Category: Trump Era Page 12 of 13

Okay, so the Federal Reserve, coincidentally, now that Trump has been elected, has decided that the economy is at full employment and they’ve raised rates.

The funny thing is, it’s true. Sort of. The unemployment rate (u-1) is low enough to be considered “full employment.” What that means is that the labor market is tight enough that, for the first time in Obama’s reign, workers actually got raises in 2015.

According to the economic policy regime which has run the Federal Reserve, and the US, since Greenspan, that can’t be allowed. The moment employment starts causing “wage push inflation” (wage increases faster than the general rate of inflation) it must be stopped.

Of course, out of Obama’s era, there has been only one good year so far (though 2016 will probably come in as decent), and the only reason the unemployment rate has improved is because millions of Americans gave up on finding a job. As a percentage of the population, there are about as many jobs as there were at the bottom of the last recession.

There was quite a bit of growth, but it didn’t make it into wages. The only way it will do so is if the labor market stays tight for years, because there are years (decades, really) to make up for almost all the gains going to the top few percent.

So, Yellen probably “should” have raised rates six months or so ago. She didn’t, probably because she’s Obama’s appointee–the same way that Bernanke didn’t when he “should” have because he was Bush’s appointee, and wanted a Republican to replace Bush.

Under Barack Obama, the deficit (how much the US pays on its debt) dropped, but the debt increased by $7.917 trillion (not including the first year, which he didn’t control). The deficit dropped because the Federal Reserve kept interests rates extremely low for years and years and bought up a pile of debt as well.

But the debt is higher than it has been, in relative terms, since the WWII debt splurge. And if Yellen raises rates, debt service charges will start to increase (not immediately, much of it is in longer term instruments).

More to the point, higher interest rates are meant to make sure that wages increases stop, the unemployment rate increases, and that (in effect) the economy never actually recovers from the financial crisis.

So Trump has a problem. He needs cheap money if he’s to have a good economy, and Yellen is ending the cheap money era–just as he’s been elected.

It’s not completely a coincidence, but it’s not entirely not a coincidence, and if I were Trump or his team, I’d be livid, and it looks like they are.

Worse, Trump has a big stimulus plan. It’s a bad plan, but it’ll still create some jobs, and Yellen has said:

“I would say at this point that fiscal policy is not obviously needed to provide stimulus to help us get back to full employment,” Yellen said.

That’s Fed speak for “spend the money if you want, but we’ll neutralize every dollar you spend.” Which, by the way, has been orthodox Fed policy since Greenspan and arguably Volcker–almost 40 years.

So, Trump (and Bannon) if they want a good economy and their stimulus to work, have a problem: Yellen and the Federal Reserve Board. And Yellen has stated she won’t step down till her term ends, in 2024.

They can do two things. The first is to wait, not for Yellen, but for the terms of other Federal Reserve members, to expire. Two slots of the six (seven with Yellen) are currently empty, he can fill those. That gives him two. One, Powell, is a Republican and may be amenable; and Fischer’s term expires June 2018. So by late 2018, Trump might have a Fed willing to cooperate with him–or at least not sandbag him.

BUT that’s quite a while, and assumes that Powell is amenable. It gives Trump only two years to make the economy work how he needs it to work, and means his first two years will be sandbagged by the Fed. Trump’s followers are not going to care what the reason is, they expect results.

The other option is hardball. Governors can be removed for cause. Trump can say they have performed badly (it’s not a hard case, and people who voted Trump and many others will agree) and remove them. This can then go to the Supreme Court, which, if Trump is smart, will then be firmly in Republican hands.

I will be frank: I would absolutely do this. I would have done it as Obama to Bernanke (if Obama had actually wanted a good economy, or to have banks go under) and I would do it as Trump. For four decades, the Federal Reserve has sandbagged wages and made sure the rich got richer. This is not even in question, and the financial crisis was only the largest proof of it, not nearly the only one.

I think this is coming. The Federal Reserve bows (and Yellen has been very clear she won’t) or the resisting Governors get booted.

There will be screams from Democrats and “liberals” and I will ignore most of them. As with ending the Trans-Pacific Partnership, this is the right thing to do, and it’s something that should have been done decades ago. Appointed technocrats sandbagging Congress’s fiscal policy and deliberately crushing wages was always evil.

Get out your popcorn, folks.

Oh, and these sort of stakes are why there is such a huge effort, abetted by the CIA (and opposed by the FBI) to make sure that Trump doesn’t take office.

Like it or hate it, he’s going to have to destroy much of how DC has done business for the last 40 years, and many people in power really, really don’t want this.

Don’t defend the Federal Reserve if you claim to care about workers, the middle class, or anyone under the top 10 percent or so. They have acted unutterably evil for decades, and if it takes another evil person to destroy their power, I’m fine with it. Frankly, the Federal Reserve should be placed under direct control of Congress with four year terms at most, and every central bank in the world should lose its “independence.” They have misused that independence to do little more than make the rich richer for decades and they are profoundly anti-democratic.

It’s a pity so much that has to be done will likely be done by someone like Trump, and that he’ll do much of it the wrong way to support terrible policies like tax cuts, but that’s what happens when the Left allows the Right to be the populist party, and chooses to be the party of bailouts and technocrats.

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Trump Is No Longer Trump

By Ian Welsh

On December 13, 2016

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Stop thinking of Trump as Trump alone. He was never entirely that, and he’s definitely not that any more.

Trump is now Team Trump. The two most influential people in his court appear to be his son-in-law, Kushner, a fellow real-estate developer (and the guy who made the key strategic decisions which lead to Trump’s victor), and Bannon. Bannon is an economic nationalist with white nationalist leanings, who identifies with the working class and wants to bring manufacturing back to America. He’s quite willing to have a trade war to do it.

Priebus, the chief of staff, is also influential, but seems to be a bit of a drone. Trump’s children are influential, and it appears that Ivanka, his daughter, is the most influential of the three. She’s probably the most liberal person in the administration (even if she, strictly speaking, isn’t in the administration).

Trump has loaded up successful oligarchs and generals.

Steve Bannon

So, for example, his shift on China policy is in alignment with a lot of generals’ thinking (China is the real threat) and with what Bannon thinks (manufacturing jobs, economic nationalism).

His economic and labor policy will seek to both undermine labor rights and to spike the economy, which is essentially what authoritarians tend to do.

But the important point is that Trump, because he has only a few fixed ideas, even more than most Presidents, will be defined by the agendas of his closest advisers. To understand Trump’s moves, you need to understand his court.

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The Trump China Showdown Aligns with Reality

By Ian Welsh

On December 12, 2016

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Trump received a phone call from the Taiwanese president. That was a violation of the One China policy, where in order to have diplomatic relations with China, one cannot have formal relations with China.

It is quite clear that Trump did this deliberately, it was not a gaffe, but planned.

China stated this was unacceptable, but was willing to pretend it was a gaffe.

Trump doubled down, accusing China of currency manipulation hurting the US (not true right now, but massive in the past), of not helping enough with North Korea, and of unacceptable behaviour in the South China Sea, where it has been building islands in order to seize control of the sea. He said he sees no reason to abide by One China if the US isn’t getting something in return.

China’s official response is that there will be no negotiations over anything without One China first.

A Chinese tabloid which is party associated said that if the US rescinded One China, China should invade Taiwan and arm American enemies.

And here we are.

Some basics. One power maximum; the potential power, of a modern state, is equal to its industrial power. Many nations may not have as much power as their industry allows, but this is the limiter.

China is now the world’s largest manufacturer. It is the world’s potentially most powerful nation. However, China’s policy has been (quite sensibly) to gain the base first, then arm, for classic guns or butter reasons.

China did manipulate its currency to gain their manufacturing base, but the US and other Western elites were entirely complicit. China offered large profits to individuals and corporations, and they took that money. It’s that simple.

China’s ascension did not just hurt the US, it hurt Japan, who is probably America’s most loyal ally (with the possible exception of the UK or Canada).

The manufacturing jobs performed in China would have been, in an alternate universe, done by the people who elected Trump in the Rust Belt.

Trump and his advisors do not believe that China and the US’s interests are aligned; they see China as the rising power, who is rising at the expense of the US.

This is not insane. In fact, it is accurate. It is possible to imagine a world in which that rise led to shared prosperity, but no one is offering such policies and no one ever has.

Now, I want you to turn your attention to Russia. Yes, Russia.

See, the problem with NATO expansion, the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, the color revolutions, and sanctions against Russia, and all that stuff, is that it was forcing Russia into China’s camp.

Russia does not want to be China’s ally. Russians (at least in the past, not so sure any more) would far rather have allied with Europe and the US, but Europe and the US would simply not allow it. Running on crazed fumes from the Cold War, the US and Europe feared Russia, who is no longer a threat to take first sport, rather than China, who is.

Note that Trump has also expressed great skepticism about NATO. He puts it in money terms: “Why should we pay for Europe’s defense?” But the end is the same, a NATO pointed at Russia doesn’t make sense to Trump or his advisors.

And Trump’s plans for the US involve a change in trade, anyway. People are scared of a trade war, and they should be. Right now, what Trump is saying is at a meta-level which most people are too stupid to get: China is going to have to make a deal which helps American manufacturing, and everything is on the table in order to negotiate that. Everything.

Because Trump owes his election to the Rust Belt. He must deliver for them, in four years, or he will not be re-elected. His people, at least, will understand this. The election was too close. Trump must deliver.

And if China won’t cut a deal? Fine, slap tariffs on them. America is still America; American consumers can still consume, and if it turns into a trade war, manufacturing jobs may well come back to the US.

This is high stakes poker. It could cause a serious war, or it could send the world economy into a serious tailspin.

It is also a realignment moment. The US is pivoting from treating Russia as a big enemy, to treating China as the big threat. This is, whether you like it or not, rational: China is the actual threat to American hegemony.

I assume Trump thinks there is a deal to be made–perhaps he even thinks there is a way to make the deal into a win/win. We will see.

But do not think this is pure insanity, or that it is not well thought out. This is based on a world model in better accord with actual world conditions–more so than the world model under which Obama was operating.

If the status quo continues, the US will be superseded by China. At that point, if China and Russia are allies, options for the US are extremely limited. China is the rising power, Russia is a great power, but won’t a threat at the “super power” level again in the immediate future.

I will remind readers, once again, to stop assuming that Trump and his team are idiots just because they are doing things in new ways. I do not know if this pivot will work, and it could blow up spectacularly, but it is not prima facie stupid.

In fact, politicians who actually put the US’s real interests first would have never allowed China into the WTO, and certainly would have gone out of their way to make sure that China’s ascendence was a win/win, rather than a win/lose OR (if they were ruthless and slightly less smart) they would have done everything they could to prevent it. (I would not have favored that, to be clear).

Certainly, the US should have pivoted East years ago. This is a move which is made much more dangerous and problematic than it could have been by the fact that it wasn’t done when it should have been, enabled by an absolutely deranged policy towards Russia, which schizophrenically treated Russia as if it were both powerless and a huge threat.*

The world is getting a lot more dangerous, fast. But it was going to anyway. This may not be the best China policy possible, but it at least acknowledges reality.

(*I understand the impulse to prevent Russia from turning back into a huge threat, but that could have been managed with far less difficulty and in ways that wouldn’t have estranged Russia.)

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Russian Hacking of the US Election and Faithless Electors

By Ian Welsh

On December 11, 2016

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Alrighty, I had hoped to avoid this topic, because it’s stupid, but here we are: The Left can talk about nothing else.

The argument is that Russia interfered in the US election, and that this interference threw the election to Trump. Therefore, electors pledged to Trump should switch their vote to Clinton.

I’m tempted to just say, “This is insanity,” but let’s go through it step by step.

The CIA apparently believes that the Russians (GRU) hacked both the DNC and the RNC, along with Podesta and didn’t release the RNC emails. This is the basis for their argument that Russia was push the election away from Clinton.

Emptywheel has the best summary of this. She notes that:

First, hackers presumed to be GRU did hack and release emails from Colin Powell and an Republican-related server. The Powell emails (including some that weren’t picked up in the press), in particular, were detrimental to both candidates. The Republican ones were, like a great deal of the Democratic ones, utterly meaningless from a news standpoint.

So, weak on its point. Also, while there are reasons to believe Russia was involved in the various hacks, there is no smoking gun that makes it certain, especially not that it was Russian STATE-sponsored actors.

But let’s assume it’s true: Russians hacked and made sure that certain information wound up public.

So far, I am unaware of a single email which has been found to have been fabricated or doctored. Not one. All the released information appears to have been true. The information was germane to the election; there was simple more truth available about Clinton than Trump.

(There have also been allegations of hacking voting machines. This may be, but there is no proof. I’ll wait for that, as well as proof that the interference was from outside the US.)

So, there are some reasons to believe Russia may have tried to influence the election by releasing true–and damaging–information about Clinton, but they also appear to have released info against the Republicans too. So…what?

More to the point, none of this is ironclad. Contrary to the wailing I see from many, the idea that intelligence agency assessments are always correct is laughable, as anyone who was alive for Iraq knows. Intelligence agencies not only get things wrong, they have axes to grind and slant intelligence to suit both their own ends and the ends of their masters (still Obama).

If I were a Trump voter, and a bunch of electors were to give the election to Clinton, based on evidence that is this uncertain and which–even if it is true–amounts to “telling the truth about Hillary and Democrats,” I would be furious, and I would consider it a violation of democratic norms: An overturning of a valid election result because elites didn’t like the result.

And while I’m not saying that they should, or that I would (nor that I wouldn’t), many will feel that violence is the only solution if the ballot box is not respected.

If faithless electors give the election to Clinton, there will be a LOT of violence as a result, and there might even be a civil war.

If you’re pushing for this, understand what you are pushing for. One reason we have democratic elections and referendums (Hello, People Who Want to Overturn Brexit!), is so that we don’t settle such things by violent means.

Trump won the election, and unless you have ironclad proof of real election tampering that had impact enough to throw the election (a.k.a. voting fraud, in auditable form), you should probably just live with it. Unless you really think he’s Hitler and going to set up concentration camps, in which case I can see no argument against using force yourself.

This is where Nazi/Fascist/Hitler/Camps rhetoric leaves you. Nothing is off the table.

Either decide you mean it, or calm down and take shit off the table that is going to get a lot of people dead or hurt unless you pull it off.

(Oh yes, and, as a number of wags have noted, the idea of the CIA in specific, or the US in general, whining about foreign influence leading to a right-wing government is hilarious on its face.)

Update: The article has the worst case scenario for Russian hacks (minus machines) that can be even slightly suggested by the evidence IN ORDER to show that overturning an election result still isn’t justified. This doesn’t include whether the Russian state was directly behind any or all information releases. Only hardcore proof of machine hacking could justify the above outlined.

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Trump’s Not-So-Crazed Speech in Ohio

By Ian Welsh

On December 4, 2016

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I took the time to read the transcript of Trump’s speech, the entire transcript. It has three parts to it. First, he talks about what he’s going to do in very general terms (“Ra ra, we can fix America”). Then, he takes a victory lap and exorciates the press, and then he talks more about what he’s going to do.

According to this:

Cut taxes so that companies stay in the US.
Reduce regulations so corporations can produce in the US.
Renegotiate or leave NAFTA.
Consider leaving other trade deals seems implicit.
Repeal Obamacare.
Do something so people have healthcare.
Stop immigration from certain (a.k.a., Muslim countries) and stop taking refugees.
Massive infrastructure projects, including in the inner cities and rural America.
For those infrastructure programs, buy American and hire American.
Specifically bring manufacturing back to the rust belt.
He’s hired some billionaires, etc…that’s because he wants nasty winners on his team.
Executive branch employees can’t lobby for five years after working, can never lobby for foreign governments.
Affordable child support for all.
Increased pay and opportunities for women.
Partner with any nation to kill ISIS.
But other than that, no more wars.
More money for cops.
Great Wall
Work with other nations for win-win deals.
Repeal environmental restrictions on petroleum industries.

This is populist, little America-ism. Isolationism, bilateral trade deals, mind-our-own-business, combined with standard Republican tax cut and regulation policy.

Let me be clear, I think parts of this program are idiocy: American companies often pay no tax already, and taxes aren’t the primary issue in production. That doesn’t mean companies don’t use tricks to avoid paying American taxes, but there are ways to make them pay them. While there are certainly regulations which can be done away with, in general, regulations aren’t the issue either.

Climate change is real, so gutting enviro protections is insane, and coal jobs aren’t coming back–no matter what. Immigrants aren’t a significant problem, etc. Crime isn’t up, it’s down.

(He also inflated the trade deficit by about 300 billion, but it’s still too large.)

That said, this ain’t crazy stuff overall. What it is is a change from the current consensus on some important issues, especially American foreign and trade policy. The tax cuts are just more of the same.

I have doubts that Trump will be able to deliver on all of this, and he’s going to need to find some big pots of money to even try, especially given his ideas about tax cuts. His cabinet, while made up of rich people, does not engender confidence that he means what he says about corruption.

All that said, it’s NOT a crazy speech.

Now, if you read it below, you’ll also notice a very long and extended attack on the Press. It’s quite clear that Trump, personally, despises the press. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t also good strategy, much of the press, while they’ll cover him to inches, is going to work to de-legitimize him, so he needs to de-legitimize them.

I’m also tired of cherry picking. Trump wants to do some things that I truly despise. But, for example, killing the TPP was a really good thing. If he actually does follow through on his foreign policy promise of not attacking any more countries, that’d be a really good thing. Not everything Trump wants to do is bad, just as not everything he wants to do is good.

It should also be noted that Trump goes out of his way in this speech, as he has done in many others, to declare his love for African-Americans and Hispanics, and to say he intends to help them. Will he? Well, not with police violence, but, otherwise, we’ll see.

Trump, very clearly, wants to be loved and adored. That is his primary goal here. Trump would love nothing more than, in seven years, to be able to go to a rally with primarily Blacks or Hispanics and be cheered. So, while I don’t think he’ll deliver for them, I do think he wants to.

I’ve put the transcript below. I’ve taken out most of the (Applause) and (Booing) lines. Original transcript is from C-span.

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Transcript

For too long, Washington has tried to put us in boxes. They separate us by race, by age, by income, by geography, by place of birth. We spend too much time focusing on what divides us. Now is the time to embrace the one thing that truly unites us. You know what that is? America, America. It’s America.

You hear a lot of talk about how we’re becoming a globalized world, but the relationships people value in this country are local — family, city, state,…

There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag, and that flag is the American…

From now on, it’s going to be America first, OK? America first.

We’re gonna put ourselves first. We seek peace and harmony with the nations of the world, but that means recognizing the right of every country including our own to look after its citizens. We would put other countries first. We had people running our country that truly didn’t know what the hell they we’re doing. OK?

Don’t Underestimate Steven Bannon

By Ian Welsh

On December 1, 2016

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First, I told you not to underestimate Trump (well, I’ve told you repeatedly), now I’m going to tell you not to underestimate Bannon, his chief strategist, rewarded for supporting him through everything from Breitbart.

Here’s Bannon:

“The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get fucked over. If we deliver we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

Pretty much. Now, it was not necessary to gut the American working class to create a middle class in Asia, there were win/win ways to alleviate poverty outside the developed world without fucking working class Europeans, Americans, and anyone else over. But those methods were not possible under neoliberalism.

That point is important, but irrelevant to what Bannon is saying. The way the world economy was run completely fucked a lot of people in America, the EU, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere and Bannon is right that if the Trump White House can deliver for enough people, they will get to rule DC and America for 50 years, like the Dems did from 1932 to 1980 (yeah, there were Republicans, but they governed as Democrats).

Bannon’s problem is simple enough: Trump doesn’t really believe. Oh, he doesn’t not believe either, Trump doesn’t have firm beliefs of most any sort, except that Trump is the best and that he wants people to adore and cheer him. Trump’s picks for the cabinet are the same old, same old–Goldman Sachs for Treasury, etc., and his tax cut program, whether Bannon understands it or not, will undercut any long-term prosperity for the working and middle class. If his health secretary gets to end Medicare, that will also be a disaster.

Doing that stuff will deny Bannon his 50 years.

But it won’t deny Trump his eight years, because all that’s really required in the US (or Europe) for what feels sort of like prosperity for a while, is to simply stop insane austerity policies and for the muscle in both areas to insist on jobs. You can cut worker’s rights at the same time, and it’ll work for a while. Hitler wasn’t an economic genius, and he gutted workers rights. But he did end idiot austerity and most workers were better off for a time. It’s a wasting strategy (Hitler needed war for his economy), but it works for a time.

In more immediate terms, Bannon, for all he is decried as a racist, is the person you want to win most of the Trump White House fights, at least if you care about ordinary people, because he’s the guy who wants ordinary Americans to do well, and he knows he needs Hispanics and Blacks to get jobs too. Contrary to what mainstream economists (over 90 percent of whom, I remind you, did not notice the housing bubble) say, Trump can use tariffs to bring a lot of jobs back. The manufacturer of iPhones (FoxConn) has already said, sure, they’re willing to build them in the US. They aren’t going to kiss a market like that goodbye.

But Trump’s tax cutting instincts work against this. Cutting taxes for corporations isn’t as effective as tariffs, because corporations already pay very low taxes, and multinationals pay damn near none, since they play various jurisdictions off against each other.

Bannon will also need easy money from the Fed, and need to direct that money to where he wants. Trump will get to replace most Fed governors, fairly soon, so he can certainly have a compliant Federal Reserve. Bear in mind that the Fed gave away trillions of dollars, and was giving away tens of billions a month for years. That money is an available slush fund for anyone smart enough to use it to do more than bail out bankers.

Bannon, I suspect, is smart enough. 80 billion a month can buy a lot of jobs if you use it effectively, which Obama’s Fed never did.

So Bannon is a key man in the White House. If you’re a partisan Democrat first and don’t give a fuck about the working class and middle class, especially in flyover country, then Bannon needs to lose his fights, because if he wins them, Trump gets elected again (though, as I note, I don’t think Bannon gets his 50 years, unless he’s far more clever even than he’s so far indicated (not impossible)).

This is going to be a very interesting White House and administration, simply because Trump does not have definitive views on many issues. Who wins these internal fights will determine the entire course of Trump’s presidency, and may well determine America’s (and the world’s) future for decades.

Place your bets and don’t underestimate these people.

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Maybe It Is Time to Stop Underestimating Trump?

By Ian Welsh

On November 30, 2016

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I keep seeing people talking about how stupid Trump is.

It is certainly true that Trump is not book-smart. He probably wouldn’t score well on an IQ test.

But by now, it should be clear, except to functional idiots, that Trump is very good at getting what he wants.

This is a man who shits into a gold toilet. Who has slept with a succession of models. Yeah, he’s a sleazy predator, but he gets what he wants.

He won the primary and the election. He won the election spending half as much money as Clinton did. Yes, she won the popular vote total; that’s irrelevant. He won where he needed to win to get the Presidency.

He played the media like a maestro, getting a ton of coverage, got the subjects he wanted covered, when he wanted them covered.

People laugh at him saying he would have won the popular vote too, except for fraud, but that idea is now out there and those who want to believe it have seen it repeated in the press. Even those outlets who said it wasn’t true repeated it, and Trump’s followers don’t trust the press.

Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, ran his paid advertising and also decided where the campaigns efforts should go. He fine-targeted ads, and he went for places Trump could win with the least money and effort.

Trump says he hires “the best.” I dunno, but his daughter married someone scarily competent, and Trump had the sense to trust him, take his advice, and get out of the way and let him do his job.

Trump just convinced Carrier to keep some manufacturing jobs in the US (by bribing them with tax cuts, it seems). That sort of high profile personal intervention will be remembered, and has already said to his followers: “I’m delivering for you.”

Trump is clearly a very flawed individual, with really questionable morals and ethics, but he isn’t incompetent by any useful definition of the word. He may well wind up betraying his followers, certainly many of his cabinet picks are of deeply dubious individuals who favor policies which will hurt the working and middle classes.

But that doesn’t make him incompetent, that makes him a politician and a sleazy, but very good, salesman.

Trump’s opposition will continue getting their asses handed to them if they keep assuming that he’s a boob, or that he can’t take good advice. He’s a very savvy operator, and the people he trusts most, Bannon and Kushner, are extraordinarily competent men who have proved their loyalty.

What Trump doesn’t have is very firm policy opinions, and wonkish centrists and lefties think that makes him stupid, and that that type of stupid is the same thing as incompetent.

Trump stands a decent chance of juicing the economy even as he chops away at is remaining underpinnings through his tax cuts. If he does so, he will be re-elected.

I’d be careful betting against him.

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Trump on His Transition

By Ian Welsh

On November 21, 2016

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Folks on the Left really should watch this. It doesn’t sound insane, even if I disagree with parts. Note that I don’t disagree with parts of it, for example, killing the TPP trade deal.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Trump Era Page 12 of 13

Trump’s Coming Confrontation with Yellen and the Federal Reserve

Trump Is No Longer Trump

The Trump China Showdown Aligns with Reality

Russian Hacking of the US Election and Faithless Electors

Trump’s Not-So-Crazed Speech in Ohio

Don’t Underestimate Steven Bannon

Maybe It Is Time to Stop Underestimating Trump?

Trump on His Transition