Pundits endlessly bleat that President Donald Trump baffles them, but only because the blustery businessman discards the usual slick policy rhetoric to tell tall tales he believes to dim loyal followers, and makes the mistake of appointing some of them, like Mike Flynn, to high posts. Unpredictable? No one is more predictable than Donald Trump if one only views him as an ordinary if big-time and thin-skinned huckster with a shady past. Trump successfully portrays himself not so much as a traitor to his upper class, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as a rascally bad boy within it. Unlike Roosevelt, he does not welcome the wrath of ‘economic royalists’ since he staunchly remains one of them and fully intends to turn the spigot of federal funds and tax breaks wide open for the wealthy.
His brash self-serving businessman’s demeanour ought to, and apparently already does, serve to mobilize a gathering of considerable forces against him. The shrill voices warning about fascistic tendencies are probably but not entirely off track inasmuch as intensifying divisiveness is the way Trump instinctively promotes his agenda. Can his mishandlings, blunders and arrogance generate a large enough opposition that can check him? Despite all the bad, and in some cases comically bad, news already in play or on the horizon the prospects for regenerating a progressive New Deal/Great Society style coalition in the USA have never been more promising.
Under Trump’s pseudo-populist policy agenda, real estate magnates like himself will thrive as infrastructure spending improves their properties, bankers continue to be treated like nobility, huge corporations are gifted with tax cuts and regulatory breaks, the military is pacified with more reckless spending, the medical system ~ with Obamacare or not ~ absorbs every spare penny the average earner has, essential welfare programmes are mutilated by the richest people on the planet, and the police enjoy carte blanche to deal with the consequences. (Anthony Russo of Pentagon Papers fame said he knew why they tortured people in Vietnam ~ because they tortured people in the US, that is, former wardens and cops ran the interrogation programmes.) Trump at least will behave sanely with Russia, while Hilary Clinton diehards do their best to hang the preposterous “Putin collaborator” label on him.
Every phrase Trump utters is geared to please his core crowd, but he instantly reverts to cunning business practices he relished all his life alongside other schemers every bit as devious as he is. No recent public figure, except maybe Dick Cheney, embodies all the reasons why classical philosophers deemed merchants, because of their blinding greed, as unfit to govern. Trump epitomizes the glib amoral modern executive who says anything that serves his purposes. Who hasn’t at some time suffered a boss like him? One swoons, though, at the “what-if” vision of a fiery Barack Obama fighting for single payer healthcare and other domestic needs as combatively as Trump does for his reactionary agenda. Still, as the Trump era sputteringly starts, it is worth asking in the impish spirit of Monty Python (Life of Brian) what does Trump owe to his enemies? Trump undeniably owes Obama and Bill Clinton his licences to kill afforded by drone warfare, unconditional bank bailouts, habitual deference to market ideologues, unchecked military expenditure, failures to roll back mass surveillance and police state authority, and promotion of temporary and part-time jobs which comprised 90 per cent of Obama’s vaunted job creation. Nothing in Hilary’s policy creed countered any of the foregoing list.
Hilary Clinton helped Trump by campaigning far to the right of Dwight Eisenhower, force-feeding conservative nostrums to her thinning crowds, and antagonizing Bernie Sanders’ supporters who angrily discovered that the Democratic party establishment is as deft at dirty tricks as Republicans are, only against unwanted insurgents like themselves, not against Republicans the Hilary wing bent backwards to entice. She scornfully told Americans that they would never have National Health Care, wherein her donor network, not public-spirited judgment, was clearly evident. Trump, unlike Clinton, alertly balks at mega-trade deals, though more as a matter of bargaining tactics than any democratic concern about turning crucial economic decisions over to a nest of viperous private corporations.
Trump’s tax plan is nothing but a Reagan repeat that raises taxes on working families and cuts taxes for the rich, which will generate deficits everyone but the rich eventually will pay for. His infrastructure plan is a nifty corporate giveaway and a stealth privatization scheme. Trump’s repatriation holiday for overseas corporate cash troves, Craig Whitney notes, is “going go into buybacks that will pump up the equities bubble”, which is not what Trump backers anticipated. Trump filled the White House with minions from Goldman Sachs, an outfit Trump denounced on the campaign trail and one that delights in swindling citizens at home and abroad. One million fewer Americans are at work than before the Great Recession while the conventional 9-to-5 job with benefits rapidly is becoming a thing of the past. None of these nasty facts are easy to hide, and recall that only 27 per cent of eligible voters voted Trump.
The next four years threaten to be volatile, painful and fascinating as any crummy soap opera. The notion that “the worse things are, the better they are” never persuaded us, but now we must see if it might be true. In 1930 economist John Maynard Keynes ruefully scribbled that for a while longer “we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair.” Isn’t the time just about up on that one?
The writers are authors of No Clean Hands and of Parables of Permanent War.