No one should say, when it happens, that nobody thought it would. Everybody thought it would, just as they thought, eight years ago, that a vulgar, loud-mouthed, pathological liar like Trump could never be elected. But don’t be fooled by a misfire on only one part of the equation. Yes, Trump got elected, once, and then again, for a second term, by a population that seemed oblivious to the real forces that shape and distort our economic and social lives.
This is a segment of the population that believes in barstool wisdom: some loudmouth sitting next to you at a bar and mouthing off about how high his taxes are, how crime is getting out of control, how America has outsourced all of the best jobs, how preposterous it is for people to choose their gender, could be the next cabinet secretary in a Trump administration.
When you hear interviews with the MAGA crowd, the first thing that is evident is that they have no idea what economic health or the cause of inflation is. They believe that crime is on the increase when it objectively is not. They have no idea that 75% of the manufacturing jobs that were lost over the last 20 years were lost to automation, not out-sourcing. They zero in on inflation and magically believe that Joe Biden’s policies caused it, even though it happened in every developed country. They hated the constrictions imposed on them by the Covid epidemic but nobody had a magical formula for preventing its spread, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, while allowing everyone to conduct business as usual. Nobody was going to be happy with any solution– and they weren’t. They blamed Biden for the deplorable mess at the exit from Afghanistan, but only the generals who believed the U.S. should stay there for at least another 20 years had any alternative. Diatribes about the messy exist almost never acknowledge the fact that the U.S. and it’s allies were losing, badly, by that time, and that the whole project was a colossal failure, and that it was the Republican Party that got America into that mess in the first place. The honest Republican knows in his heart that it was their party’s great fortune that a plan devised by Trump had to be executed under a Democratic Administration. Trump, who was just as determined to leave, would have fared no better.
Lost in all the flotsam around the Biden Administration, is the fact that he pulled off a singularly remarkable achievement: he kept the economy chugging along while reducing inflation. Most economists will tell you that reducing inflation will causes joblessness to rise significantly. Biden’s infrastructure investment and other policies prevented that. That is a signal accomplishment for which Biden gets no credit.
I doubt that anyone would have fared better than Harris had Biden had the sense to not run for re-election. It will be to his everlasting discredit that he allowed his ego to blind him to his own frailties, but had someone been nominated earlier, and contested the primaries, would it have made a difference? A large portion of the voting public were ornery, dissatisfied with their lives, and infatuated with simplistic solutions. Trump would make prices go down, houses go up, and people who don’t like me go away. Trump will bring peace to Gaza and the Ukraine. Trump will teach China a lesson.
And so we arrive at the Trump Administration. I think it is natural for most informed observes to instinctively believe, on some level, that he can’t be serious. He’s not going to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, deport 15 million illegal immigrants, or invade Greenland. He can’t let China bully Taiwan. He can’t really end Obamacare. He certainly won’t balance the budget.
He can’t be serious, because what he says he is going to do is stupid.
What will probably happen?
Either he will go ahead and impose the tariffs or he will grant so many exceptions that some people will realize– as if they didn’t already know– that he is a liar, like every other politician. If he imposes the tariffs, he will re-ignite inflation, and that will be embarrassing, but he can try to blame it on some kind of hidden Biden policies that he couldn’t vanquish overnight. But it will raise suspicions. But then, other nations will retaliate with tariffs on U. S. exports, causing jobs to be lost and corporations to lose money.
He can try to round up millions of illegal immigrants, but that will require something that looks like concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands of state employees, guards, administration, lawyers. It will be very costly, and it will have a large impact on some industries that depend on immigrants, like construction, meat packing, and agriculture. Again, there will be a significant inflationary impact.
He will try to extend his tax cuts, due to expire next year, and add a few more. This will lead to an interesting battle with the hard core tea-party Republicans who sincerely want to balance the budget. Dream on. In the meantime, Speaker Johnson will have a monumental challenge to get any budgetary measures passed given that he has a razor-thin majority and lots of members of his own party who won’t hesitate to sabotage their own agenda. To keep the tax cuts, Trump badly needs an extension– or suspension– of the debt ceiling. The Tea Party Republicans will probably try to hold the process hostage to their own radical agenda– massive cuts to the budget. That should be fun.
Trump has nominated a bunch of clowns for the top cabinet posts in his administration. Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., are almost literally, yes, clowns. You can be assured that most of government is actually carried out by deferential functionaries below the level of cabinet secretary, but these three, and the others, have big egos and extraordinary confidence in their own genius and may try to push through things that any sensible person would hesitate to push through. Will Kennedy try to stop vaccine mandates, or undermine them? Will he take on the processed food industry? Will Hegseth stay sober on the job? Will Gabbard try to restore Assad to power in Syria?
And will Trump cut off aide to Ukraine? Ukraine does receive a lot of aide from other nations, including Germany, France, and Britain, but if it collapses, will the American public be as eager to wash their hands of it as Trump is? And what if Putin, seeing the opportunity, starts to mass troops at the border of Moldova or Georgia?
Americans– aside from some Republican true believers– don’t care much about the deficit. It will balloon under Trump because he will cut taxes even more than he did in his first term but won’t dare touch Social Security or Medicare, the two largest (by far) spending items in the budget. But Republican strategy– the core of their very being as a political party– is to complain bitterly about the deficit only when they are not in office.
The last balanced budget in the U.S. was the last year of the Clinton Administration.
In Republican Fantasy, after a few months or a year of Trump, inflation will be down to below 2%, housing starts will rise, house prices will drop, mortgage rates will drop, Hamas will turn over the remaining hostages, Ukraine will surrender the seized territories to the Russians, NATO countries will increase their spending on defense, and thousands of factories will open to begin manufacturing televisions, washers, and driers in America. With high-paying union jobs. Wait– Trump is not going to be good for unions.
The sales of electric cars will decline while America will amazingly find even more oil to burn. Don’t forget: crime will go down.
And if it happens, it will be due to the miraculous intervention of Donald Trump, or God, or both. And if none of it happens, it will still be Joe Biden’s fault, whose administration policies were so bad that even Trump cannot undo them during his time of administration even though he told you that he could.
What he won’t be able to blame on Biden are the numerous scandals and blow-ups that seem likely to pervade this Administration. Trump’s people are unusually shameless about wanting to get very rich while having a rather cavalier attitude towards ethics and propriety. Trump’s family and cohorts are already lining up “investments” and real estate deals with the oil-producing Arab states. In Trump’s view, MAGA people don’t mind. That’s why they elected him. But there is a tiny smidgeon of shame left in the Republican Party and Trump is a lame-duck: he cannot run again.
I repeat: he is a lame-duck, who cannot run for president again. If it is to the material advantage of one of his “friends” to turn on him, he will. If it is to the political advantage of a Congressman or Senator to diverge from the Trump agenda, he or she will.
One last depressing probability: Supreme Court Justice Alito retires and, without McConnell to influence him, Trump gets to replace him with, I don’t know, Donald Jr. The most moronic president in recent history will have appointed four justices to the highest court in the land.
