Cerberus Economics

 Here's a credulous piece from the Times about Trump's presumed economic plan. Basically, Trump wants, are you ready for it, 3% economic growth, the national debt to be 3% of GDP and to add 3 million barrels of oil a day to America's energy output.

Meanwhile, in the real world, he's also planning on deporting a bunch of people, which would slow growth and reduce the tax revenue that even undocumented workers pay into the system. He's also proposing tariffs that will raise the price of goods and slow economic growth. He is proposing tax cuts that will explode the debt, again. If American oil companies produce 3 million more barrels of oil a day, the price of oil will fall below where it needs to be to reward the sort of drilling that is needed to add those 3 million barrels.

In short, Trump is promising a bunch of bullshit that he has no ability to deliver on. The sad part is that his failures will not register with people who consume our bullshit news media (to the degree that they consume non-celebrity news at all). So, Trump will fail to do what he promised, but it is unlikely to make a huge difference to the sort of voter who voted for Trump because he's a "straight shooter."

Josh Marshall wrote about this in a different context - health care policy:

I’ve written a few times recently about Donald Trump’s ability to stake out and hold territory in the public mind, the public attention span, with threats that he likely (though not certainly) can’t make good on or won’t even have the attention span or care enough to focus on. So he’ll end birthright citizenship or he’ll jail his opponents. Or maybe not. It’s part of his ability to always be taking the initiative on that mutable and uncanny territory where media narratives and old fashioned reality become a common fabric. He acts and keeps acting and his opponents react and keep reacting.

I was reminded of a central example of this this morning, something that happened again and again in his first term. He muses publicly about his sole and unchallenged right to make some decision or choice that in practice he knows nothing about. Usually he has no right to make that choice. Often he has no ability to make that choice. The fact that he has no ability to make such a choice in any remotely informed way adds to the angst many feel hearing his comments. It’s the essence of the power, a multiple-layered onion of gaslighting and itself a factor in keeping everyone off balance. It is, and is intended to serve as, a kind of meditation and magnification of his arbitrary power, how we’re all living not just in his world but in his will.

Trump truly is the master of post-factual politics.