The Ghost of Trump Chaos Future

Sorry, investors, but there is no sanity clause.

Two years ago, after the shock of Donald Trump’s election, financial markets briefly freaked out, then quickly recovered. In effect, they decided that while Trump was manifestly unqualified for the job, temperamentally and intellectually, it wouldn’t matter. He might talk the populist talk, but he’d walk the plutocratic walk. He might be erratic and uninformed, but wiser heads would keep him from doing anything too stupid.

In other words, investors convinced themselves that they had a deal: Trump might sound off, but he wouldn’t really get to make policy. And, hey, taxes on corporations and the wealthy would go down.

But now, just in time for Christmas, people are realizing that there was no such deal — or at any rate, that there wasn’t a sanity clause. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) Put an unstable, ignorant, belligerent man in the Oval Office, and he will eventually do crazy things.

To be clear, voters have been aware for some time that government by a bad man is bad government. That’s why Democrats won a historically spectacular majority of the popular vote in the midterms. Even the wealthy, who have been the prime beneficiaries of Trump policies, are unhappy: A CNBC survey finds that millionaires, even Republican millionaires, have turned sharply against the tweeter in chief.

.. The reality that presidential unfitness matters for investors seems to have started setting in only about three weeks (and around 4,000 points on the Dow) ago.

  • First came the realization that Trump’s much-hyped deal with China existed only in his imagination. Then came
  • his televised meltdown in a meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer,
  • his abrupt pullout from Syria,
  • his firing of Jim Mattis and
  • his shutdown of the government because Congress won’t cater to his edifice complex and build a pointless wall. And now there’s
  • buzz that he wants to fire Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Oh, and along the way we learned that Trump has been engaging in raw obstruction of justice, pressuring his acting attorney general (who is himself a piece of work) over the Mueller investigation as the tally of convictions, confessions and forced resignations mounts.

.. And even trade war might not do that much harm, as long as it’s focused mainly on China, which is only one piece of U.S. trade. The really big economic risk was that Trump might break up Nafta, the North American trade agreement: U.S. manufacturing is so deeply integrated with production in Canada and Mexico that this would have been highly disruptive. But he settled for changing the agreement’s name while leaving its structure basically intact, and the remaining risks don’t seem that large.

.. Now imagine how this administration team might cope with a real economic setback, whatever its source. Would Trump look for solutions or refuse to accept responsibility and focus mainly on blaming other people? Would his Treasury secretary and chief economic advisers coolly analyze the problem and formulate a course of action, or would they respond with a combination of sycophancy to the boss and denials that anything was wrong? What do you think?

Another government shutdown … and another good gamble by Trump

Another government shutdown. Coming on the heels of Trump’s precipitous withdrawal from Syria, the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and continued decline in the stock market, this merely adds to the growing sense that the American government is in near-terminal disarray. But as a political matter, it is highly unlikely to hurt either President Trump or the Republican Party.

.. There are two reasons for this: Voters already behind Trump want the wall, and political effects of shutdowns usually fade quickly after shutdowns are resolved. That this shutdown occurs nearly two years before the next election merely adds to the fact this is probably a good gamble by Trump.

Polls have long shown that controlling immigration is a high priority for Republican and Trump voters. Indeed, the midterm exit polls showed that immigration was the second-most-important issue facing the country, and voters who thought it was the most important voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin.

.. 43 percent of Americans supported building the wall, including 86 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents.

.. The same poll found that 52 percent of Republicans think immigration should be the top issue for Congress in the coming year.

Forcing a shutdown over the wall is not likely to gain Trump or the GOP much support, but it reinforces their position with their own voters. That’s a good thing to do this far out from the election, and sets up possible shifts to the center on other issues as goodwill has been increased first among the base.

Nor do voters tend to punish a party that causes a shutdown at the ballot box. The research of FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver backs this up, and he contends that shutdowns cause political damage only if they last for a long time. That happened in late November 1995 and in the 1995-1996 holiday period, when two separate shutdowns over government spending issues that lasted a combined 27 days helped propel President Bill Clinton to reelection.

.. But it’s also worth recalling that voters did not punish the congressional Republicans who were widely blamed for the shutdown.

.. Both history and current politics are on Trump’s side in this standoff. There’s no reason he shouldn’t dig in for the holiday season and wait for the Democrats to offer a compromise he can live with.

Shields and Gerson on Mattis’ resignation, congressional stalemate

Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson join Judy Woodruff to analyze the week’s political news, including the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the congressional scramble to fund the government and avoid a partial shutdown.

 

Summary

Jim Mattis’s resignation resulted in panic and is a sign that we are reaching the beginning of the end.

Trump had an agreement for temporary funding but felt pressured by Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh because the threat of the Mueller Report forces Trump to solidify his support on the right.