The Potemkin Policies of Donald Trump

There are many who have stated that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, decided to withdraw America from the Paris climate accord for purely domestic political purposes: he has failed to deliver so far on any of his campaign promises and, therefore, was desperate to throw a political bone to his base of Christofascists and xenophobes.  With his plans for health care reform - using the term "reform" very loosely - and an overhaul of the tax code going nowhere in Congress, trashing the Paris accord was the easiest way to convince his less than intellectually brilliant and non-analytical base a bone.  Indeed, it is part and parcel with Trump's effort to construct a Potemkin village if you will for his base - for Fox News viewers, a "Potemkin village is is any construction (literal or figurative) built solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is - so that they will believe he is actually doing something for them as promised even when he is failing to do so in fact. A piece in The Atlantic looks at Trump's failing policies and his efforts to continue to dupe the gullible in the GOP base.  Here are excerpts:

It’s “Infrastructure Week” at the White House. Theoretically.

On Monday, the administration announced a plan to spend $200 billion on infrastructure and overhaul U.S. air traffic control. There was a high-profile signing in the East Wing before dozens of cheering lawmakers and industry titans. It was supposed to be the beginning of a weeklong push to fix America’s roads, bridges, and airports.

But in the next two days, Trump spent more energy burning metaphorical bridges than trying to build literal ones. He could have stayed on message for several hours, gathered Democrats and Republicans to discuss a bipartisan agreement, and announced a timeframe. Instead he quickly turned his attention to Twitter to accuse media companies of “Fake News” while undermining an alliance with Qatar based on what may be, fittingly, a fake news story.

It’s a microcosm of this administration’s approach to public policy. A high-profile announcement, coupled with an ambitious promise, subsumed by an unrelated, self-inflicted public-relations crisis, followed by … nothing.

The secret of the Trump infrastructure plan is: There is no infrastructure plan. Just like there is no White House tax plan. Just like there was no White House health care plan. More than 120 days into Trump’s term in a unified Republican government, Trump’s policy accomplishments have been more in the subtraction category (e.g., stripping away environmental regulations) than addition. The president has signed no major legislation and left significant portions of federal agencies unstaffed, as U.S. courts have blocked what would be his most significant policy achievement, the legally dubious immigration ban.

The simplest summary of White House economic policy to date is four words long: There is no policy.

Consider the purported focus of this week. An infrastructure plan ought to include actual proposals, like revenue-and-spending details and timetables. The Trump infrastructure plan has little of that. Even the president’s speech on Monday was devoid of specifics. . . . . The ceremonial signing on Monday was pure theater. . . . Meanwhile, Congress isn’t working on infrastructure at all, according to Politico, and Republicans have shown no interest in a $200 billion spending bill.

In short, this “plan” is not a plan, so much as a Potemkin policy, a presentation devised to show the press and the public that the president has an economic agenda. The show continued on Wednesday, as the president delivered an infrastructure speech in Cincinnati that criticized Obamacare, hailed his Middle East trip, and offered no new details on how his plan would work. Infrastructure Week is a series of scheduled performances to make it look as if the president is hard at work on a domestic agenda that cannot move forward because it does not exist.

Journalists are beginning to catch on.  The administration’s policy drought has so far been obscured by a formulaic bait-and-switch strategy one could call the Two-Week Two-Step. Bloomberg has compiled several examples of the president promising major proposals or decisions on everything from climate-change policy to infrastructure “in two weeks.” He has missed the fortnight deadline almost every time.

The starkest false promise has been taxes. . . . . . the simplest summary of White House tax policy is: There is no plan. There isn’t even a complete staff to compose one.

The story is slightly different for the White House budget, but no more favorable. The budget suffers, not from a lack of details, but from a failure of numeracy that speaks to the administration’s indifference toward serious public policy.

Trump and his party are alike—united in their antagonism toward Obama-era policies and united in their inability to articulate what should come next. Republicans are trapped by campaign promises that they cannot fulfill. The White House is trapped inside of the president’s perpetual campaign, a cavalcade of economic promises divorced from any effort to detail, advocate, or enact major economic legislation. With an administration that uses public policy as little more than a photo op, get ready for many sequels to this summer’s Infrastructure Week.

The only good news is that since Trump's and the GOP's policies would likely be so bad for the country that it is a benefit that nothing is actually happening. 

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Trump Offers Little New in Economic Policy that Most Aids the Wealthy

Other than wanting to throw out trade treaties that could have a negative boomerang effect on America, Donald Trump offered little new in his much vaunted economic policy speech in Detroit yesterday.  The take away?  That Trump like so many Republicans before him is relying on his low intellect supporters to be induced by hate, racism, and xenophobia to back policies that harm them economically.  Trickle down economics have never worked and after 36 years of broken promises one would think even the Neanderthals of the GOP base would be able to figure this out, but sadly such is not the case.  Both the New York Times and the Washington Post slam Trump's proposals.  Here are highlights from the Post editorial:

Mr. Trump’s economic policy speech to the Detroit Economic Club managed to embrace the worst of traditional Republican doctrine while repudiating the best of it.

Harking back to a nonexistent period “when we were governed by an America First policy,” Mr. Trump blamed the economic collapse of Detroit, and many other untoward economic trends, on trade, specifically free-trade agreements — such as the North American Free Trade Agreement — which the postwar GOP has generally supported, along with many Democrats. Not only would Mr. Trump scrap the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership with 11 other Pacific Rim nations, he would “renegotiate” NAFTA and “walk away” if Mexico and Canada don’t do what he wants. You may or may not like NAFTA and similar deals; they create winners and losers across the $17 trillion U.S. economy. Even critics must agree that, by now, they are firmly woven into the American economic fabric — and that unraveling them would be profoundly disruptive, perhaps creating “jobs and higher wages” for some, as Mr. Trump promises, but destroying them for many, many others.

On taxes, though, Mr. Trump reverted to GOP orthodoxy, offering cuts for upper-income Americans as a growth elixir. He promised to abolish the estate tax and to reduce the current seven income tax brackets to three, with a top rate of 33 percent. The former idea would benefit a relative handful of super-wealthy families; the latter would blow a gargantuan hole in federal finances unless Mr. Trump also ended deductions and other loopholes, most of which benefit upper-income households disproportionately. Yet he promised to close only one: the “carried interest” deduction whereby Wall Street investors can have certain earnings taxed at the lower capital gains rate rather than as ordinary income. It’s a good idea but would save the Treasury only about$1.8 billion per year.

Mr. Trump called for a new tax break, a deduction for child-care expenses. Though ostensibly for the benefit of hard-pressed families, the proposal will do nothing for the nearly half of American households who don’t owe federal income taxes at all.

There was, in short, little in the way of tangible benefit for the downscale Americans for whom Mr. Trump claims to speak. Possibly to draw attention away from that fact, Mr. Trump framed his proposals as a salve for such injustices as “rebuilding other countries instead of our own” and “resettl[ing] millions of refugees at taxpayer expense” while our infrastructure “fell into disrepair.” Brimming with statistics, larded with footnotes, Monday’s speech was meant to instill “message discipline” in the Trump campaign. But even that message’s most carefully scripted version is held together by smoke, mirrors and scapegoating.

The GOP "Reformicon” Sham

Of late one hears more and more about Republicans who allegedly want reform - so-called Reformicons - and claim to be concerned about the GOP war on the middle class.  Among these would be reformers - I see them more as snake oil merchants looking to dupe the naive - is, of course, Jeb Bush.  While some of these folks talk a good game, the reality of what they want and/or their ability to deliver are vastly exaggerated.  A piece in Salon looks at this phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

I’m a fan of Edsall’s work, and he’s probably forgotten more about American politics and journalism than I’ll ever know. Still, the reality is that his reformicon profile, while being far from the worst of an already voluminous genre (a distinction that goes to Sam Tanehaus’ piece from last summer) suffers from the same mistakes as nearly all of the rest. It exaggerates the reformicons’ influence, it minimizes their conservative orthodoxy, and it ignores the fact that they lack the one crucial element of any successful political reform movement: a dedicated constituency. 

I’ve said it once before but it bears repeating: There is much less to the reformicon project than meets the eye. It’s the Potemkin village of political movements.

[E]arly indicators suggest that the GOP plan for combating inequality will be to promote the same supply-side nostrums they’ve peddled since 1980 — but to do it while saying the word “opportunity” a bunch. But as George W. Bush proved in 2000, a candidate can absolutely lie his ass off and still win.

The biggest problem with the rosy view of the reformicons, though, can be seen in a reply from National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, who is one of the more prominent reformicons. As Jonathan Chait has correctly noted before, the reformicons are in the awkward position of wanting to change their party but being unable to do so through the usual means: by engaging in and winning a political fight. . . . the reformicons have no real popular base or influential constituency. The evangelical Christians, the Tea Party pseudo-libertarians, the hawks in the military industrial complex, the billionaire donors like the Kochs; none of the relevant, powerful interests within the party particularly care if the tax credit for children is expanded. Indeed, as Edsall’s piece notes, many of the current stakeholders in the party are not just indifferent to but in active opposition to the few new ideas the reformicons have.

[H]ere’s what a closer look at the ballyhooed reformicon movement reveals: a relatively small group of relatively young writers speaking to a relatively small audience about a few relatively modest tweaks they’d like to make to what is otherwise a very conservative agenda.

The American public needs to not be fooled by this latest version of smoke and mirrors being trotted out by some in the GOP.  NOTHING has really changed.  And nothing will change in the GOP until it stops prostituting itself to Christofascists, white supremacists and vulture capitalists like the Koch brothers.

The Latest Bush Lie: Jeb's a "Reform Conservative"

The country has still not fully recovered from the disaster of the last Bush presidency and yet we see another member of the Bush clan seeking to hold the nation's highest office.  One has to wonder why Americans are running screaming from the mere thought of another Bush in the White House.  Now, Jeb Bush is describing himself as a "reform conservative" much as his idiot brother sought to call himself a "compassionate conservative" - compassionate that is unless you are gay, a woman, minority and, of course an Iraqi civilian. Slate looks at Jeb's effort to dupe Americans yet again.  Here are highlights:

On Wednesday, [Jeb] Bush addressed the Detroit Economic Club, in what many saw as a coming-out party for his nascent presidential campaign. In the wind-up to the speech, Dana Bash and Jeremy Diamond of CNN reported that Bush would offer up something called “reform conservatism,” which they described as similar to the “compassionate conservatism” of his older brother, George W. Bush. For reasons that will soon become clear, the comparison made me wince a bit. I couldn’t exactly blame Bash and Diamond for not being fully up to speed on reform conservatism, as the term is used almost exclusively by a handful of nerds.

According to Davis, the really distinctive thing about the reformocons is that they prefer middle-class tax cuts over the rate cuts for the rich favored by many supply-siders. Last summer, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne offered an extended critique in Democracy Journal. For Dionne, reform conservatism is the anti–Tea Party. Whereas the Tea Party represents (in his view) “extreme opposition to government,” reformocons are (also in his view) people that the left can do business with, if only they would acknowledge how much they have in common with Barack Obama. 

So what do the reformocons believe, exactly? Are they the GOP’s answer to the New Democrats, a moderate faction devoted to making their party more electable by dragging it to the center? Or are they clever marketers trying to rebrand Reaganism for the 21^st century? The simplest answer is that reform conservatives are garden-variety free-market conservatives who believe that a well-designed safety net and high-quality public services are essential parts of making entrepreneurial capitalism work. This separates them from more emphatically libertarian conservatives for whom the first priority is to eliminate as many government programs as possible.

Instead of defending the welfare state in its current form, reformocons look at the goals of programs like Social Security and Medicare and then try to find better, fairer, more cost-effective ways of achieving them. They believe a few other things as well. To the extent possible, social programs that help those who fall on hard times should be geared toward helping them achieve economic self-sufficiency, rather than letting them become permanently dependent. The tax code should encourage savings and investment. 

Though Bush spoke movingly about the challenges facing the tens of millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, he never really reckoned with the fact that America’s economic woes began long before Barack Obama became president and that the bloated government he rightly criticizes is very much a bipartisan failure. What I really wanted was for Bush to demonstrate that he understood why so many Americans had lost their faith in the Republican Party, and why he deserved their trust. He failed to do that. Instead of offering an agenda worthy of a future president, he offered compassion for those who’ve missed out on the fruits of America’s sluggish economic growth and a series of minor tweaks that are better suited to a governor or a mayor than to the next president. To be the candidate of reform, he’ll have to do better.

My reformocon homework assignment for would-be GOP presidential candidates is simple. Don’t just tell us what you’re against. Tell us what you’re for, and be specific. You don’t like Obamacare? I don’t either. Got anything cheaper that will cover at least as many people? Not a fan of stagnant wages? Neither am I. Walk me through how deregulation or corporate tax reform or a bigger tax benefit for low-wage workers might help. Think our immigration system is broken? Me too! On what basis should we choose who does and does not get to become an American? Republicans have been trying to get by on government-bashing swagger and vague, poll-tested generalities for too long. The time has come to put some meat on the bone.

Don't expect Jeb Bush to deliver what the author asks for.  It's all a ploy so that he and his family can fool the American people yet again.