The first Trump Administration was chaotic, counterproductive and largely a series of rhetorical outrages, interspersed with some pretty bad policy. When Covid came, it exposed the bad policy side of things and he was trounced. Then, people memory-holed the chaos, dysfunction and anger and just remembered that times were prosperous and Trump is "funny".
So, as we embark on what the Wall Street Journal has accurately termed the "Dumbest Trade War In History" it's worth noting what people got wrong about Trump 2.0 was rooted in Trump 1.0.
As Paul Krugman notes, Trump is doing what he said he would do. It remains my conviction that politicians - even aberrant ones like Trump - will at least try and do what they say they will do. What Trump discovered in his first term was that the government is a complicated thing and there are a ton of veto points. The presence of John Kelly, James Mattis and even Steve Mnuchin helped thwart his lunacy and splenetic desire to wreak havoc on Americans.
The central part of Project 2025 that was so chilling to those of us paying attention was that it was a blueprint to bulldoze those institutional constraints. This is why you have the purges of civil servants. (Matthew Yglesias is right that if at all possible, civil servants need to hang on for as long as they can.) This is why Elon Musk is largely able to execute what is looking more and more like a coup - not just in Very Online rhetoric, but actual practice.
The rich people who thought they could just write Trump checks and he would bestow favors on them are going to be surprised that he is who his opponents said he was. He was always who we said he was. It's just that now there is no one around him to constrain him, just a ketamine-addled billionaire freakshow who empowers his worst impulses.
Now, we all have to live with the consequences.
No comments:
Post a Comment