A Dangerous Start to Talking Politics
Some thoughts on President Donald J Trump
This note is much longer than most of my Substack posts will be but I wanted to go into some detail because much of this conversation frames how so many people think about politics these days and how I think about our current president, undoubtedly the center of the political universe at this time, for good or for ill.
I don’t hate Donald Trump. I also don’t love him. Because of the tribal and sometimes cultish nature of today’s politics, some Trump supporters would lob “You have TDS” or “You’re a never-Trumper” at me whenever I criticized the guy during his first term. I didn’t vote for him in 2016 because I didn’t see any reason to trust him given that he had long been, whether in actual registration or by viewpoint, a Democrat. After his first couple of years I thought (and said on the air) “if I knew then what I know now, I would have voted for him.” I was particularly impressed with his tax reforms and his Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch.
When COVID hit, Donald Trump was oddly bipolar. He seemed to take the pandemic seriously and was significantly responsible for reining in the regulatory state enough that drug companies were able to create and release vaccines in — to use a Trumpism — a time frame nobody’s ever seen before. I realize the vaccines became controversial (and remain so) but the fact that they were produced so fast and, although some folks don’t want to admit it, saved a lot of lives (primarily among the old and those with other ailments), was incredible. And yet he talked about the virus as if it were a nearly irrelevant inconvenience. I won’t go into detailed history but it’s clear to me that his reaction to the pandemic is why he lost the election: he just didn’t seem to recognize or care how frightened people were (and how angry some others were…after all, Trump was a big part of keeping the economy shut down and keeping Anthony Fauci running the show.)
I had decided not to vote for Trump in 2020 and to continue with my usual habit of voting for the Libertarian candidate (even if clearly imperfect.) But then something happened: the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, always one of the least interesting and least intelligent members of the US Senate, and a guy who spent his entire adult life avoiding productive private sector work (because he was incapable of it, probably), chose as his running mate one Kamala Harris, a petty tyrant near-socialist political climber who always struck me as vapid and utterly principle-free. I told my listeners (on KHOW at the time) that I had decided to vote for Trump because “the choice of Kamala Harris means that a Biden administration will be further to the left and more incompetent than anybody believes.” Separate from anything else that happened with Trump after the 2020 election, that analysis could not have been more accurate. And I did in fact vote for Trump in 2020.
I’m not looking for a debate when I tell you that while I was never a “Never Trumper”, I became one on January 6, 2021. I believe that Trump abandoned his oath of office and his duty to the nation that day, not as much by what he did but by what he didn’t do: he didn’t lift a finger to stop the rioters at the Capitol until it was too late despite please from his family, top staff and advisors, and even famous Fox News personalities who had (and still have) Trump’s ear. It was the culmination of a couple months of lies about a “stolen election”, lies that tore apart the country and weakened our democratic republic.
Going into the election, I repeatedly told listeners: I’m not considering voting for Trump (or obviously for Biden or, later, for Harris) but if I were considering Trump the two things that would have me most concerned about him are that, first, I think he will do great harm to the economy by imposing tariffs and starting trade wars (because opposition to international trade is one of the few things I’ve seen him state consistently for decades) and, second, I think he will side with Vladimir Putin rather than with Ukraine, thus emboldening our enemies, especially China. (To be clear, I am not saying the US has a responsibility to spend unlimited money supporting Ukraine and I am very much in favor of the US making some sort of “minerals deal” with Ukraine where we recoup much or most or maybe even all of what we spent/spend to help them defeat the KGB thug who invaded them. And I am also not saying that Ukraine was or is a model of good government; it was famously corrupt but it’s wrong of the isolationists and Trump supporters to claim that that’s a good reason to let them be overrun by Russia.)
Again, so far at least, my two primary concerns about Trump have come true. (We’ll soon see how Trump plays the Ukraine/Russia situation given his recent mumblings of “walking away.” So much for “I’ll end the war in 24 hours”…but I’m getting ahead of myself…
So I voted Libertarian again in 2024. That said, my analysis in that election was pretty good: I made a bet on the air that Trump would win the election. In fact, I only got one state wrong in my predictions of each state. (As a general matter, I work hard to not let my views on a particular politician or policy or what I want to happen color my views on what I think will happen.)
So now here we are.
Imagine a giant balance…you know, the old-style scale where you weighed something but putting it on one side and putting (known) weights on the other side. You can picture a situation where a whole bunch of small or mid-sized objects on one side of the balance are outweighed by a couple of very heavy objects on the other side. In my bad analogy, the small and mid-sized things are most Trump policies. In my opinion most of his policies are somewhere between slightly good and excellent.
Some things I support:
Shrinking the size and intrusiveness and head count of the federal government including, where possible, canceling wasteful and arguably unconstitutional projects
Deregulation generally, and ordering his cabinet-level agencies to eliminate regulations that they deem to be non-compliant with the many recent Supreme Court rulings reining in the power of the regulatory state
Extending the 2017 tax reforms that gave most of the country a tax cut (and most of those relative few who didn’t are high-income earners in high-tax states who lost the ability to shift their state taxes on to other federal taxpayers or into the national debt)
Ending DEI in government and especially in the military
Controlling the border and deporting illegal alien criminals (I know there’s much to say about whether they’ve gone too far or done things the wrong way but I’m just laying out policies that I support rather than debating specific execution.)
Working to end the ridiculous participation in girls’/women’s sports of people who went through puberty as males
Pressuring NATO members to spend more on their own defense
Reducing US (and global) dependence on China
Pressuring trading partners to reduce tariff and non-tariff barriers to American goods (while understanding that doing so is much harder than most Americans understand because of the domestic political considerations facing “leaders” in those nations)
Modernizing the federal government (including military) procurement process
Seeking ways to lower prescription drug prices
Reducing the ability of anti-growth radicals to use federal law to stop various commercial activities, especially energy development, and expediting federal permitting of projects that require it.
All these and more are on one side of the scale as “the benefits of a Trump presidency.”
On the other side of the scale, “the negatives of a Trump presidency”, are a few small things that I mostly won’t mention and a couple of biggies:
On the small side, I disapprove of Trump’s effort to ban all military service by transgender folks who want to serve their country. (I understand restrictions for certain close-quarters environments and I do not support the use of the military for social “progress” experimentation but if there are patriotic and talented individuals who have been serving or want to serve, especially after years of military services failing to reach their recruitment goals, they should be allowed and welcomed.)
I think not enough people put Trump’s positions on trade and on international relations into an essentially internally coherent worldview: He deeply believes that almost any interaction with foreign countries means the US is losing or getting “ripped off.” To be sure, the US has let other countries take some advantage of us, “free-riding” on us such as with Europe and defense spending. But Trump takes it much too far. And the worst example is his 18th-century long-disproven mercantilist mindset in which he believes that a “trade deficit” (also known as a “capital surplus”) is inherently bad. Trump supporters don’t like it when I say this, but the president has a weak understanding of economics generally and a wild misunderstanding of trade economics specifically. (For the best writings on this, see Scott Lincicome and Don Boudreaux.)
Tariffs are taxes. Tariffs imposed by the US are paid by Americans. It’s true that foreign tariffs on American goods and services harm American manufacturers/suppliers of those things. But the primary victims of those tariffs are consumers in those countries who lose the ability to buy what they want to at a price they can afford. Tariffs make a few local producers wealthier by making almost everyone else poorer. In short, tariffs are a harmful policy that politicians often implement because the benefits get concentrated in politically powerful special interests while the mass of the public doesn’t put up a big fight despite being made slightly poorer. (Imagine a hundred million people each spending an extra $50 a year in tariffs and 5 companies each making an extra billion dollars a year by having the government squash their international competition. Those 5 companies will spend a lot of money lobbying for tariffs and will donate a lot of money to politicians who support the tariffs, while the 100 million American suffer quietly and some might not even know the harm being done to them. It’s also worth noting that LOTS of stuff America imports are “intermediate goods”, meaning stuff that American companies use as parts or tools to make things here. So tariffs will increase the cost of many things that most folks would think of as “Made in America.”
Our global supply chains developed as they did for good reason: they represent the best-known way to create products at a combination of quality and price that people can and will afford. It is impossible, at least in the short term, to recreate a global supply chain in the United States without significantly increasing the cost of everything made with parts that come through that supply chain. (I say in the short-term because eventually it may be possible for the costs of US-made stuff to get almost close to the cost of foreign-made stuff but only when robots/technology replace workers, in which case the politicians — whose primary motivation is buying votes — won’t get the benefits they’re seeking.)
By starting massive trade wars, President Trump will do a few key things: 1) make the country poorer (while claiming that he’ll be making us richer), 2) likely causing a local or global recession or, worse, stagflation (slowing economy with rising prices, like in the 1970s), 3) pushing away the allies whom we need to take on our adversaries, especially China.
So let’s take a minute on China: China really is a special case. Not just because, in fact not even primarily because, they’ve been very successful and have taken a lot of global manufacturing jobs. But rather because they are intent on dominating East Asia and the “first island chain” while also exerting significant coercive “loan to own” influence throughout the developing world. China objects to a US-led world order and wants to destroy it. Their efforts include massive militarization, gaining monopolies over some critical inputs for the industrialized world including technology firms and militaries, and the aforementioned buying of loyalty from corrupt or desperate politicians around the world.
It is both stupid and dangerous to be in a position where a leader of China can cut off most of the world’s supply of processed rare earth minerals which are critical to many current technologies including electric vehicles and certain military platforms, not least because of the powerful magnets that can be made with those minerals. China has a majority of the world’s production of the ores and a near-monopoly on processing so that even places that can mine their own ore have to send it to China to turn it into useful material. This must stop. And there might be a colorable argument for the use of tariffs against China, both to incentivize the creation of critical resource supplies elsewhere and to reduce their economic growth (even if it means also reducing ours…which it does.)
Note also that Trump focuses on the total value of trade between the US and China and the significant “imbalance” whereby China exports to the US far more than it imports from us. Trump takes that to mean the US has the leverage in this dispute. But it’s not true. Because much or most of what China gets from us, they can get elsewhere. But much of what we get from China, they are our sole source.
In order to take on an economic behemoth like China, we must work with allies around the world, especially in Europe and East Asia. But Trump has, at least until recently, treated them as badly or worse than he treated China. Why would any “ally” trust the Trump administration (or, going forward, the US) not to suddenly stab them in the back? I mean, Trump’s attacks on Canada are truly insane — and may end up in elections this month causing the re-election of the pathetic Liberal Party rather than the Conservatives who, before Trump’s juvenile and ignorant trade temper-tantrum, seemed poised for a landslide.
As far as the Ukraine/Russia war, it’s beyond disappointing how many Trump supporters seem to be following his lead on making excuses for the brutal Russian invasion. In a sense, I don’t care that much about Ukraine. It was highly corrupt (though perhaps this shock to the system might ameliorate that to some degree) and it’s far from here and it’s really much more Europe’s problem than ours. BUT, if Trump walks away and does not support Ukraine with weapons (even under the auspices of an agreement where Ukraine will later pay us back), the signal to China may be too powerful for Xi to resist: I think if Trump abandons Ukraine to Russia (even given whatever Europe tries to do to help Ukraine), Xi will try to take Taiwan during Trump’s presidency. That would be a catastrophe orders of magnitude greater than Ukraine.
Here’s a recent note by
on the subject (may be behind paywall depending on when you try to read it):
In short, despite his constant references to strength and his persona as a strong person (and wannabe “strongman”) Donald Trump’s benighted views on trade and international relations are weakening the nation in ways that pose massive risk will not be easily overcome.
Thus, even with only a few things on the bad side of the scale, I fear that the Trump presidency will be defined by a small number of disastrous decisions that overwhelm the far greater number of positive and useful achievements.
Contrary to a rabid Trump-supporting friend who says that this viewpoint just means that I “hate Trump”, I really don’t hate him. I reserve hate for people who truly deserve it; Rashida Tlaib comes to mind.
My take on Trump isn’t hatred; it’s disappointment that what could be one of the most transformative — in a good way — presidencies will go down as the second coming of Herbert Hoover, or worse.
That said, I will continue to praise Trump when he does good things and criticize when he does bad things. Because I don’t hate him. And because there’s so little honest analysis of a guy who turns so many supporters and detractors alike into emotional and irrational members of their respective tribes.