Friday, May 03, 2024
Trump: A Five Alarm Fire on Inflation
Donald Trump, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, wants to kneecap the Federal Reserve. This should be a five-alarm fire for anyone who claims to care about inflation.
The former president and his advisers keep finding new ways to outdo themselves on bad economic ideas. Should Trump be granted a second term, he plans to slash the labor supply by ratcheting down immigration (including legal, work-authorized immigration). He wants to devalue the dollar. He’d levy worldwide tariffs of 10 percent or higher, plus perhaps a 100 percent tariff on some Chinese goods, apparently failing to notice that the costs of his previous tariffs fell almost entirely on American consumers.
Now, according to a Wall Street Journal scoop, Trump also wants to strip the Fed of its political independence. Proposed changes include enabling the president to fire the Fed chair at will, or even play a role in setting interest rates himself.
So why is it important for the Fed to be, and remain, independent?
Politicians always have an incentive to manipulate the money supply in ways they think will improve short-term economic outcomes, to help them win reelection. That might mean, for example, slashing interest rates to make it cheaper to borrow, helping people feel richer and more likely to spend money. In other words, politicians might be tempted to give the economy a sugar rush, whether it actually needs a boost or not.
But what seems politically smart in the short run is not always good in the long run. Juicing the economy when it’s already going strong can stoke inflation. On the flip side, if an economy is overheating, the central bank might need to make choices that are deeply unpopular in the short term (a.k.a. “taking the punch bowl away”). Raising interest rates, for example, may be necessary to cool price growth and prevent a more painful crash.
None of this is to say that central bankers always make the right decisions, nor that they should operate free of any oversight. Fed governors, for example, are president-nominated and Senate-confirmed, and by law, the Fed chair must testify regularly before Congress.
But there’s a difference between making Fed officials answer hard questions and directly enlisting them in politicians’ short-term electoral calculations. Central bankers must be able to make unpopular decisions without fear of losing their jobs. That’s the only way they have any hope of achieving their dual mandate, which is stable prices and maximum employment.
[C]entral banks with greater independence have better inflation outcomes. There are also lots of counterexamples, illustrating what happens when the money supply is left to politicians whose punch bowls overfloweth. Inflation-plagued Argentina and pre-euro Italy are notorious poster children of this problem. For other examples, look to Turkey (current annual inflation rate: 68.5 percent) or Venezuela (last year, nearly 200 percent).
Businesses that fear the central bank won’t act might start preemptively raising prices just in case their suppliers do, too. So if a central bank lacks the credibility to keep expectations about inflation “anchored,” a short-term price shock can easily turn into something more entrenched.
Trump’s disrespect for Fed independence is not new. When he was president, he tried to appoint obsequious political operatives to the central bank’s board. At the time, fortunately, Republican senators effectively stopped him. Trump also tried to bully the Fed into cutting interest rates — presumably to help not only his polling, but also his own finances. (Lower rates are attractive if you happen to hold a lot of debt.)
Why, then, didn’t the U.S. economy experience much inflation when Trump was in office?
Well, by that point, the Fed had already spent decades building up its reputation for independence, and even (competent) the Fed members whom Trump did appoint were able to publicly resist his jawboning. It also helps that when Trump was in power, the United States wasn’t hit with a huge inflationary shock — such as, say, the reopening of an economy after a once-in-a-century pandemic.
The economic context is different now. For a variety of reasons — some likely inevitable, some due to poor policy choices — the country recently experienced the highest levels of inflation in a generation. It’s been painful.
The Fed’s credible, long-term commitment to stable prices — and not merely its recent rate hikes — is a key reason inflation has since cooled as much as it has, and hasn’t (so far) reignited.
But if the next president compromises that pristine reputation, we may not be so lucky.
None of this will likely sway MAGA cultists who worship their orange god , largely because he plays to their racism and religious extremism.
Thursday, May 02, 2024
Trump's Hush Money Lawyer Torches His Reputation
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Going into Donald Trump's Manhattan criminal trial for fraud and election regarding "hush money" payments to an adult film actress, the world of legal experts worried that, this time, Trump might mount a strong defense. Unlike many of the lawyers he used in his civil trials, who are widely regarded as MAGA hacks, Trump hired Todd Blanche to beat the 34 felony charges brought by New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Blanche . . . . Blanche has long drawn accolades from "the lawyers who know him best" in New York. They say things like, "He’s an extraordinary trial lawyer" and "very good at reading people."
Before the trial started in April, Blanche had, in fact, deftly maneuvered in many ways to delay various Trump trials, a strategy likely employed out of a deep understanding that Trump is unlikely to do well once a jury sees evidence of his alleged crimes. But now that he's actually trying a case in the court of Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan, much of Blanche's defense strategy seems puzzling at best and downright foolish in many cases. Sometimes it's hard not to wonder if he's trying to alienate the judge and jury that hold his client's fate in their hands.
During opening statements, for instance, Blanche kept openly flouting the judicial restrictions. Prosecutors successfully objected more than half a dozen times, which is highly unusual during opening statements — and could turn a jury against the defendant. Meanwhile, Blanche struggles to control Trump, who doesn't just sleep through much of the trial but keeps pulling out his phone, against courtroom rules.
Under Blanche's leadership, another defense lawyer, Emil Bove, pretended he had a damning document to present a witness, but it was just a bunch of words that had no bearing on the case. This is a classic Trump trick, as he often uses blank pieces of paper to pretend to have "evidence" he does not have. But in court, it backfired on Blanche's team and the judge called them out in front of the jury.
But it was really the battle over Trump's refusal to obey the judge's gag order that exposed how much Blanche seems unmoored from his past as a respected, professional litigator. Trump flagrantly violated the judge's order to avoid speaking publicly about the jurors or witnesses, to the point where one potential juror had to be sent home because of Trump's threatening messages. Rather than do the smart thing and tell his client to knock it off, Blanche beclowned himself in court, trying to argue that because Trump was quoting a Fox News video instead of using his own words, it didn't count. To compound the bad faith of the argument, it turned out that Trump made up part of the quote.
"You're losing all credibility with the court," Merchan exasperatedly explained. He soon ruled Trump was in contempt of court, fining him the paltry maximum of $9,000 under New York law. But, Merchan said, "an incarceratory punishment" was on the table if Trump kept it up.
When asked why he's taken on such an odious client, Blanche uses high-minded rhetoric about equality under the law, pointing out that even universally despised rapists like Jeffrey Epstein can find lawyers willing to defend them. He told Rice that it's "incredible hypocrisy" to hear lawyers who are willing to defend mafiosos and other shameless criminals turn their noses up to Trump.
But, as Rice details, this is not a matter of Blanche holding his nose and taking on an undesirable client. Blanche has been completely assimilated into the MAGA borg. He changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. He bought a house near Mar-a-Lago. He attends Trump campaign events. He works out of Trump's offices. It's the same process we've all seen time and again with people who work for Trump: Either you get completely on board with Trump and all his delusions, or you're pushed out. This fear keeps people from noticing what is obvious to outsiders: Sticking by Trump means a very strong chance you ruin your life and torch your reputation.
Blanche's bad choices in trial largely seem driven by a need to placate his famously narcissistic client, who believes belligerence and lies are a superior strategy to more well-regarded tactics like being diplomatic, showing respect, and staying within the facts. Trump is even reportedly insisting that Blanche stick to the ridiculous story that a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels never happened, a claim so preposterous it could make the jury assume everything else the defense says is a lie.
Despite sacrificing so much of his reputation to defend Trump, however, Blanche is reportedly learning the same lesson everyone who backs Trump learns: He rewards loyalty by spitting in your face. . . . . Trump wants Blanche to "attack witnesses, attack what the former president sees as a hostile jury pool, and attack the judge."
As anyone with basic common sense can see, these demands run directly counter to the job Trump allegedly hired Blanche to do, which is to keep him out of prison. From some of the strategic errors Blanche has already made, it seems the defense lawyer is trying to placate Trump with more minor infractions. But Trump's narcissism causes him to believe he's "his own best legal strategist,"
Trump is going to keep pushing Blanche to embrace methods that are dangerous, stupid, and possibly illegal.
As legal expert Mark Hermann wrote for the Daily Beast, doing what Trump wants is dangerous for lawyers. One can lose their license to practice law, which is exactly what happened to Roy Cohn, Trump's former lawyer that he regularly invokes when complaining that his new lawyers won't cross legal and ethical lines for him.
"There’s an old saying among criminal defense lawyers: 'Be sure that, at the end of the trial, your client is the one who goes to jail.'” But Trump makes that very hard for his lawyers, as history shows.
Trump's view of his relationships with other people is simple: They owe him everything, including their lives and their freedom. He owes them nothing. Seems like a bad bet, but time and again, people talk themselves into believing they're the genius who will figure out how to make this deal with the devil work. Blanche is just the latest person to delude himself this way. It's starting to look like he may be the latest to regret it.
Wednesday, May 01, 2024
The Trumpification of the Supreme Court
The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.
“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”
“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.
The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law.
“Trying to overthrow the Constitution and subvert the peaceful transfer of power is not an official act, even if you conspire with other government employees to do it and you make phone calls from the Oval Office,” Michael Waldman, a legal expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal public-policy organization, told me.
Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.
The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.
The Supreme Court, however, does not need to accept Trump’s absurdly broad claim of immunity for him to prevail in his broader legal battle. Such a ruling might damage the image of the Court, which has already been battered by a parade of hard-right ideological rulings. But if Trump can prevail in November, delay is as good as immunity.
If they wanted, the justices could rule expeditiously as well as narrowly, focusing on the central claim in the case and rejecting the argument that former presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president, without getting into which acts might qualify as official or not. Sauer also acknowledged under questioning by Justice Amy Coney Barrett that some of the allegations against Trump do not involve official acts but private ones, and so theoretically the prosecution could move ahead with those charges and not others. But that wouldn’t necessarily delay the trial sufficiently for Trump’s purposes.
“If they write a grant opinion, saying no president is above the law, but it comes out too late in the year, they will have effectively immunized Trump from prosecution before the election while pretending not to.”
Trump’s own attorneys argued in 2021, during his second impeachment trial, that the fact that he could be criminally prosecuted later was a reason not to impeach him. As The New York Times reported, Trump’s attorney Bruce Castor told Congress that “after he is out of office,” then “you go and arrest him.”
[S]ome of those who voted to acquit did so reasoning that Trump was subject to criminal prosecution as a private citizen. The catch-22 here reveals that the actual position being taken is that the president is a king, or that he is entitled to make himself one. At least if his name is Donald Trump.
The only part of Trump’s case that contains anything resembling a reasonable argument is the idea that without some kind of immunity for official acts, presidents could be prosecuted on a flimsy basis by political rivals. But this argument is stretched beyond credibility when it comes to what Trump did, which was to try repeatedly and in multiple ways to unlawfully seize power after losing an election. Even if the prospect of presidents being prosecuted for official acts could undermine the peaceful transfer of power, actually trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power is a much more direct threat—especially because it has already happened. But the Republican-appointed justices seemed much more concerned about the hypothetical than the reality.
Trump has the conservative justices arguing that you cannot prosecute a former president for trying to overthrow the country, because then they might try to overthrow the country, something Trump already attempted and is demanding immunity for doing. The incentive for an incumbent to execute a coup is simply much greater if the Supreme Court decides that the incumbent cannot be held accountable if he fails. And not just a coup, but any kind of brazen criminal behavior. . . . Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”
What the justices—and other Republican loyalists—are loath to acknowledge is that Trump is not being uniquely persecuted; he is uniquely criminal.
This case—even more than the Colorado ballot-eligibility case—unites the right-wing justices’ political and ideological interests with Trump’s own. One way or another, they will have to choose between Trumpism and democracy. They’ve given the public little reason to believe that they will choose any differently than the majority of their colleagues in the Republican Party.
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Monday, April 29, 2024
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Much of the Media Is Again Failing Americans
The American news media is facing an extreme challenge as it prepares to celebrate itself tonight at the White House Correspondents' dinner. During normal times covering a presidential election is hard work. But the Age of Trump and the larger democracy crisis have made reporting and commenting about the news and current events even more difficult. How has the American mainstream news media as an institution met the challenge?
On one day the elite agenda-setting news media such as the New York Times and the Washington Post will publish excellent investigative reporting on subjects such as Donald Trump and his regime’s crimes, Jan. 6, and the authoritarian playbook of Project 2025 and Agenda 47. But as has been widely documented, in the interest of “balance” and “fairness” and a “diversity of opinion," those same elite media outlets will the next day feature op-eds and other commentary from Trumpists and MAGA people and others who oppose multiracial pluralistic democracy – the effect of which is to mainstream and normalize their anti-democratic beliefs.
“Many reporters across the traditional news media are struggling against institutional tics and timidities that make ‘balance’ a false idol.” The consequence: “The inadvertent normalization of existential threats to democracy and public health by one party and its right-wing media echo chamber.”
There is a focus on President Biden’s occasional lapses in memory – which mental health and other experts have concluded are normal for a man of his age. However, Donald Trump’s worsening and much more severe challenges in memory, speech, cognition, and behavior which may be indicative of an actual brain disease are often downplayed or ignored. Alternately, the mainstream news media tries to create a false equivalency between President Biden and Donald Trump’s challenges with memory and speech when they are in fact very different.
Slate magazine’s Alicia Montgomery recently reflected on her time working at NPR and how its leadership dismissed the mounting evidence that Donald Trump could win in 2016 and enforced a policy of normalizing his candidacy: For most of 2016, many NPR journalists warned newsroom leadership that we weren’t taking Trump and the possibility of his winning seriously enough. But top editors dismissed the chance of a Trump win repeatedly, declaring that Americans would be revolted by this or that outrageous thing he’d said or done. I remember one editorial meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump’s strong poll numbers wouldn’t survive his being exposed as a racist. When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of his racism, the comment was met with silence.
Public opinion polls and other research show that the American people have low levels of trust in the news media. This is in part a function of how malign actors such as Donald Trump and others on the right have for decades used disinformation and other propaganda tools to systematically undermine faith in the news media and other democratic institutions as part of their authoritarian campaign to create an alternate reality where the truth and the facts no longer exist.
But there is another compelling explanation for these declining levels of trust: The mainstream news media as an institution has been criminally late in consistently sounding the alarm about Donald Trump and the existential dangers that he and the MAGA movement represent to the country.
On this, philosopher Jason Stanley, author of "How Fascism Works," told me in conversation here at Salon: It's surreal. No amount of reality will change them. I'm shocked, by the way the media is reacting to every new claim that Trump is a fascist as if this were news. Those like me, you, and a select group of others have been saying for years that Trump was a potential fascist dictator and there is a movement behind him. They dismissed us and laughed at us. Now instead of turning to those of us who were accurate and sounding the alarm years ago, the media is turning to people, supposed experts, who only now are realizing that we're facing a fascist, social and political movement. Such people should not be the ones turned to by the news media to be talking about the near-term future of Trump and this fascist movement and the danger. Why? They have quite clearly demonstrated total unreliability.
Can the American mainstream news media fix itself?
Charles Sykes offers the following suggestions in his new essay at the Atlantic:
Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign? My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed…. The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal. And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.
The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses, for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries.)
Sykes concludes with a much-needed corrective about the dangers of political coverage as theater criticism:
In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even—as David Frum points out in The Atlantic—the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.
Mark Jacob, former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune, has also been trying to hold the mainstream American news media to a higher standard in the Age of Trump. In a particularly sharp essay at his newsletter Stop the Presses, which merits being quoted at length, Jacob takes on the dictates of “neutrality” and “objectivity.”
Journalists aren’t bystanders in a democracy. Democracy relies on them to take action – to fact-check political lies, expose wrongdoing, explain the issues, and warn the public about the consequences of their votes.
Our political system cannot survive without an informed citizenry that’s equipped with shared, verified facts. That means journalists are not passive members of the audience – they’re supporting actors in the drama.
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