Oops, Mr. Pumpkinhead is going to be president. So, who gets the blame?
The Republicans for failing to kill his candidacy in the cradle since it was obviously a populist mutant having no relation to Republican orthodoxy. The cable channels who gave him billions in free, unquestioning airtime. The Democrats for nominating Hillary Clinton, even though they knew how much baggage she came equipped with and had learned she was unelectably unpopular when a little-known, black, freshman senator was able to best her in the primaries eight years earlier.
The Democratic Party also deserves conviction for political malpractice for failing to learn a lesson staring it in the face for thirty years. Starting as early as 1928 it became the party of the working man. But the anti-war stance of Democrats during Vietnam allowed the hawkish Nixon to steal blue collar workers away. Racism also played a part, the famous Southern strategy. Under Reagan, cultural issues were added to the mix to create Reagan Democrats who were promised a morning in America that dawned for Wall Street but never really materialized for Main Street.
It happened again this year. Trump acolytes claim he will take back their country for them from the black president and the party of gay rights, abortion, multiculturalism, environmental regulation, gun control, atheism and all the rest. But if they think the Republicans are going to give them a return to some imagined good old days they are doomed to disappointment. Capitalism makes new and improved clocks at the lowest cost using foreign labor, it doesn’t turn them back.
So what happens now? Presumably Republicans who don’t necessarily share Trump’s wackier ideas will go along with a few and then force him to accept whatever orthodox right wing legislation they pass through Congress. They will probably allow him to build his wall and deport some Hispanics, to discriminate against LGBT citizens and ban Muslim immigration. They will gleefully repeal Obamacare, depriving 20 million people of insurance, but it won’t be replaced by anything a populist worker could love. Rather, one can expect to see the medical-insurance-pharmaceutical complex permitted to solidify its stranglehold on all healthcare.
Republicans will also cheerfully repeal regulations on financial companies and on polluting industries though how that will produce good jobs at good wages is unclear. Trump has called explicitly for elimination of EPA and the Department of Education and believes climate change is a Chinese hoax, so our participation in efforts to combat it are likely to end and our children will be educated to the standards demanded by whichever backward state they are born into. Our children will get stupider and energy companies will get richer, though the rest of us may not care for the droughts, famines, polluted groundwater, depleted aquifers, earthquakes and plagues that fracking up the planet will produce.
Trump will clearly get the chance to choose the successor to Antonin Scalia for the Supreme Court and is likely to get as many as three more opportunities over the next four years to yank the court in a profoundly conservative direction for a generation or more. Since he knows nothing about constitutional jurisprudence and cares less, he will be the puppet of those who do. Expect the gutting of voting rights and civil rights protections. Citizens United will stand, permitting corporations to dominate elections, and the police power of the state and economic power of corporations will be favored over the rights of individual citizens.
As to the reason many voted for Trump, the hope of more halcyon days ahead for the working class, my Magic Eight Ball says “outlook not so good.” Wilbur Ross, leveraged-buyout billionaire who is mentioned as a possible Secretary of Commerce, and Peter Navarro, a polemic-writing mercantilist professor, are Trump economic advisors who have drafted a Trump plan to make the country great again.
Unsurprisingly, it contains the same Republicans pie-in-the-sky, trickle-down, supply-side voodoo that the right has been peddling ever since Jack Kemp hypnotized Reagan. So, Ross and Navarro say huge prosperity, a 25,000 Dow and a balanced budget are just around the corner without raising taxes or cutting spending. The secret? Growth created by tax cuts, reduced regulation, and the production and export of energy to eliminate the trade deficit. And perhaps a little trade war or tariff threat along the way.
The nonpartisan Tax Foundation calculated that this nonsense would increase the deficit by $2.6 trillion, not eliminate it, and Forbes Magazine, hardly a leftwing organ, warns that Navarro’s trade nostrums are dead wrong and dangerous. But Trump, like Reagan before him, has drunk the Kool-aid.
The suffering working class that was instrumental in gaining Trump the presidency can be expected to react badly when the same old prescriptions have the same result — namely giant tax breaks and increased wealth for those at the top, known as capital, and no improvement in the lot of those who do the work or are left behind without a job, known as labor. The Reagan Democrat–Tea Party–Trump blue collars keep saying they won’t get fooled again by Wall Street and the elites who live in gold towers, but they always do.
An early look at the betrayal ahead is furnished by Politico’s reporting on the names being tossed around as likely members of a Trump Cabinet, which I have annotated when available with estimated net worth — NW– a handy measure of the nominees’ populist fervor. Secretary of State: the undiplomatic bomb-thrower Newt Gingrich, NW $18 million. Attorney General: conspiracy theorist Rudy Giuliani, so Hillary can expect to be hauled into court and minorities to face stormtroopers unleashed. NW $45 million.
The leading name for Treasury is Steven Mnuchin, NW undisclosed but surely hundreds of millions after 17 years at Goldman Sachs, the takeover of a bank ruined in the 2008 crash, the use of government bailout money to bring it back to life and a subsequent history of predatory lending. For Defense, superhawks Sen. Jeff Sessions and Rep. Duncan Hunter, despite Trump’s claim that he’d be far less interventionist aboard. Interior: Forrest Lucas, NW $500 million, the head of Lucas Oil — drill baby drill — (or possibly Sarah Palin, presumably just for the outdoorsy photo-ops), Energy: Harold Hamm, NW $1.3 billion, another oil mogul. Health and Human Services: Gov. Rick Scott, NW $147 million, who as CEO of Columbia/HCA presided over the largest Medicare fraud in history so why not entrust the program to him? And if Education is allowed to survive, evangelical neurosurgeon Ben Carson, NW $10 million.
Do the blue collar voters who helped elect Trump really suppose this motley crew is going to place the people’s well-being above their own self-interest, the trait that made them rich? Pigs might fly, but the smart money in on capitalists using their time in government to increase their capital. Expect the financial shenanigans, conflicts of interest and self-dealing to rival the good old days of Teapot Dome. And then there’s the Donald’s perpetual pursuit of celebrity groupies lining up for the groper-in-chief. It ought to be a four years to remember, and a return to the good old days — of Louis XVI. Melania, how do you say “let them eat cake,” in Slovenian?