It is not fashionable on the Left or in the mainstream media
to speak as if President Trump were anything more than mentally and
behaviorally challenged. While there are
arguments for both claims, matters have long since gone beyond the niceties of
rational assessment.
Among the dysfunctional dynamics this has created, each day
is filled with Trump personally and crassly laying claim to every positive
outcome in the country that occurs during his Administration. More than likely, he will trumpet that his
outcomes — real or confabulated — put the “failures” of Barack Obama to shame.
He lives to punish his predecessor, President Obama, as
revenge for a public drubbing delivered during the 2011 White House
Correspondents' Dinner. Donald has a
rule. If you ridicule him he will do
everything in his power to make you pay with your reputation and all you value
in life. If he can do you still worse he
will.
Just as certainly, his opponents publicly assign any
undeniable success to the groundwork President Obama laid for those who came
after him. President Obama brought an
honor, dignity and overall competence to the office that Donald Trump cannot
begin to match.
Donald Trump has learned to enhance his chances of success
in life through the constant manipulation of the niceties of social mores, and of
laws that cannot survive litigation, in order to undercut his competition. The lesson is so thoroughly ingrained that he
will never change. He did not succeed
through business acumen but by using the wealth he has always had reduce every
competition to its Least Common Denominator.
It is his skill and we would do ourselves a collective favor to
recognize that he is by no means alone.
He is merely one of the very best at it.
Where we don’t do ourselves any favors is by blindly lashing back. By buying into the dynamic that favors him, with knee-jerk responses, we are failing to understand what is happening under his presidency.
Where we don’t do ourselves any favors is by blindly lashing back. By buying into the dynamic that favors him, with knee-jerk responses, we are failing to understand what is happening under his presidency.
For one example, we reply that the financial markets are going up and unemployment down at historical rates because President Obama laid a powerful groundwork for future success. But this is far more The Trump Economy. It is The Trump Economy because President Trump does actually have an economic philosophy that he is implementing with success.
Among the first actions of the Trump presidency, he ended
U.S. commitments to mitigate climate change.
This reduced the future commitments of this country’s major corporations
by tens of billions of dollars. This was
followed by ending regulations with a stroke of the presidential pen that
collectively reduced the production cost of large corporations and corporate
farms by billions of dollars, as well. The
departments of the government announced that they were ceasing enforcement
actions against environmental and labor infractions that could not be written out
of law by presidential order, again reducing expenses to the same corporations.
While all of this was going on, Trump was proving even more
incompetent at the legislative process than his handlers expected. As the result, Obama’s signature health care
program survived to limp along providing insurance to those on the low end of
the income scale. The huge tax cut that
he promised did not materialize.
Through flattery and misdirection, his handlers (including
the Republican Congressional leadership) learned how to work the president like
an erratic marionette long enough to pass the tax cuts in 2017. For all he demanded to be the fêted hero of
the show, the bill had been entirely designed by that Republican leadership. Their paymasters repatriated over a trillion
dollars previously held overseas to avoid paying the taxes that could have
reduced deficits, rebuilt crumbling infrastructure, paid for sufficient Legal Services
lawyers, improved schools and accomplished all the other things government is
called upon to do.
All of these acts betray a conscious philosophy:
sacrifice the future of politically weak minorities and the lower economic classes
for every present gain that can be managed, by far the lion’s share of those
gains going to the wealthy. By removing
regulations or enforcement, install an environmental, safety and labor regime
much more satisfied to let the chips fall where they may, negative outcomes just
being the way life works out sometimes for those who cannot afford to lawyer up.
So then, this is indeed The Trump Economy. He knows full well that legislating money
into the coffers of the wealthy and large corporations (and small) to the tune
of many trillions of dollars, at the cost of exploding national deficits as far
as the eye can see, and abandoning politically vulnerable populations, creates
a far better present economy than responsible presidents could possibly manage. He is depending on it to get him re-elected
and there’s more than a small chance that he will succeed.
Also from the Virtual Vanaprastha:
- Did the Democrats Win 2018 at the Cost of Losing 2020? January 3, 2019. “But aware now of importance of the restraint they showed, surely the various other groups expect, as the result, to see their agendas more fully realized in the Democratic party.”
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