The Trump Economy

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.

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.

And Donald Trump knows very well the earliest date on which the future can be permitted to begin.  He is reputed to have said it more than once.  The final day of his second term, when results of all of it will be someone else’s problem.

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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