Cromwell

The ex-Breitbart man named Steve Bannon.

He’s working for Trump and for mammon.

On the doorstep of power,

He’s the man of the hour,

Like a circus freak shot from a cannon.

During the last few weeks of his campaign, Trump predicted an outcome similar to the Brexit vote.  In a nutshell, he was right.  His voters and the Brexit voters were essentially the same kind of people with the same kinds of fears.

If you spin out the analogy to the present day, it shouldn’t comfort him very much.  The British government is badly divided on how to proceed with Brexit. The pound has fallen dramatically.  Investment has slowed to a crawl. Nationalist parties have a new cause.  Stagflation and constitutional issues loom.

A lot of this is going to look familiar in the US over the next year or so.

As I indicated in Friday’s post, Trump’s foreign policy really will be operated on the basis of some well-defined (albeit stupid) concepts.  In practice, however, his ignorance of conditions throughout the world may make it difficult for him to apply them consistently.

The following will be the hallmarks of his diplomacy:

1.  It’s both business and personal:  Trump will view himself as the nation’s negotiator-in-chief, so look for him to spend lots of face time with foreign leaders, including bad hombres like Kim Jong Un.

2.  It’s blustery out there:  Trump thinks that previous administrations didn’t play their hand strongly enough in the past.  Expect lots of shouting, table pounding, nasty tweets, walkouts, and threats of war (both trade and military).

3.  One administration, many voices:  Given his lack of familiarity with the people and the conditions on the ground, expect him to change his mind openly and repeatedly, depending on the last person who spoke to him.  In addition, there will be plenty of officials at the State Department offering “clarifications” after he oversteps his bounds.  The result will be chaos, which may be part of his plan;  after all, he likes to remain as unpredictable as possible in order to strengthen his negotiating hand.

4.  Passive-aggression:  He craves popularity, so he will probably make a practice of telling other leaders what they want to hear to their face, and then contradict himself when he gets home.  That’s what he did in Mexico.

In other words, think of him as Duterte with nukes.  It will be a roller coaster, to be sure:  new crises and opportunities every day.

It’s all about Trump, now, of course, so for the next several weeks, I will be posting about various aspects of the new administration:

Trump Versus the World will address our relationships with various countries throughout the world.

Trump, Ryan, and the Welfare State will discuss the GOP’s plans for the safety net, with a few suggestions for improvement thrown in.

The Trump Domestic Agenda will talk about tax and trade policy and a variety of other items on the domestic agenda.

The Strong Man and the System, finally, will identify various checks and balances in our political system and speculate as to how successful they will be.

Enjoy!

You might think it is Paul Ryan, but you would be wrong.  Ryan doesn’t suffer from overweening personal ambition; he only cares about his odious ideological agenda.  Most of it is going to become law whether he remains Speaker or not.

No, in spite of holding his Senate seat, the real loser was Marco Rubio, who, of all of the 2016 also-rans, was best positioned to be the GOP candidate in 2020. Unlike Ryan, he desperately wants to be President.  Now he’s third in line, and his next best chance will come at the end of what is likely to be a deeply unpopular Republican administration.

Am I shedding any tears for him?  Alas, no.  On the other hand, this time he will actually have to keep his promise and spend all six boring years in the Senate, so my state will actually have two functioning Senators.

To put this in proper perspective, the Clinton campaign did plenty of things right. She performed very well in the debates.   She raised lots of money, had a good ground game, and ran professional commercials.  In the end, she won the popular vote.

That said, here is what cost her the election:

1.  She never came up with a satisfactory response to the e-mail issue.  Duh. The false equivalence between Trump’s outrageous behavior and the e-mail issue was decisive with lots of swing voters.

2.  She never made much of an effort to connect with rural voters.  From the very beginning of this blog, I have tried to make the case that the Democrats need to show more sensitivity to rural voters and culture.  It wouldn’t hurt to spend some time with country musicians, or go to a NASCAR race, or accept that guns will only be regulated on a state and local level.  Campaigning with Beyonce and Jay-Z doesn’t help with swing voters.

3.  She spent too much time talking about Trump’s character, and not enough about his policies.   We were treated to an avalanche of commercials about what a disgusting human being Trump is, but essentially nothing about his tax plan, spending cuts, and climate change views.  At some point, the avalanche became pointless;  in fact, by highlighting Trump’s, shall we say, unconventional behavior, she probably made the case for him as a plausible change agent.

Normally, when a Republican takes office, he can call upon a pool of qualified people from the last GOP administration to fill the newly vacated positions.  In Trump’s case, however, he has been bitterly critical of Bush 43’s foreign policy, and his ideas about foreign relations are completely out of the mainstream of either party.  In addition to that, his short attention span, his history of random, erratic interventions, and his hunger for popularity suggest that he is incapable of either supporting his subordinates or selecting a course of action and sticking to it when things get tough. As a result, I think the Trump State Department is going to be led by people with odd ideas and no reputation in the international community.

It’s going to be a wild ride–no doubt about it.

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.”