The greatest trick Donald Trump pulled was convincing voters he’d be “anti-establishment.”
.. But the idea that he would do this was based on a profound misunderstanding of what the establishment actually is, and who Donald Trump is.
.. An organizational chart of Trump’s transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy. And K Street is positively salivating over all the new opportunities they’ll have to deliver goodies to their clients in the Trump era. Who could possibly have predicted such a thing?
The answer is, anyone who was paying attention.
.. No, their commitment is to be of service to that most oppressed and forgotten group of Americans, the wealthy. Trump’s tax plan would give 47 percent of its benefits to the richest one percent of taxpayers. Paul Ryan’s tax plan is even purer — it gives 76 percent of its cuts to the richest one percent in its first year, and by 2025 would feed 99.6 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent.
.. Once that’s accomplished, Trump and the Republicans plan to either gut or completely repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, the greatest wish of Wall Street bankers. Can you feel the anti-establishment wind blowing?
.. So what’s going on here? Most plainly, the voters thinking that Trump would vanquish the establishment were just marks for a con, like those who lost their life savings at Trump University. But
.. By now we should understand that while Trump is an ignorant buffoon in some ways and an outright moron in others, he’s also a savant of hatred and resentment. He not only identifies the ugliest feelings that portions of the electorate have — that’s the easy part, and all of his primary opponents knew equally well what those feelings were — he finds just the right way to reach in and goose them. And he grasped that people were ready to sign on with an attack on all sectors of established power, in Washington or anywhere else.
.. What Trump tapped into was their sense of powerlessness, that unseen forces are pulling the strings and manipulating “the system” for their own benefit. That “system” encompasses everything from politics to the economy to their local schools to culture. The system made that factory leave town. The system lets immigrants come in and speak a language other than English. Everywhere you look you’re being held down by the system.
So when Trump complained that anything that didn’t go his way meant the system was “rigged” against him, they nodded in agreement and said, “Yep, it’s rigged against me, too.”
.. He’s reckless, impulsive, vindictive, hateful, and authoritarian, and his presidency is going to be somewhere between disastrous and cataclysmic, likely in ways we can’t even imagine yet.
Trump’s Economic Prescription. First: Do Harm.
Donald J. Trump is positioned to achieve the most radical reshaping of economic policy since Ronald Reagan. Even under Reagan, Republicans never controlled both houses of Congress.
.. if he follows through on his ideas, we could face higher prices on imported goods, rising interest rates, substantial inflation and a further shift of wealth to the upper classes.
.. Lower-income Americans — including Mr. Trump’s core supporters — would be hurt the most because they disproportionately buy less expensive imported items.
.. While some manufacturing jobs might come back as a result of the tariffs, a greater number of domestic jobs would most likely be lost because Americans would have less spending power.
.. rather than bringing jobs back to the United States, Mr. Trump’s tariffs could result in a trade war that would cost our economy five million jobs and possibly lead to a recession.
.. As soon as Mr. Trump’s ascendancy became clear on Tuesday night, interest rates on Treasuries began to rise. Usually, an unexpected event causes a flight to the safety of government debt, pushing yields down. That the opposite occurred reflects fears that the deficit might balloon out of control.
.. As a fiscal conservative, Mr. Ryan is unlikely to accept large tax cuts unaccompanied by major spending reductions. That could lead to the evisceration of many of the discretionary federal programs — think education or research and development — critical to putting our economy on a stronger footing.
.. As a fiscal conservative, Mr. Ryan is unlikely to accept large tax cuts unaccompanied by major spending reductions. That could lead to the evisceration of many of the discretionary federal programs — think education or research and development — critical to putting our economy on a stronger footing.
.. If Mr. Trump sticks to his pledge, it will be open season on regulations, as businesses go after their most disliked provisions and agencies. Industrial companies will take aim at the Environmental Protection Agency. Financial institutions, including the big banks, will push to repeal Dodd-Frank. That’s just for starters.
.. Some of the efforts at dismantling government may face hurdles in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to break filibusters, more than the Republicans will have. But under a process known as “reconciliation,” matters relating to taxes and spending — and potentially the repeal of Obamacare — can be passed by a simple majority of 51.
.. The conservative American Action Forum calculated that his deportation plan would cost $400 billion to $600 billion and, because there are not enough citizens and legal residents to fill the demand, the plan would shrink the labor force and reduce gross domestic product by $1.6 trillion.
.. Mr. Trump’s proposals would confer vast monetary gains on wealthy Americans while leaving middle- and working-class Americans — his electoral base — further behind. For his supporters, the irony of a Trump victory is that they may end up even less well off.
Things Are About to Get Much Worse for Poor Americans
They didn’t vote for this. Richer Americans did.
President Obama’s anti-inequality crusade has had three main pillars. First, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, brought the percentage of uninsured down from 16 percent in 2010 to 9 percent, the lowest in U.S. history. Second, tax benefits passed in the 2009 stimulus, and extended throughout the last seven years, raised the overall income of millions of poor Americans. Third, the administration went beyond the tax code to increase anti-poverty spending, like food stamps and long-term unemployment benefits, and to support the national movement for a higher minimum wage. Together, these measures helped to reduce after-tax inequality more than any administration on record
.. In the last six years, the number of uninsured families living around the poverty line fell by almost 50 percent. Those gains would be reversed, and more than 20 million people, many of them just above the poverty line, could suddenly lose access to health care.
.. the massive size of the proposed Trump tax is significant, because House Republicans are also calling for a balanced budget. Mathematically that means that the GOP will be on the lookout for $6 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. And Trump has essentially declared more than half the budget off-limits for cuts, since he wants to grow the military and preserve Social Security and Medicare.
.. With protective collars around defense and spending on the elderly, the rest of government spending would have to be bulldozed. This remainder is dominated by assistance for the young and poor. Medicaid would shrink, as might the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Food stamps would be cut. Federal unemployment insurance spending would fall, as would housing and energy assistance for the poor. The Department of Education would have to be gutted, taking federal student loans with it.
.. cutting welfare and health insurance payments to the poor in order to balance the budget while financing a historic tax cut for the wealthy
.. Presidents cannot slide the economy to 4 percent growth, as if GDP were a thermostat bar. But the government has great control over how growth is shared.
.. the Obama doctrine has put sharing at the heart of economic policy with a progressive plan to redistribute the country’s prodigious wealth to help low-income Americans of all ethnicities stay afloat in a period of severe inequality.
.. Hillary Clinton won by double digits among voters making less than $50,000. Trump won among all richer groups
.. his coalition seems to be living in a world ever so slightly detached from that described by national statistics. More than half of Republicans think that unemployment has increased under Obama. It has in fact fallen from 10 percent in 2010 to below 5 percent today.
What Happened on Election Day
People I know were angry. They were tired of being told they were racist and bigoted as they went about the business of mowing their lawns, writing college tuition checks and working their jobs as cops, secretaries and teachers’ aides. They kept being told they needed to look inward, examine their sins and judge themselves guilty. They had not forgotten when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008 and his wife, Michelle, said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country…”
So now we have President-Elect Donald Trump. I supported him because he promised to curb regulations, cut taxes and appoint constitutionalists to the Supreme Court. I supported him because Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have what it takes to turn around a stagnant economy or stand up to the special interests that block innovation.
.. The real danger Mr. Trump poses is the undermining of our politics — the norms that sustain our liberal democracies. His campaign was based on a divisive politics of identity. Ideals of equity, equal rights, diversity and inclusion were submerged under the weight of a rhetoric that raised racial and ethnic tensions and inflamed passions against imagined enemies — Mexican immigrants, Chinese exporters, Muslim refugees.
Illiberal democracy has been the bane of several nations around the world. Under Mr. Trump, the traditions in the United States of checks and balances and of rule of law will be tested seriously.
The political danger will be greatly magnified by Mr. Trump’s likely economic failure. He comes into office as the putative leader of middle and lower classes who feel they have been left behind. He has raised their expectations in ways that he cannot meet. There is little chance that incomes at the middle and lower end of income distribution will receive a large boost under his policies. The manufacturing jobs that have left will not return no matter how tough Mr. Trump’s trade policies get. These jobs have disappeared for good, largely thanks to technological changes, and not trade.
.. When the full scale of his economic disappointment sinks in sometime during his term, Mr. Trump may well react in the time-honored fashion of global populists like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. To keep his base mobilized and insulate himself from economic troubles, he may take shelter in an intensified form of the identity politics that worked so well for him during the presidential campaign. This would rip American society further apart along racial and ethnic cleavages.
The ugliness that characterized politics during the presidential campaign may be nothing compared with what may be yet to come.
.. Now it looks like a warning shot. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, Donald Trump was among the first to call for stonewalling President Obama’s choice to fill the seat.
.. Since 1900, had the Senate ever refused to confirm a nominee in a presidential election year as a result of the impending election? The answer was no (even if Mr. Cruz tried to argue, against the facts, that Justice Anthony Kennedy wasn’t confirmed in the election year of 1988.) The Republicans’ refusal to grant Judge Garland a hearing or schedule a vote was in fact unprecedented.
It was a new kind of hardball.
.. When they assumed Hillary Clinton would win, Republicans including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina talked about blocking Democratic Supreme Court picks indefinitely.
.. It’s hard to see how any Republican paid a price for radically altering the norms for Supreme Court appointments. Mr. Trump helped point the way, and the voters rewarded him and those who followed.
.. I believed, and still believe, that he is a man with a disordered personality and authoritarian tendencies. My job is to give him a chance to prove me wrong; his job is to prove me wrong.
.. The way he mistreats people will be normalized.
.. The Republican Party will fundamentally change, from a conservative party to one that champions European-style ethnic nationalism.
.. “Some say God moves in mysterious ways. I say, God grants humans the freedom to move in even more mysterious ways.”