christian Democrat pundits are wringing their hands about Trumpism in general and the vacuity of ACHA in particular. ACHA, in their eyes, validates all of the old, false liberal cliches about the Party of Lincoln wanting to redistribute wealth from the poor to the wealthy and from minorities to white people. As Mark Jackson, an ESPN basketball commentator might say, “C’mon GOP! You’re better than that!”
Or not. Bill Parcells is famous for saying “You are what your record says you are.” The record shows that the mainstream of the GOP consists of small government fanatics, climate change deniers, self-interested businessmen, and reactionaries whose principal mission in life is to return political, social, and economic power to the white Christian patriarchy. Can you point to any action taken by the GOP, not just in this administration, but in the past 8 years, that disproves this statement? Didn’t think so.
One of the chief advantages the US has possessed as a competitor with China is relatively small and friendly neighbors. Of course, Trump is doing his best to change that.
Trump is determined to change the terms of trade with Mexico in a way that will enrich the US and impoverish the Mexicans. If you want to encourage illegal immigration, that’s a great way to do it.
And so, the plan on one hand is to spend untold billions building a wall, and to provide additional incentives for illegal immigrants on the other. That’s making America great again?
So which will it be? As of today, the smart money would be on #1, but it’s early.
According to an NYT article a few months back, in order to keep the wall affordable, it will have to be constructed with Mexican materials and labor.
And so, to keep illegal immigrants out and make America great, we’re going to pay Mexico to build the wall.
Who’s the April fool here?
It has been widely reported that Trump, in response to policy concerns expressed by members of the Freedom Caucus, told them not to worry about “little sh__” and to focus on the big picture. It is safe to assume that the big picture is Trump’s image as the supreme maker of deals and his approval ratings.
That is the problem with Trump in a nutshell. He doesn’t care about the American people and whether they can afford health insurance. He doesn’t even care about his own party. The only thing that motivates him is the desire to be viewed as “the man.”
To the NYT: Stop calling me an erratic autocrat, or I’ll change the libel laws and really kick your butt!
Crooked New York Times keeps portraying me as a narcissistic, ignorant, bumbling autocrat. I’m not an autocrat. Sad!
One of the principal questions about the new administration is whether its foreign policy would be completely unconventional, or conventional in an erratic, blustery, and militaristic way. It’s early days, but thus far, the answer mostly is (b), except that Trump appears to want the worst of all possible worlds by alienating our allies and undermining confidence in our willingness to lead.
Perhaps we will learn more after the Xi visit. Hope he likes to play golf.
The Republicans had a field day with their cynical and opportunistic attacks on the ACA during the Obama Administration. Knowing perfectly well that their plan, to the extent they had one, was to cut costs by making insurance on the exchanges less valuable and less affordable, they exploited complaints from the public that the deductibles and co-pays were too high. Once in power, they wrote legislation that made no sense except as a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. It turned into a fiasco.
If you think that was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait until we have another financial crisis.
Obama won the 2008 election largely because the electorate correctly perceived that tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation, the GOP’s perennial favorite option, were not a viable solution to the crash. The GOP responded by creating a bizarro alternative narrative of the crash in which financial institutions were blameless, and the government was at fault by doing too much to encourage poor people to buy homes. Consistent with that (and their own interests), the Republicans want to get rid of Dodd-Frank and unleash the banks again, while all the while insisting that there must be no more bailouts.
If we have another crisis, the survival instincts of the self-styled “King of Debt” will probably send him in the correct direction, but his party is another matter. The GOP, on the whole, is the party of gold bugs, high interest rates, and no bailouts. Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon are their role models, not FDR and Obama. How could Trump get a new version of TARP through the system?
It will be a complete nightmare.
To the Dems: be bipartisan and get behind me, or else!
So the GOP turns now to tax.
And their leaders play loose with the facts.
Will their bill help the rich?
If it does, that’s a bitch.
I don’t think they can cover their tracks.
In the UK, coal miners are left-wing icons: a band of working class brothers martyred on the cross of uncaring capitalism during the 1980’s. In America in 2017, they are the vanguard of the Trump right-wing counterrevolution, to the point that Trump is willing to isolate the country diplomatically, endanger the health of its citizens, and forfeit the more numerous jobs of less visible people working in clean industry to protect their interests.
How can this be? How can we account for such a vast difference?
There are two explanations:
He lost an opportunity to show off his screwball. Oh, wait . . .