Saturday, August 03, 2024
Big Business Needs to Wake Up to the Economic Threat Trump Poses
The conventional wisdom about Donald Trump is that he has no coherent policy agenda. He is transactional, impulsive and narcissistic. . . . . But Trump does have an ideological core, and it’s one that dates back a long way.
In 1987, when Trump was merely a New York developer, he spent almost $100,000 to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times. It was an open letter “To The American People,” and its basic message should by now be familiar. It began, “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” The thrust of the letter is that the United States is crippling itself by spending on the defense of its allies while those allies prosper. His solution? Make “Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others” pay America to protect them and “tax” these nations, by which he means impose tariffs.
This is the core of Trump’s worldview. In this campaign, he has announced that he would impose 10 percent tariffs on all imported goods and 60 percent tariffs on those from China. As for America’s defense commitments, Trump threatened he would not defend NATO countries that have not “paid their bills” — by which he means met their defense spending target of 2 percent of GDP. In fact, he said, he would encourage the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” with such countries.
I’ve asked businesspeople who support Trump how they could be in favor of an agenda that was so obviously anti-markets, anti-growth and anti-stability. They reply that it’s all bluster, that Trump’s bark is always worse than his bite. But hostility to America’s allies and a fascination with protectionism are constants in Trump’s ideology.
Trump’s dark vision from the 1980s did not pan out. Japan and Europe stagnated, China rose, and through it all, the United States stayed remarkably strong, maintaining its share of global GDP at 26 percent from 1990 to today. American wages, once very similar to Europe’s, are now about 45 percent higher.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Reagan and Clinton administrations tried all kinds of measures to stop Japan’s advance. They amounted to costly failures (and Japan missed the information revolution anyway). Undeterred by that record of failure, Trump wants to try it all again, this time with China, which now seems to be entering a period of slower growth itself, caused by its own mistakes.
So far, the record has been clear. By Trump’s own key measure — the trade deficit — the tariffs against China (extended by President Biden) have failed. Since the imposition of the tariffs, the trade deficit has expanded rather than contracted. Many studies have shown that these measures have cost American consumers tens of billions of dollars and have not altered China’s policies. A recent study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded that Trump’s new tariffs would cost American consumers $500 billion annually, or around $1,700 for a typical middle-income family every year. In other words, they would stoke inflation.
Trump’s is an ideological view that facts and evidence can do little to dissuade. He insists, for example, that his tariffs are not paid by Americans, but rather by China and other nations.
There is a broader point to make here. The United States did something truly revolutionary after World War II. It understood that by underwriting international stability and helping other nations get rich, it would create a zone of peace and prosperity in which it, too, would thrive. That vision of enlightened self-interest has been at the heart of America’s engagement with the world for almost eight decades. Trump and JD Vance utterly reject it, choosing instead a dark, narrow and selfish vision that would turn its back on one of America’s greatest and most enduring achievements.
Friday, August 02, 2024
Why Trump Can’t Banish the Weirdos and Extremists
After years of describing Republicans as “dangerous,” Democrats seem to have hit a groove with “weird.” “These guys are just weird,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said recently. “We’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”
Democrats aren’t the only ones who think conservative ideologues are weird. Trump thinks they are too—if weird means extreme and unpopular. In fact, he’s been trying to escape them. The problem is he can’t, at least not fully, because they’re his people.
On Tuesday, media outlets reported that the former Trump staffer Paul Dans had stepped down as the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which created a conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration. Dans left his role following Trump’s condemnation of Project 2025, and attempts by the former president to distance himself from its plans . . . and trashing the Project 2025-linked ‘lunatics’ who keep demanding unpopular abortion bans and restrictions.”
Trump is right to worry that Project 2025 is a political loser. The project’s 900-page presidential-transition document, “Mandate for Leadership,” includes a lot of unpopular conservative ideas, such as using the archaic Comstock Act to restrict access to the abortion drug mifepristone, preventing Medicaid from covering abortion, gathering data on women who get abortions, and allowing hospitals to refuse medical care to women ill from abortion complications. It also outlines plans to reorganize the federal bureaucracy into an organization that is loyal to Trump personally rather than concerned with public service, and to outlaw “pornography,” broadly defined as anything LGBTQ-related.
Lesser-known, yet equally extreme, ideas include dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service for the thought crime of acknowledging the reality of climate change as part of their work, repealing certain child-labor protections, undermining public- and private-sector unions, and allowing states to ignore federal labor laws regarding overtime pay and the minimum wage.
And in a GOP where loyalty to Trump is the paramount value, ideologues can rise by pledging fealty to him, even if their beliefs and public conduct are very strange.
Being associated with the ideologues who ran his administration last time and who would run it next time gives up the game, and lets the public know who would really be in charge during a second Trump administration, while the president live-tweets Fox News every day just like he did four years ago.
But whatever Trump says about Project 2025, his ties to it are undeniable. A CNN review in mid-July found that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” and “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering nearly every aspect of his time in politics and the White House
Condemning Project 2025 because it is a political loser does not mean that Trump won’t pursue many or most of its recommendations. As the Ronald Reagan staffer Scott Faulkner once famously put it, “Personnel is policy.” And whatever Trump says about policy in public, the people who put together Project 2025 are his personnel.
“Trump can try to distance himself from this, but 70 to 80 percent of the people who wrote the book are going to be in his second administration—the cabinet, under secretaries, assistant secretaries, the senior advisers,” one anonymous Project 2025 contributor told Rolling Stone. “They’re all going to be the foot soldiers in a second Trump administration!”
As CBS News reported, Project 2025 was advised by more than “100 conservative groups,” and its “Mandate for Leadership” lists as co-authors many former Trump officials, including Russ Vought, the policy director for the 2024 Republican National Committee’s platform committee. That means that all of the extreme positions documented in Project 2025 remain conservative goals, whether Trump embraces Project 2025 by name or not.
Another problem for Trump is that he chose an ideologue, J. D. Vance, as his running mate. Surveys suggest that Vance—who wrote an introduction to a new book by Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025—is one of the most unpopular vice-presidential picks in the modern history of polling, in part because of what is a frankly very weird obsession with childless people, women in particular. . . . . He’s separately described people without children as “more sociopathic.”
Being obsessed with strangers’ personal lives, especially to the point where you’re trying to use the power of the state to force everyone else to live according to your values rather than their own, comes across as pretty weird. Even Trump understands that. He also understands that, weird or no, this is the agenda the movement behind him wants to pursue. If he can obscure that agenda long enough to get elected, that movement might actually succeed.
Thursday, August 01, 2024
Trump Has Racist Meltdown Before Black Journalists
Onstage at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention today, Donald Trump complained bitterly that technical difficulties had delayed his appearance, but he had no trouble squeezing plenty of inflammatory comments into a shortened interview.
The former president refused to condemn the violent rioters on January 6, 2021. He gave only faint support for J. D. Vance’s preparedness to serve as president. He wouldn’t refute allies’ claim that his presumptive presidential opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a “DEI candidate.” And in the most eye-popping moment, he questioned whether Harris is really Black.
Who knows what Trump is talking about? Harris was born in the United States to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. She attended Howard University, one of the country’s most famed historically Black institutions, and has never shied away from her Black heritage during her career as a politician. But Trump has long engaged in these kinds of racial-purity tests.
As is often the case with Trump, the facts are beside the point. Trump may have been trying to undermine Harris’s bona fides with Black voters. His strategy to beat President Joe Biden included drawing some Black voters away from the Democratic Party and hoping that other Black voters—who, polling suggested, were unenthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy—would just stay home. Biden’s replacement by Harris threatens that path by energizing Black voters. If Trump’s goal at NABJ was to build a friendly rapport with the Black community, however, he approached it in a curious manner.
Some NABJ members questioned the decision to invite Trump at all . . . . Trump’s appearance showed why the invitation was worthwhile, though. The former president seldom conducts interviews that are not either with friendly outlets or on his own territory (most often at Mar-a-Lago), or both. He doesn’t often have to answer hard questions before a hostile or even skeptical audience, and when he did today, it went off the rails fast.
“A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today,” Scott said. “You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States, which is not true. You have told four congresswomen of color who were American citizens to go back to where they came from. You have used words like animal and rabid to describe Black district attorneys. You’ve attacked Black journalists, calling them a ‘loser,’ saying the questions they ask are ‘stupid and racist.’ You have had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. My question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you: Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”
Every one of Scott’s statements is true, and Trump should have been prepared to answer her question. But he’s so accustomed to friendly and fawning interviews that he was furious.
Trump said the message he wanted to impart at the conference was that immigration was bad for the Black community, but when Trump says that immigrants are taking “Black jobs,” many people hear him categorizing low-skilled or manual jobs as “Black.”
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
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