Complexity at almost any level isn’t high on the list of those things appreciated by many people, maybe most, especially if the forces at work don’t stare the average person in the face. A popular default position is the childlike reduction of circumstances into a single person, such as the economic boom that is attributed solely to Trump by his congregation of worshippers. Don’t bother them with the details.
Like the Age of Augustus for Rome, we have that “Trump” economy (’17-’19), the “Bush” financial crisis (’07-’08), the “Reagan” boom following the “Reagan” recession, the “Hoover” depression (’29-’32), etc., etc. The adolescent fantasy is particularly acute when considering economic matters. It’s almost as if, in presidential elections, that we are choosing a god to deliver us from the vagaries of life. Quickly, millions of economic actors as free and independent producers and consumers, technological trends, social disruptions in the form of the decline in public morality and the family, huge government incentives and disincentives to be both unproductive and productive, and misbegotten popular beliefs are erased in a mad rush to praise a group’s patron saint. No wonder that we get so much wrong because many of us understand so little. Now isn’t that a clear condemnation of our system of education?
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the same is true in a person’s head. A lack of knowledge leads to the resort to the equivalent of magic. For instance, one person is our savior or master villain. Seldom is it that simple. A classic example of this mass psychomotor tic is the so-called “Trump” economic boom. Trump boosters reduce everything to the “genius” of Trump. In fact, the guy was more of a braggadocious surfer than a George Washington or reincarnation of ancient Rome’s Cincinnatus.
Trump benefitted from two years of united Republican control of the elective branches of the federal government in the first half of his only term as president. To address the huge government discouragements to be productive, the Republican playbook was unleashed. Not long after Trump took the oath, Congress under a Republican majority and Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell set to work to reverse the neo-socialism of the prior Pelosi Congress and Obama administration. The Congressional Review Act was dusted off to veto by congressional vote the Obama rampaging Leviathan’s regulations in the workplace and EPA. Trump had no idea, but he was around to sign the repeals. See, deregulation works, as predicted in the free-market sermons of the Chicago school economists (Friedman, Stigler, etc.).
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018 was festooned with the free-market, small-government ideas that have been bouncing around Republican circles and conservative think tanks since Reagan. If a nation wants to keep its businesses, stop beating them over the head with one of the highest capital gains tax regimes in the world.
If you want your people to be productive, put down the tax lash that was applied to their backs too. Republicans for years were slammed with “tax cuts for the rich”, so this time around, most of the benefits accrued to the middle class while additional slices of the population were removed from the tax rolls entirely. These ideas bounced around the Republican caucus for decades, long before Trump came down the escalator to bash “the swamp”. Trump showed and expressed no interest or knowledge in the intricacies of tax policy, except maybe what directly affected the family real estate empire. He had no idea about the strategic triad in national security nor supply-side economics. He’s not a reader nor deep thinker. He just happened to be the man behind the Resolute desk to hector the Republican caucuses to give him a trophy (a win) so he could revel in the Roman-like triumph of a signing ceremony. In that sense, narcissism proved useful.
Trump’s ubiquitous self-aggrandizement has been routinely applied to increased domestic energy production during his term. Simply put, Republicans don’t have the Democrats’ fossil-fuel phobia, which is a healthy beginning. It’s not necessarily a Trump thing; it’s the Republican Party platform of many iterations past. They’ve always wanted to open up ANWR, and I don’t know of many Republican leaders opposed to pipelines. They got through without a hitch when the GOP was in charge, pre-Trump. Ditto for approving domestic production on public lands. Trump only did what was established GOP doctrine.
The GOP was itching at the chance to rescind the donkey party’s draconian fuel-efficiency standards, which was a sleight-of-hand way to coerce you into a frivolous electric vehicle and ditch the far more practical piston-driven family sedan. Expressing the GOP’s longstanding faith in free markets, when the GOP is in power, the free-to-choose philosophy has dominant sway. The dictat was lifted like some of the other near-totalitarian nonsense of the donkey party. Not necessarily a Trump thing, a free-market GOP thing.
The results were a repetition of the Reagan-era boom, which is just shorthand for the implementation of the outlook coming out of the Hoover Institution, Heritage, and the American Enterprise Institute, the free market Club for Growth, etc. – some of them predating Reagan, and some bashed today by Trump for insufficient toadying.
The Federalist Society, the source of many of Trump’s judicial picks, dates back to the second year of Reagan’s first term. Without that Federalist Society list, who knows, we might be faced with Trump’s older sister, Mary Trump Barry, sitting on a federal circuit or the Supreme Court. To no surprise, Trump relied on the originalist Federalist Society to secure the support of an originalist GOP in order to appoint originalist judges. Even an ill-read Trump could figure that one out.
Speaking of Mary Trump Barry, appointed by Reagan as a US Attorney and later elevated by Bill Clinton to a district judgeship, she has some misgivings about her brother. Obviously with some animus, Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, recorded Mary T. Barry in a conversation about her brother. Speaking of a hot mic, this one sizzles. Mary Barry:
“All he [Trump] wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles. None. His goddamned tweeting and lying… oh my God. I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation [he doesn’t read]. The lying. Holy shit…. It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
If this was an episode of Family Feud, it would be a civil war with the direct family offspring versus the extended one.
The country was rewarded by the GOP’s Reaganomics in the two years of unified Republican control of the elective branches of government. From Jan. 2017 to Jan. 2019, Trump was one of 290 Republicans in the 115th Congress and the 45th presidency: 238 R congressman (majority) + 51 R senators (majority), + the R chief executive. The “I”, “I”, “I” of Trump is such a gross exaggeration that it borders on a lie.
The Pelosi House that took office in Jan. 2019 couldn’t stop the positive wave of Reaganomics through the economy. Average family income grew by $4,600 in 2019 alone, and all racial groups benefitted; the poverty rate plummeted; inflation hovered around the fed’s target; unemployment for all groups hit historic lows. Frequently, the quarterback is accorded the limelight, but how many weren’t the next Tom Brady because their career ended with an ambulance trip to the hospital due to a porous line, or their receiver corps was plagued with slow feet and stone hands? Trump just so happened to benefit from a great offensive line and receivers. And there wasn’t a Hillary around to protect the donkey party’s entrenched collectivism.
It didn’t take long for that self-proclaimed “winner” to be outed as an inveterate loser. In 2018, he lost the House. In 2020, his antics cost the Republicans the presidency and the Senate. In 2022, a Trump endorsement was the kiss of death, except in the deepest blood-red precincts.
Now, a good portion of registered Republicans seem prepared to trade their party identity for that of a lemming. What didn’t work in 2018, 2020, and 2022 is enthusiastically embraced for 2024 according to polls. Einstein’s formulation of insanity keeps coming to mind – doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
The truth is that the Electoral College doesn’t choose a god. It elects a chief executive to carry out the laws, and that’s it. Trump didn’t invent sensible economics. Heck, the little that he knows was given to him by the constellation of Republican advisers that attend to every Republican president.
Even Trump couldn’t screw up what was handed to him in 2017 to 2018. What he did manage to do was to see to it that it didn’t last beyond Jan. 2019. First, Pelosi seized the House gavel, then Schumer took the one in the Senate, and at the same time, a senescent oldster campaigning from his basement rest home bested him and moved into the White House. That orange-haired “winner” is a loser, loser, loser, thrice over.
Trump tries to take all the credit that rightfully belongs to a throng of conservative pundits, think tanks, and public figures. Instead, a bombastic clown dominates the scene. Four charges from Mary Trump Barry keep resonating: “lack of preparation”, “lying”, “cruel” and “phoniness”. That says about it all.
And to think that a large number of Republicans want to do it all over again. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
RogerG
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* The comments of Mary Trump Barry can be read in a Wikipedia post, and in the Washington Post (Aug. 22, 2020), “In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him’”, Michael Kranish, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maryanne-trump-barry-secret-recordings/2020/08/22/30d457f4-e334-11ea-ade1-28daf1a5e919_story.html
* The success of Trump’s unacknowledged Reaganomics can be read in “The Biden Economy and How It Could Be Fixed”, Andrew Puzder, Imprimis, Hillsdale College, March 2023, at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Imprimis_Mar_3-23_8pg_4-3Web.pdf