He can make you so nuts — he can so vacuum your brains out — that you can’t think clearly about the most important questions today: What things are true even if Trump believes them, and therefore merit support?
.. But I worry about his pugnacious tactics. I would be negotiating with Beijing in total secret. Let everybody save face. If he smacks China with “America First,” China will smack him with “China First,” and soon we’ll have a good ol’ trade war.
.. But what Trump doesn’t see is that while this may get him some short-term jobs headlines, in the long-run C.E.O.s may prefer not to build their next factory in America, precisely because it will be hostage to Trump’s Twitter lashings. They also may quietly replace more workers with robots faster, because Trump can’t see or complain about that.
.. “Trump wants to protect jobs,” explained Gidi Grinstein, who heads the Israeli policy institute Reut. “What we really need is to protect workers.”
You need to protect workers, not jobs, because every worker today will most likely have to transition multiple times to multiple jobs as the pace of change accelerates. So the best way you help workers is by ensuring that they are flexible — that they have the skills, safety nets, health care and lifelong learning opportunities to make those leaps and that they live in cities open to innovation, entrepreneurship and high-I.Q. risk-takers.
.. Eric Beinhocker, executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford, calls this the “new progressive localism.” For too long, he argues, “progressives have been so focused on Washington, they’ve missed the fact that most of the progress on the issues they care about — environment, education, economic opportunity and work-force skills — has happened at the local level.
Because that is where trust lives.”
Trust is what enables you to adapt quickly and experiment often, i.e., to be flexible. And there is so much more trust on the local level than the national level in America today.
.. he is saving jobs but hurting workers, because he is making workers less secure and less flexible.
Why Trump Is Thriving in an Age of Distrust
“Populism is people taking authority back from institutions they no longer have faith in.
These dynamics help explain why, for example, political and media elites have been so troubled by Trump’s skepticism of U.S. intelligence findings regarding Russia’s interference in the country’s presidential election. They trust government institutions, and they are alarmed by Trump’s lack of trust in those institutions. Likewise, many of Trump’s supporters aren’t troubled by Trump’s skepticism because they too are skeptical of the government.
.. Lack of belief in system + economic and societal fears + loss of trust in institutions = populism, or at least the potential for populism. “Populism is people … taking authority back from institutions they no longer have faith in,” he told me, and it’s now ascendant not just in the United States, but in countries like France and Germany as well.
Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low
- 32% say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust
- 14% of Republicans express trust, down from 32% last year
- Confidence drops among younger and older Americans
My concern with Trump’s team of generals
My issue with having a foreign policy Cabinet consisting of general officers and Goldman Sachs alums
All of the public opinion data shows that as public trust in institutions has waned, trust in the military has remained high. And this, in turn, has led to the militarization of foreign policy.
.. because of the gap in trust, the Pentagon commands an ever-growing share of the foreign affairs budget. This means it exercises operational control over a large swath of activities that heretofore were probably not thought of as being under the purview of the Defense Department.
.. In the long term, it is dangerous to signal that the best way to become secretary of state is to have achieved the rank of a general officer. There are a lot of other dimensions of foreign policy that go beyond military statecraft. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not a coincidence that the best secretaries of state over the past 40 years — George P. Shultz and James A. Baker — were originally secretaries of the Treasury
.. A team of generals might be talented, but it’s also one-dimensional.
.. appointing general officers to Cabinet-level positions could be a way to restore faith in government. And maybe they will do a great job and, like Washington or Cincinnatus, ride off into the sunset. Or it could just convince the public and the politicians that the only route to a policy principal position is not just service, but a lifelong career in the military.
.. the most talented former general would be serving an unpredictable, dangerous gasbag of a president. Failure is likely. In which case, Trump will have proven to be a true egalitarian, and have eviscerated public faith in the last outsized institution in America.