This small act of historical clarification by the keepers of our sacred sites and shared spaces would have been no big deal, had not the response from the new president sounded like an edict from the Dear Leader. A gag order on public servants was issued, and the National Park Service tweet on crowd size vanished, replaced by a picture of a bison.
.. But what is different with this administration, from that very first attempt to snuff a truth about the size of the crowd on the lovingly restored National Mall grass, is they’re trying to institutionalize lying.
.. These employees are protected by Civil Service laws, including many hatched by Teddy Roosevelt.
Making the Rust Belt Rustier
Why does he want this? Because he sees international trade the way he sees everything else: as a struggle for dominance, in which you only win at somebody else’s expense.
.. What Reagan did do, however, was blow up the budget deficit with military spending and tax cuts. This drove up interest rates, which drew in foreign capital. The inflow of capital, in turn, led to a stronger dollar, which made U.S. manufacturing uncompetitive. The trade deficit soared — and the long-term decline in the share of manufacturing in overall employment accelerated sharply.
Trump’s Little Mexican War
Doesn’t the “art of the deal” include giving your negotiating partner room to compromise? Mr. Trump made it impossible for Mr. Peña Nieto even to negotiate, all the more so after Mr. Peña Nieto went out of his way in August to invite Mr. Trump for a visit. That campaign stop helped Mr. Trump show he could stand on stage as an equal with a foreign leader, but Mr. Peña Nieto took a beating at home when Mr. Trump returned to Mexico-bashing.
When Mr. Trump visited the Journal in November 2015, we asked if the U.S. should encourage political stability and economic growth in Mexico. “I don’t care about Mexico honestly, I really don’t care about Mexico,” he replied.
.. Mexico’s main political parties have since traded stints in power, but both the PRI and the PAN have pressed economic reforms that have raised living standards and given Mexicans reasons to stay on their side of the Rio Grande.
.. Mr. Trump has accused Mexico of seeking a weak currency, but the central bank has been vigilant against inflation. The main reason the peso has fallen to 21 to the dollar from 17 in less than a year is Mr. Trump’s threats to destroy Nafta and start a trade war. The U.S. President is devaluing Mexico’s currency—the opposite of what he claims to want.
What’s the method in Trump’s madness?
On the one hand, he has continued to make himself out as a “populist” standing up for workers by scrapping the Trans-Pacific Partnership and bringing verbal pressure on American companies to keep or create jobs in the United States.
On the other, he has been promising corporations the moon.
.. In principle, it’s possible that Trump is returning to the days of William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge. From the 1890s to the Great Depression, Republican presidents pursued policies that were simultaneously pro-business and protectionist.
.. And so far, his announcements about jobs “kept” in the United States under his pressure have been largely symbolic, involving relatively small numbers in an economy where 152 million people are working.
.. he said he’d ask for “a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD,” using those Trumpian capital letters.
Here again, Trump set off a debate between madness and method. The most obvious conclusion is that we are confronting yet another case of his bizarre insecurity. He’s furious that even though he is president, his enemies are denying him a popular mandate because he lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes. But voting rights advocates fear that he is laying the groundwork for extensive voter-suppression efforts aimed at making voting far more difficult for Latinos, African Americans and others hostile to him... If there is any consistency here, it lies in the right-wing nationalism of his senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon. He hopes to marry broadly conservative economic policies with protectionism, restrictions on immigration, and new infrastructure and military spending.