September 16, 2019--Trump's Four-Step Program

Take the tariffs as an example of a political strategy Trump employs with great aplomb and consequence.

During the 2016 campaign he stressed two things more than anything else--the Wall, how he would build it and Mexico would pay for it--and trade with China--how they were taking advantage of American naiveté and as a result surpassing us in economic growth. They were stealing our intellectual property and the Chinese government was unfairly subsidizing the cost of the expansion of their manufacturing sector. We, on the other hand, were experiencing a chronically stalled economy and ballooning trade deficits.

He said that unlike his predecessors he would confront the Chinese directly and fight back by using every trick and tool at his disposal. Among them, first and foremost, tariffs.

As the initial step he talked tough, boasting how he would take on the Chinese and force them to amend their ways or face crippling tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of manufactured goods and agricultural products.

The Chinese did not knuckle under. Instead, they announced retaliatory tariffs of their own. In response Trump, as the next step, ramped up the rhetoric, including personal attacks on Xi Jinping, China's president for life.

Still the Chinese did not back down. As a consequence the American stock market plunged, attracting Trump's attention. He had represented the previously soaring market as evidence that his economic policies were working. If the market tanked, not far behind would be Trump's reelection chances.

As a result, as the third step, he began to soften his position. To back off. He ratcheted back his criticism of Xi and began to hint that he would hold off on imposing tariffs until the end of the holiday shopping season. And just last week he announced that perhaps tariffs aren't necessary after all since both the Chinese and he are interested in making a deal. Not so between the lines was the implication that that deal might not require tariffs.

In this final move of the Trumpian four-step, he will soon take credit for getting the Chinese to retreat in the face of a crisis that he himself created and from which he, not they, is doing the backing down. 

The Chinese government's recent announcement that they will resume importing soybeans will be cited as evidence by Trump that they are capitulating, while in truth he is.

So, he begins by initiating a crisis which, when it starts to spin out of control, he "solves" by abandoning his own positions while at the same time taking credit for doing so as if that was the plan all along. 

If I have this right, those who want to depose Trump need to understand how this strategy works and figure out how best in real time to counter it. It's his most powerful tool and we have to expose and resist it, jiu jitsu-style, by turning his own strength against him.

January 26, 2018--Trump vs. Obama

Donald Trump launched his political career by savaging Barack Obama, beginning with the birther racism to accusing him of being a stealth Muslim to doing all he could first as a candidate and now as president to discredit and dismantle everything that was accomplished during the Obama eight years in the White House. 

It is as if Trump wants to nullify Obama's presidency (more racism) and delete his name from history. To make it as if Obama was not president. Forget that--to make it so that he never existed. 

For Trump's most ardent followers this is the definition of how to make America great again: Purge the country of people of color and anyone who is not Christian. Actually, not a Protestant. 

If one is looking for the Trump policy agenda all that is needed is to take out a list of Obama's achievements and invert them. Voilà, the Trump agenda is revealed. For example, most recently, most dramatically Obama-annihilating, Trump allowing all states bordered by our oceans to license oil companies the unfettered right to drill.

Try as Trump might to pull off this campaign to overturn Obama's record and place in history, the facts, assuming anyone is interested in them, present a very different picture.

Case in point, a recent Joe Scarborough op-ed column in the Washington Post, "The Damage Trump Has Done, Documented."

Drawing on data about the state of the economy from a January article in Forbes Magazine, not exactly a Bernie Sanders endorsed publication, "Trump's Economic Scorecard: One Year Since Inauguration," Scarborough compares how the economy fared during each presidency.

Most self-vaunted is the run up of the stock market. Trump claims there is no better evidence that his economic policies are working and that this is in contrast with the "failed" Obama record. During the first year of the Trump presidency the run-up in the Standard & Poor's average was a noteworthy 19.4%. But, though he never fails to reject the idea that he inherited a heating-up economy from Obama, the market did even better during Obama's first year--rising on the S&P an astonishing 23.5%.

In regard to jobs created Trump's numbers were lower in 2017 than in any of the first six years of Obama's presidency. And the unemployment rate declined faster under Obama than during Trump's first year in office.

The budget deficit last year was $666 billion, whereas it was a declining $585 a year earlier under Obama. And the national debt, a favorite target of conservatives, is now accruing at a more rapid rate than during the years of the Obama administration.

Then the trade deficit, an important indicator of economic health, was worse last year than in any of Obama's eight years.

There are things to criticize when it comes to the Obama record about the economy (for example the unrelenting growth in the gap between the wealthy and middle class), but things with Trump in regard to the economy, acknowledging its early achievements, are for the most part not as noteworthy as during the Obama years. 

One thing is certain, President Obama's record, which, in spite of Trump's obsessive assault on it, continues to endure while we may soon see the dismantling of the Trump presidency itself. And over time we will also see how history regards each of them. The outline of that, regardless of the Trump posturing, is already clear.