Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey, whose success in getting away with obvious corruption by politicizing law offers a disturbing preview of how Trump may become the authoritarian ruler he clearly wants to be. Not surprisingly, Trump, who basically seems to like dictators in general, has expressed admiration for Erdogan and his regime.
.. Both also have contempt for expertise... Erdogan has presided over an actual economic boom. Investors and markets don’t seem to mind the craziness at the top... The fact that economic policymakers have no idea what they’re talking about doesn’t seem to make any difference... run-of-the-mill policies like changes in tax law, even if they’re pretty big and clearly irresponsible, rarely have dramatic effects.
.. aside from fueling an unprecedented wave of stock buybacks, the tax cut is having little discernible effect, good or bad. There’s no sign of the investment boom advocates promised, but there’s also no sign that investors are losing faith in U.S. solvency.
.. Someone looking at U.S. growth in G.D.P. or employment over the past few years who didn’t know we’d had an election in 2016 would have no reason to suspect that anything important had changed.
.. Even if the quality of economic leadership matters a lot only during crises, you might expect markets to think ahead and incorporate the risk of badly handled future crises into stock and bond prices. Somehow, though, that almost never happens.
.. What we get instead are long stretches of complacency followed by sudden panic.
.. Rudiger Dornbusch): “Crises take longer to arrive than you can possibly imagine, but when they do come, they happen faster than you can possibly imagine.”
.. Although America borrows a lot abroad, it borrows in its own currency, which means that it isn’t vulnerable to a classic emerging-markets crisis.
Macron-Trump, a Friendship That Must Deliver
I hear that they speak all the time. Trump follows Macron’s labor-market reforms and calls to congratulate him. The first state visit of his administration will be Macron’s to Washington next month, a special honor for “a great guy.” The French president is Trump’s best friend in Europe ..
.. Both understood the fact that voters were bored as well as angry, mistrustful of the liberal consensus, angry at globalization’s predations, restive for grandeur, thirsty for the outspoken rather than the dutiful warnings of experts.
.. Both men came from nowhere, mavericks hoisted to the highest offices of their lands by a wave of disgust at politics-as-usual. They are, in their way, accidents of history, thrust to power at the passing of an era. Longing for disruption produced these two disrupters.
.. Macron, who at 40 could be Trump’s son, has honed a grandiose theater of the center, thereby giving centrist politics new vigor at a time of extremist temptation. He’s tough on immigration because he knows his survival depends on it. Trump’s is the theater of the zigzagging bully, nonstop noise often drowning out meaning. For both men, movement and action are essential.
.. Gaullist pomp, shunned by Macron’s predecessor, is back. If that’s what it takes to defeat the racist National Front, bring it on. Macron celebrated his victory last year with an address to the French people at the Louvre, greeted Putin at Versailles
.. “It’s not ‘Make France Great Again’ — except that it is, sort of,” a French friend observed.
Donald Trump: The Anti-Hero
Donald J. Trump, with his golden towers, his perennial tanned face and his 7th grade vocabulary, is the anti-hero of the elites. He’s the negation of countless hours spent on complicated books, of travelling around the world to attend sophistic conferences, of being proud of their PhDs, of writing hunger-solving children-savings essays. He is the negation of everything that they are.
.. They knew that if Trump won, their rent-free business models would come to an end. They were not concerned with the fate of the country, they were concerned with the fate of their careers. After all, how could they keep distributing their unbounded expertise to the masses when the guy who, according to them didn’t have any, was rewarded with the highest office in the land? How could they sell complicated books and charge high fees to go speak around the country when the guy who was proud of not reading books was made President?
.. This catastrophe, of course, caused pain and disbelief in the heart of the experts. How could they be this wrong? They couldn’t, obviously. Something else must have happened. Something else that was outside of their control. Something nefarious which couldn’t possibly be foreseen nor accounted for in their torrential editorials plastered on the front pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Something, something. Something that could, somehow, incorporate President Trump in their “I’m a very educated and smart person” worldview.
What if Trump actually lost the election? What if there was a glitch in the system, an error, a mistake. That would explain everything.
And so it came. A few days after the election, the exit door from their nightmare materialized, like the sun after a tempest, under the form of an old enemy. An enemy that was operating below the surface, away from the impervious sight of the experts, an enemy sabotaging our democracy from the cold basements of a foreign land. And, just like that, Russia became the scapegoat for all of their shortcomings. As they furiously typed away their new editorials explaining in phantasmagorical details how Russia stole the election for Trump, they realized that hope was still there. Not everything was lost.
George W. Bush is not the resistance. He’s part of what brought us Trump.
Don’t let one speech fool you into revisionist history.
But a more careful look at Trump and Bush’s records shouldn’t elevate Bush; it should remind us that the two presidents have more in common than they care publicly to admit.
For starters, just think about tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, suppressing the black vote and Bush’s penchant for denigrating facts and expertise. Our country’s historical amnesia be damned; the roots of Trump’s reactionary agenda were planted in W.’s West Wing.
.. “Because of my position and my affection for the president and my belief and trust in he and his advisers, I gave them the benefit of the doubt,” McClellan said. “And looking back on it and reflecting on it now, I don’t think I should have.” McClellan faulted the Bush administration for never having shifted from campaign mode to governing mode, a failure that “almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option [in Iraq].
In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”
.. In his recent speech, Bush claimed that bigotry “is blasphemy against the American creed,” referring to Trump’s politics. But Bush’s own Svengali, Rove, was simply more sophisticated and soft-spoken in his bigotry than Trump’s past and present cabal, Stephen K. Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka.
.. he and Rove were the crown princes of wedge issues. Having championed a historically unprecedented move to change the Constitution to bar same-sex couples from marrying, Bush and Rove then helped get 11 initiatives to ban same-sex marriage on state ballots in November 2004, the better to draw conservatives to the polls to support his reelection
.. Bush, Rove and Gillespie worked diligently with Republican state legislators to put voter-restriction laws on the books, the better to keep blacks and college students away. Despite no worthy evidence of voting fraud in 2000 or 2002, John Ashcroft, Bush’s attorney general, put the issue at the top of the Justice Department’s agenda.
.. Bush had his attorney general fire seven U.S. attorneys. Ultimately, the Department of Justice’s own inspector general concluded that some of the dismissals were motivated by the fired prosecutors’ refusal to go after trumped-up voter fraud cases.
.. Mother Jones suggests that Wisconsin’s black voter suppression helped tip the state to Trump.
.. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 delivered the top 1 percent of earners an average tax break of more than $570,000 between 2004 and 2012. Bush boosted that top 1 percent’s already high after-tax income by more than 5 percent each year.
.. It was Bush and Rove who demonized climate scientists, reproductive health specialists, stem-cell researchers and Middle East experts. Referring to the war in Iraq, a top Bush aide once mocked “the reality-based community,” a code for those who dare criticized Bush’s policies — gasp! — based on facts. Bush dishonestly teed up the anti-intellectual, anti-elitist rage that became the emotional touchstone of Trumpism.
.. There’s very little lifestyle or ideological difference between the Bush clan and core members of the Trump administration: Jared Kushner, Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson or Betsy DeVos (whose brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwate