Making News: New Magazine Article (Again) Debunks the Trump-as-Phony-Populist Claim

Tags

Making News, middle class, Populism, The American Conservative, Trump, working class

I’m pleased to announce that a new article of mine has just been published in The American Conservative. It updates a piece I wrote last year for this magazine, and reports that, as then, official U.S. data indicate that President Trump’s administration has worked out well economically for most of the middle- and working-class voters in his base who bet that he’d be a genuine champion of their interests.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of media appearances and other developments.

Im-Politic: The Debate and the Current Danger

Tags

Blob, Democrats, election 2016, election 2020, globalism, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Mainstream Media, Never Trumper, Populism, presidential debate, progressives, Trump

As difficult as it might be to believe that the verbal knife fight of a presidential debate held Tuesday night changed absolutely nothing about the election campaign, it’s increasingly clear to me that it changed absolutely nothing about the election campaign.

Politically speaking, that’s bad news for President Trump. After all, however flawed the national and, more important, the state polls might be, they’re virtually all saying that Democratic challenger Joe Biden is in the lead. Yes, there may be a significant hidden Trump vote out there, comprised of folks who either are too embarrassed to tell canvassers their real preferences, or too mistrustful of strangers, period. Yes, an enthusiasm gap does seem to favor the President. Yes, both nationally and in some key swing states, the results are tightening. But the hidden vote hypothesis remains a mere hypothesis. Anti-Trump sentiment could well overcome the lukewarm feelings about Biden. And the narrowing hasn’t been major or uniform as best as I can tell.

Therefore, for the debate to have helped the President, he needed to throw the former Vice President considerably off his game, or Biden needed to stumble into major trouble on his own. Neither happened. And since Mr. Trump and many of his backers set the expectations bar for Biden so low with their constant “Sleepy Joe” refrain and insistence that the 77-year old Democrat was losing his marbles along with too much of his physical energy and stamina, Biden’s at-least-perfectly fine coherence and energy level earned him a solid passing grade, and for now surely reeassured many voters worried about his capacities.

Interestingly, in this vein, the Trump performance displayed almost no interest in overtures of the President’s own aimed at enhancing his appeal beyond his base. One possible exception: For the first 20 minutes or so, the President was actually even-toned and on-message. But for whatever reason (some successful early baiting by Biden, frustration with moderator Chris Wallace, surprise at Biden’s performance, an inability to maintain self-control, or some combination of these), Mr. Trump eventually reverted to quasi-rally mode.

So it’s evident that, unless he decides to become more “presidential” (for lack of a better word) – a tactic that may well be way too late to convince any late deciders in any case – the President will continue to bank mainly on achieving two goals: first, amping up the (considerable) base to ensure astronomical turnout; and second, convincing some in key Democratic voting blocs that Biden can’t be trusted – as with his Tuesday night dig that Biden’s rejection of the Green New Deal proper means that hes “lost the Left,” and his Kamala Harris-like attacks on the former Vice President’s record on racial issues. Not that the first claim in particular can possibly be reconciled with other Trump allegations that his opponent will let “Socialism” run wild. But in American politics, consistency doesn’t necessarily equal effectiveness. At the same time, if the aforementioned polls are generally accurate, this Trump tack hasn’t paid off sufficiently yet.

But pure politics and the debate’s impact on the election aside, it’s also important to deal with fears that the event’s rancor once more revealed an American political system that can no longer produce leaders with both the competence and the personal qualities needed by any society to remain reasonably united – and therefore adequately successful by any measure. Of course, Mr. Trump and his supporters seem to have generated the greatest concerns along these lines, but there’s no shortage of worries that Biden is simply (as per the Trump statements above) a pawn of equally angry and reckless groups on the Left.

What, however, is new to say on these scores? The country was deeply and angrily divided before Mr. Trump was elected. It’s been deeply and angrily divided now and obviously will remain so after November 3. America’s most successful Presidents – the ones to whom the nation is most indebted – have been unifiers and motivators across the political spectrum. Mr. Trump has failed abjectly here – and revealingly, he’s failed despite a solid pre-CCP Virus record on that supposedly supremely important political issue, the economy.

Whether you believe he’s fanned these flames or not (and his regular use of violent words and phrases to describe what he’d like to do, or see happen, to some opponents clearly qualifies in my view), his interest in mollifying any critic’s legitimate concerns is nowhere to be found. He appears to have no clue how many women and for how long (a) have been victims of sexual assault and harmful, derogatory physical and verbal treatment of all kinds and (b) how they and others are genuinely pained and outraged by the (unpunished) behavior revealed on the “Access Hollywood” tape and alleged in several other cases, and by appearance-based insults of women (whose vulnerability to such verbal abuse has mattered so much more than that aimed at men simply because society and culture have been so thoroughly sexist for so long).

Moreover, although it may technically be true that the United States has cured itself of most truly systemic racism, he’s equally insensitive to the impact of cursory denials of these claims, and of how African Americans could validly point out that, contrary to the Trump MAGA campaign slogan, the nation wasn’t remotely “Great” for them for most of its pre-Trump (or pre-Obama) history. (I’m aware that former President Bill Clinton invoked the same idea, but Trump hard-liners need to do better here than such “What About-ism.”)

Nevertheless, lots of What About-ism is justified when it comes to the reactions – and previous records – of so many Trump critics. Unless they should be absolved of all blame for the nation’s current hot mess? As I’ve urged so many Never Trumpers since the President began his first run for the White House in 2015, it’s not enough to decry his various offenses. The best way to defeat him and insure against any Trumpist revivals (whether led by Mr. Trump or not) is to address seriously the genuine grievances that created so much of his base in the first place. To this day, however, the Never Trumpers have not only failed miserably or shown no signs of learning curves whatever. They’ve bent over backwards and turned cartwheels – often in some of the most deluded and/or dangerously unethical ways imaginable – to justify remaining in deep denial.

How do I count the examples? They include:

>the glaringly obvious effort to politicize intelligence and law enforcement agencies to sabotage his presidency with Russia collusion charges that turned out to be not only phony but look to have been planted or spread by the camps of both his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and of the late globalist neoconservative Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona — among others;

>the literally hysterical drive to impeach Trump based on an almost completely routine instance of diplomacy and foreign policymaking;

>the utterly shameless leaking and fabrications – by career bureaucrats and establishment Republicans with whom Trump needed to staff much of his administration for lack of a large enough cadre of talented and experienced populists and America Firsters – that helped foster and sustain these anti-Trump campaigns;

>the eagerness of the Mainstream Media to swallow the leakers’ claims on these and other subjects, and propagate them without any meaningful, on-the-record corroboration;

>the adamant refusal of McCain and other card-carrying members of the globalist bipartisan foreign policy Blob to admit to the disasters their strategies produced (the Iraq nation-building effort, their gushing and often bought-and-paid-for support of the rise of China), and to acknowledge the possibility of viable alternatives;

>the mind-bogglingly hypocritical attacks on the Trump China and other tariffs by Congressional Democrats and labor leaders who spent literally decades calling for the exact same policies in order to improve working- and middle-class economic fortunes;

>the transformation of support for more lenient but still sane immigration policies into thinly-disguised support for an Open Borders approach (epitomized by the backing of every Democratic candidate at this primary debate for providing free government healthcare to illegal aliens);

>the full-throated endorsement by growing numbers of progressives and other Democrats of dangerously divisive identity politics, education as outright propaganda, and authoritarian curbs on free expression;

>and perhaps most tragically ironic of all, the now common calls for anti-Trump and other forms of violence by Democrats – including Biden.  

All of which leaves much of the country with a dispiritingly Hobson’s Choice. I continue making it as I have since it became apparent that Mr. Trump was in the 2016 race to stay: If I could have chosen anyone in the U.S. population to stand for a critical mass of the public policies I’ve long supported, Mr. Trump wouldn’t have been in the first 95 percent of my choices – for all the inexperience and personality-related reasons that were on everyone’s mind.

But against virtually all expectations (including my own) he prevailed against a large, experienced Republican field. And for the reasons described above, his Democratic opponent struck me as being both unacceptable on most issues and dwnright scary on the intangibles.

Four years later, I see the same situation – though my fears about Trump’s opponents now go way beyond Biden himself. So I’ll make the same choice. I’m also left with these observations and (unanswered) questions, which first appeared in a 2018 article in connection with U.S. foreign policy, but which apply to all other major issues as well:

“….American elections have brought to power any number of mainstream politicians, and through them any number of policy operatives, skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable enough to maintain the status quo competently and even effect important reforms. And as shown by Trump’s election, the White House can be won by an outsider with avowedly disruptive ambitions who is largely unfamiliar with Washington’s formal and informal levers of power (and lacking an advisory corps large and savvy enough to at least partly tame the federal bureaucracy).

“But what is still unknown is whether a leader unconventional enough to develop or support truly innovative foreign policy ideas can rise to the top through the current political system and all of its stay-the-course influences and incentives. Equally uncertain—can the world outside mainstream political and policy circles produce a leader both willing to think and act outside establishment boxes, yet versed enough in its ways to achieve transformational goals? And perhaps most important of all: can the nation produce such a leader before war or depression make overhaul unavoidable.”

Im-Politic: A World Trade Organization Pull-Out Proposal that Falls Sadly Short

Tags

America First, CCP Virus, China, conservartives, coronavirus, COVID 19, export bans, GATT, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, health security, Im-Politic, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, national treatment, nationalism, non-discrimination, Populism, protectionism, reciprocity, Republicans, rules-based trade, sovereignty, Trade, unilateralism, World Trade Organization, WTO, Wuhan virus

I can barely describe how much I wanted to like Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s May 6 op-ed piece in The New York Times calling for a U.S. withdrawal from the World Trade Organization (WTO). That’s why I can also barely describe the growing disappointment I felt as I read through it.  At best, it deserves only an “A for effort” grade.

First, let’s give Hawley (considerable) credit where it’s due. As I’ve been arguing since it went into business at the start of 1995, and in fact was predicting during the national debate preceding Congress’ approval of the idea the fall before, the WTO has gravely harmed crucial American economic interests. (This recent post briefy summarizes my views.)

Let’s also give The Times op-ed page credit for running an article that’s even more strongly opposed to the pre-Trump U.S. trade policy status quo than President Trump has been – because although he’s approved policies that have thrown the WTO’s future into doubt, he’s never explicitly called for a pull-out, and in fact his administration has portrayed these measures as vital steps toward WTO reform.

Hawley, moreover, articulates many powerful indictments of the WTO’s failure to defend or advance U.S. interests satisfactorily – notably, the cover it’s given to China and other protectionist economies. 

Unfortunately, Hawley’s anti-WTO case and recommendations for going forward are fundamentally basedsed on two big misunderstandings. The first is that the pre-WTO global trading order set up by the United States was based on reciprocity, and therefore adequately safeguarded the interests of American workers. Absolutely not. In fact, the concept of reciprocity – holding that a country has no obligation to reduce its trade barriers any more than those of its partners – was explicitly rejected by the pre-WTO rules, which were known collectively as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Instead, this global trade regime was based on two principles that actually entitled protectionist countries to maintain higher trade and related economic barriers than those of freer trading countries. The first was called non-discrimination. It simply urged all member countries to treat all other countries the same trade-wise. So if, say, Japan largely closed its markets to one country, all it needed to do to satisfy GATT rules was to treat other countries just as badly.

The second core GATT principle was called national treatment. Under its terms, member countries agreed to treat foreign-owned companies the same as their own companies. So if, say, a country like (again) Japan, which was is still known for fostering cartel-like arrangements that favored some of its own companies over others wanted to discriminate against whatever foreign companies it wished, that was OK according to the WTO.

Some limited exceptions were permitted to both principles. But they explain in a nutshell why Japan’s trade predation (among others’) inflicted so much damage on U.S.-based manufacturing during the WTO period, and why its own economy (among others’) remained so hermetically sealed throughout.

The GATT’s only saving grace – as I just tried to hint by using terms like “urged” and “agreed”  – was that its rules were essentially unenforceable. All told, though, it’s a lousy model for post-WTO U.S. trade policy.

The WTO has featured a strong enforcement mechanism, which is why Hawley (and other critics, like me) have rightly argued that the organization has eroded U.S. national sovereignty. But at the same time, Hawley wants to replace it with “new arrangements and new rules, in concert with other free nations, to restore America’s economic sovereignty and allow this country to practice again the capitalism that made it strong.”

If the rules are for all intents and purposes voluntary, as with the GATT, then fine – although the question then arises of why the rules are needed in the first place. And the question becomes particularly pointed when it comes to the United States, whose longstanding role as the world’s importer of last resort has long given it more than enough unilateral leverage to create all by itself whatever terms of trade it wishes with any trade partner.

At the same time, this business about creating new arrangements with “other free nations” reveals a second major flaw in Hawley’s argument: a belief that there are lots of other countries out there that agree with the United States on defining what is and isn’t acceptable in international trade and commerce. That kind of consensus is a sine qua non of any rules-based system. In fact, it needs to predate the formal creation of that system. The existence of the system itself can’t summon it into existence – unless one or a group of members can force holdouts to accept the consensus, which brings us back to the question of why countries with those capabilities need a system in the first place.

But if anyone really believed in the required preexisting consensus before the CCP Virus struck, their conviction should lay in smoking ruins now. Because as of March 21, no fewer than 54 countries worldwide had been imposing export curbs of some kind on medical supplies, and the same think tank that compiled this data reported that, as of early April, that number had risen to 70. And their ranks included many U.S. allies. So it should be obvious that, when major chips are down, global trade becomes more of a free-for-all than ever.

Hawley has been among those leading U.S. conservatives and Republicans who are trying to develop a nationalist and populist approach to both domestic and international U.S. policy-making that can survive President Trump’s departure from the White House. (Another has been Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio.) And I’ve been very impressed by much of their work so far.

But if they’re genuinely concerned about transforming U.S. trade policy, they’ll recognize the need not only to pull the United States out of the WTO, but to replace that organization with a unilateral strategy incorporating the street smarts and the flexibility to free up America to handle its trade policy needs on its own. If others want to sign on and accept U.S. rules and unilateral enforcement, so much the better. But that kind of “America First” arrangement is the only kind of international regime that can adequately serve the national interest.

Making News: Talking China Trade Deal with Jersey Joe, John Batchelor…& More!

Tags

AlphaWeek.com, America First, Breitbart News Tonight, Breitbart.com, China, economic nationalism, energy, enforcement, Gordon G. Chang, IndustryToday.com, Jersey Joe, Joe Piscopo, John Carney, Making News, Middle East, Phase One, Populism, RealVision.com, tariffs, The Epoch Times, The Joe Piscopo Show, The John Batchelor Show, trade deal, trade deficit, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that I was interviewed this morning on the new U.S.-China trade deal on “The Joe Piscopo Show” on New York City’s AM 970 The Answer radio station.  Sorry that I could only give limited advance notice, but the podcast is on-line already!  Special bonus:  Jersey Joe and I also dealt with the Major League Baseball cheating scandal, too!

In addition last night, I was back on John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio program to discuss the so-called Phase One agreement with John and co-host Gordon G. Chang.  You can listen to the podcast here.

Tuesday night, I was interviewed on a wide range of foreign and domestic issues on “Breitbart News Tonight.”  Click on this link and scroll down till you see my January 14 segment.

The Breitbart.com folks were also kind enough to write up some portions of this segment in website items here and here.

On Tuesday, meanwhile, Breitbart‘s excellent economics and finance editor John Carney quoted me in his detailed analysis of the latest U.S. government report on consumer prices – which reveals whether the Trump trade wars have sparked any meaningful inflation.  You can read it at this link.  (Spoiler alert for everyone who hasn’t been paying attention to RealityChek‘s own coverage of this issue:  They haven’t.)

Meanwhile, The Epoch Times has quoted my views recently on energy security and what it means for America’s policy in the hopelessly dysfunctional Middle East, and on the progress made in reducing the U.S. the trade deficit.

On January 6, IndustryToday.com re-published – at this link – my recent blog post on the latest data undermining the claim that President Trump has betrayed his working class and middle class voters.  (Another spoiler alert:  These data indicate that he hasn’t.)

Finally, on January 2, the popular finance website AlphaWeek.com posted the video of my December RealVision.com interview on the virtues of an America First approach to U.S. foreign and trade policy – and whether Mr. Trump’s measures fit the bill.  Catch it here.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

 

 

 

Im-Politic: Still Clueless – About Trump – After All These Years

Tags

conservatives, election 2020, GOP, Im-Politic, Jeff Stein, Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, Mainstream Media, Populism, Republicans, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump

Since a U.S. Presidential election year is now underway and since the Mainstream Media, for all its credibility problems, still supply the news coverage that so many voters rely on in whole or in part, it seems important to present some evidence that, nearly four years after Donald Trump’s victorious presidential run, at least two newspapers arguably at the top of the journalistic heap still have no clue as to what or why it happened.

Both examples deal with President Trump’s capture of the Republican Party, and the most disturbing of the two examples comes from The New York Times. The title of its December 21 piece – “Fear and Loathing: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party” – tells you pretty much all you need to know about its perspective. Authors Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman do refer in passing to “Mr. Trump’s deviations from longstanding party orthodoxy on issues like foreign policy and tariffs,” but they apparently believe that they’ve had nothing whatever to do with the GOP’s transformation.

Instead, they portray the post-2016 party as nothing but a cult of personality, comprised of voters and a majority of office-holders so blindly devoted to and terrified of Mr. Trump, respectively, that they’re determined to overlook supposedly dispositive proof of the President’s unfitness for the White House as his Ukraine policies.

In fact, Martin and Haberman are so incapable of attributing the President’s success to the policy disasters spearheaded by the political establishment’s right wing (Google “financial crisis” and “Great Recession”) that one of their sources for this claim is no less than the head of the Club for Growth – a leading anti-Trump orthodox conservative organization.

And when they encounter a more convincing explanation – an observation by a North Carolina Republican Congressman that Mr. Trump “has a complete connection with the average Republican voter and that’s given him political power here” – they simply leave it hanging.

Somewhat better – but more bewildering – is Jeff Stein’s December 27 Washington Post report on “Trump’s quest to shatter GOP economics reached its culmination in 2019.” Let’s give Stein his due for focusing on the substance (even though he seems to forget that major Trump departures from Republican dogma began on his first day in office – when the President pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement).

But his two paragraphs could not be weirder – even from a standard political standpoint:

“Whether [the Trump era shift] will permanently remake the Republican Party, on the other hand, remains an open question.

“‘Republican lawmakers privately still believe the deficit is a problem and support free trade — but they’re not going to say that publicly, because it’s not where their voters are,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the libertarian-leaning Manhattan Institute. ‘I’m not sure Trump has changed the minds of Republican lawmakers as much as he has won over the base and lawmakers understand crossing the president is political suicide.’”

There’s no question that the long-term future of conservative, Trump-ian populism is still up in the air – if only because its triumph has been so sudden, and because largely as a result, its ability to create the institutional underpinnings needed for durability can’t be taken for granted.

But does Riedl really believe that Republican lawmakers matter to the party more than the base? That may be convenient for someone in a weakening establishment struggling to avoid the ash heap of history. But does Stein buy it? Or does his use of Riedl’s statement indicate that, like so many Mainstream Media reporters, he identifies with that weakening establishment, too?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: What the Mini-Deal Says About Trump’s China Policy

Tags

agriculture, business investment, censorship, China, decoupling, democracy, Democrats, election 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Hong Kong, Hong Kong protests, human rights, impeachment, Populism, Republicans, tariffs, Trade, trade talks, trade war, Trump, Uighurs, Ukraine, Ukraine Scandal, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The “Phase One” min-deal reached by the United States and China tamping down bilateral trade tensions for the moment, speaks volumes about the three major forces that are now driving President Trump’s China policy, and that will keep shaping it through the next U.S. election – though not always in consistent ways. They are:

>the President’s evident belief that his reelection hopes are being threatened mainly by revived impeachment threats but also by an economic slowdown that has unmistakably been influenced by the so-called trade war with China;

>his consequently increased need for political support from the establishment Republicans so numerous in Congress who have never boarded the Trump Tariff Train and who are worried about their own reelection chances next year; and

>Mr. Trump’s consistent (though generally unstated) belief that no matter how the formal trade talks proceed, America’s national security as well as economic interests require the U.S. economy to continue steadily decoupling from China’s.

The strength of the impeachment drive faced by the president is now indisputable. Some polls are even showing growing Republican support for not only impeachment by the House but removal by the Senate. Moreover, this political challenge comes at a time when the President’s strongest suit by far (at least according to polls) – his economic policy record – is looking somewhat weaker.

Few signs point to a recession breaking out by Election Day, much less during the preceding weeks or months. But growth has been slowing to levels that Mr. Trump himself has deemed unacceptable – in no small measure because they were the rates that prevailed for most of the Obama administration.

The tariff-heavy Trump trade policies hardly deserve all the blame. (See, e.g., this recent post.) But the failure of business investment to stay elevated following passage of major tax cuts for business is especially telling. It buttresses claims that both the President’s various sets of tariffs and the inconsistency with which they’ve been both threatened and applied have inhibited companies from approving big new expenditures on new factories and other facilities.

As a result, nothing that can reasonably be expected from Washington (in other words, ruling out a big infrastructure spending bill) is likelier to boost the economy more than a nerve-calming trade truce with China mainly featuring some Chinese market opening or re-opening (especially for agricultural products) in return for some U.S. tariff cuts, promises to refrain from new levies, or some some combination of such moves. At the least, such an agreement would in theory help growth maintain the momentum it has remaining.

A mini-deal along these lines would also please the Senate Republicans who might ultimately judge the President’s fate, and who generally have lagged far behind the GOP base in turning against pre-Trump China and broader trade policies. Moreover, as I’ve written, impeachment politics have greatly magnified their sway over Mr. Trump before. Despite his sky-high popularity with Republican voters, the President was heavily dependent on their political backing until this spring in order to neutralize any impeachment chances while his Russia ties were being investigated. That’s surely why his early policy initiatives were dominated by traditional Republican priorities, like tax cuts and repeal of former President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul, rather than by populist priorities like an infrastructure bill and the prompt imposition to tariffs.

Once the Special Counsel and other investigations flopped for various reasons, Mr. Trump had a much freer hand. But because of the emergence of “UkraineGate,” for now, those days are over. Probes growing out of those events are certain to last for months. Therefore, continued, much less higher, tariffs on China that could further drag on the economy and further frustrate the rural constituencies so crucial to the President and many other Republicans seem out of the question.

The President is so hamstrung that he’s been unable to marshal greater public support for staying the tariff course even though China is antagonizing American public opinion with its harsh suppression of the Hong Kong protests and the Muslim Uighur minority, and with its heavy handed efforts to extend its censorship practices to the National Basketball Association and other U.S. businesses. And don’t forget: These developments have placed China in a much weaker position, too.  

One reason that the President hasn’t been able to capitalize could well be his reluctance to declare publicly the functional equivalent of economic war, or his intent to decouple – presumably because any such statements would prompt the Chinese to crack down even further on American companies even doing business in the PRC that have nothing to do with job and production offshoring aimed at serving the U.S. market from super-cheap and highly subsidized Chinese facilities, as opposed to serving Chinese customers. And that reasoning has been entirely understandable.

Much less understandable – the President’s insistence that a trade war with China would be easy to win and inflict no economic harm on Americans, rather than choosing to challenge his compatriots to endure some sacrifices in order to beat back a mortal threat to their national security as well as prosperity. No wonder public support for so-called hard-line policies remotely strong enough to offset the opposition and reservations of the Congressional Republicans and most Democratic politicians is nowhere to be seen.

And don’t doubt that the Chinese fully understand. Whatever problems they initially experienced in figuring Mr. Trump out, they surely have concluded that they’re best advised to play the waiting game on the broader and deeper so-called structural issues dividing the two countries (e.g., intellectual property theft, technology extortion, massive subsidies) until the President is replaced by a Democrat who’s much easier to deal with.

Indeed, the evidence for this conclusion is abundant. China issues have played a small role in the Democratic primary campaign so far – even when it comes to long-time critics of pre-Trump trade policies like Democratic Socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. One likely explanation: In recent years, Democratic voters and leaners have markedly flipped on those pre-Trump approaches, from deep dislike to general approval. This shift in public opinion (matched in part by a trade flip in the other direction among Republicans and leaners) may also warrant some Chinese confidence that even a President Warren might prove a more acceptable interlocutor than Mr. Trump.

Nonetheless, the formal talks are not the only track on which the Trump administration’s China trade policies are running. And the other track – featuring unilateral U.S. moves to restrict Chinese involvement in the American economy, and thereby foster decoupling – is much less controversial than the trade talks and especially the tariffs and tariff threats clearly required to spur any meaningful progress.

Highly revealing on this score (in terms of the importance attached in Washington to decoupling): Even as a high level Chinese delegation was jetting to Washington, the President approved actions against Chinese tech companies and Chinese officials that were justified by human rights concerns, but that in the first case clearly advanced decoupling. Just as revealing (in terms of possible Chinese acceptance of a more skeptical new bipartisan U.S. consensus on China policy): Despite the provocative timing, the Chinese didn’t turn around and head back home once they heard the announcement.

Reinforcing the new American consensus on decoupling has unmistakably been the growing realization by the U.S. corporate sector that its heavy bets on China have dangerously increased its vulnerability not only to the whims of American politics, but to a Chinese regime that’s turned out to be much less hospitable than expected. As a result, “Phase One” is not only a suspiciously convenient-looking term being used by the President to describe his new deal. It also looks suitable for describing where his administration’s overall China policy stands right now.     

Im-Politic: New Article Shreds Trump-as-Fake-Populist Claims

Tags

election 2016, Im-Politic, middle class, Populism, The American Conservative, Trump, working class

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my newest freelance article.  Posted last night by The American Conservative, it uses recent, and usually overlooked, U.S. government data to debunk the claim that President Trump’s working- and middle-class voters were duped by the promises of a fake populist who proceeded to shaft them once he entered the Oval Office.  Here’s the link.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Im-Politic: Times Pundit Krugman Grows Ever More Truth-Challenged

Tags

class warfare, Fox News, Im-Politic, Immigration, non-college whites, Paul Krugman, polls, Populism, pundits, tariffs, The New York Times, Trade, Trump

Oops, he (almost) did it again. That’s not only (almost) a gender-specific version of a Britney Spears song. It’s also an apt description of Paul Krugman’s latest column for The New York Times. As I wrote on RealityChek two weeks ago, Krugman’s June 3 essay on tariffs cited information on the U.S. agriculture sector fallout from 1920s duties that the source material simply didn’t contain. Yesterday, his piece on President Trump’s allegedly phony populism were partly based on a blatantly cherry-picked poll result.

According to Krugman, Mr. Trump’s talk of helping his core white working class voters economically is in fact so transparently phony that even these voters no longer believe it. His evidence? A June 16 Fox News poll finding “that only 5 percent of whites without a college degree believe that Trump’s economic policies benefit ‘people like me,’ compared with 45 percent who believe that the benefits go to ‘people with more money.’”

Regardless of whether these views reflect economic reality, the results certainly sound damning. But here’s the rub. First, Krugman didn’t get the question exactly right. Pollsters asked respondents whether the Trump programs “benefit everyone” or “mostly benefit people like you….” In other words, the benefits distribution was not presented solely as an either-or choice.

Second, and more important, the percentage of whites without college degrees believing that the Trump program “benefit everyone” (i.e., including them, and not qualified with “mostly”) was 32 percent. That’s not stratospheric, by any means, but it’s a lot higher than five percent. (See question 24.) 

(Adding another complication missed by Krugman, that five percent wasn’t five percent of the entire non-college white sample. It was five percent of the respondents who didn’t view the Trump policies as benefiting “everyone.”)

And some other notable poll results Krugman conveniently passes over:

The percentage of total Trump voters answering that his economic policies “benefit everyone” was 67 percent. That finding suggests an inclusive, rather than an us-versus-them view of how the economy should work – which in turn interestingly indicates that this part of the electorate isn’t terribly receptive to the kinds of so-called class warfare memes pushed by so many Democratic politicians.

In addition, the share of non-college whites who say they’re “strongly” or “somewhat optimistic about the U.S. economy right now” was 55 percent. That’s only a bit less than the 58 percent of the total sample that turned in such answers.  (See question 23.)  

These Fox poll results hardly demonstrate that the President is home free with his base on the economy. Moreover, they show that he’s far from having persuaded this big share of his staunchest supporters – much less the rest of the electorate – that he’s on the right track when it comes to his signature issues of immigration and trade (although as is often the case, in my opinion, the questions on these subjects – see 16-20, and 25-26 – leave much to be desired).

But Krugman’s selective report on the survey, following his off-base portrayal of an analysis of past tariffs, does demonstrate that his writings should now be accompanied by the warning, “Let the reader beware.”

Im-Politic: Claims that Trump Has Betrayed His Voters Economically Look Weaker than Ever

Tags

Commerce Department, election 2016, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politics, Populism, real personal income, Trump

President Trump has betrayed all the (tens of millions) of working class and/or rural voters who supported him in 2016 – that’s been one of the most popular claims by his opponents politics and journalism alike. (See, e.g., this post.)  Even so, the evidence to the contrary being either ignored or unknown continues to impress.

At the end of last month, I presented some data showing that lower- and middle-income Americans have seen their economic lots improve faster relative to those of upper-income Americans under the first two years of Mr. Trump’s presidency than under the last two years of Barack Obama’s.  The gap hasn’t been enormous, but it sure seems to belie the idea that Trump voters were duped by a phony populist. 

This morning, the Commerce Department supplied some more in the form of its annual report on how inflation-adjusted personal income rose or shrank in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia over the latest data year (in this case, 2016-2017).

A casual reading of the report doesn’t provide much encouragement for Trump supporters. For example, of the ten states that saw real personal income rise the fastest, six gave their electoral votes to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, and only four to Mr. Trump. Moreover, of the ten states that performed the worst when it comes to personal income improvement, seven were in the Trump column and only three in Clinton’s.

Further, on average, the Clinton states enjoyed price-adjusted personal income advances of 2.60 percent in 2017. The comparable Trump state figure was only 2.05 percent.

So why do I argue that the Trump betrayal contentions get the story largely wrong? Because I’ve compared these 2016-2017 results with those of the year before – which was of course the last year of the Obama presidency. And what it shows is what surely matters to voters more the single year results – whether their personal incomes fared better or worse in 2017 than in 2016. And when these numbers are presented, the economic case for Trump votes looks awfully strong.

To be fair, after-inflation personal income nation-wide was much faster in Mr. Trump’s first year in office than in Mr. Obama’s last – and by a whopping 2.6 percent to 1.1 percent! Even so, the Trump states saw the best rates of improvement. Indeed, of the thirty states whose electoral votes were won by the President (and adding in Maine, which split its electoral votes), price-adjusted personal income grew faster in 2017 in fully 25 (or 80.65 percent). Income growth slowed year-on-year in only four 12.90 percent), and the rate stayed the same in two.

For most of the 21 Clinton states (including Maine), real personal incomes grew faster in 2017 than in 2016, too. But the percentage was lower (71.43 percent). In five of those 21 states (23.81 percent), inflation-adjusted personal income increases slowed, and Maine remained flat.

All together, inflation-adjusted personal income growth accelerated from 0.63 percent between 2015-2016 to 2.05 percent in 2016-17 for the Trump states – a much faster rate than the 1.58 percent to 2.60 percent speed-up for the Clinton states.

Especially interesting – between the two time periods, no fewer than seven Trump states saw their personal incomes grow in real terms in 2017 after shrinking in 2016. Only one Trump state (South Dakota) experienced the reverse. By contrast, none of the Clinton states suffered after-inflation personal income drops in 2016 – but none has experienced such dramatic improvement, either.

These state-wide numbers aren’t perfect measures of personal incomes developments, and they’re even more problematic as clues to political behavior. After all, most states are big enough to be highly diverse economically, and wide gaps between rich and poor can be found inside many. It’s also important to note that the Trump states generally keep lagging the Clinton states when real personal income growth is looked at in absolute terms.

But trends almost always deserve to count more than snapshots. And although the new real personal income numbers hardly show that the Trump states have entered economic nirvana, they make the betrayal claims look flimsier than ever.

Im-Politic: After Mueller/Barr, Can Trump Be Trump?

Tags

America First, Attorney General, Betsy de, budgets, conservatism, conservatives, establishment Republicans, foreign policy, globalism, healthcare, Im-Politic, Immigration, impeachment, Kevin McCarthy, Obamacare, Populism, Republicans, Robert Mueller, Ross Douthat, seasonal workers, Special Counsel, Special Olympics, tax cuts, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, Trump-Russia, visas, William P. Barr

A week ago, I posted on the likely political impact of the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of what have become known as the Trump-Russia scandals and of the release of Attorney General William P. Barr’s summary of its principal conclusions – which appear to put these charges and the threat of presidential impeachment they created behind Mr. Trump.

Now it’s time to think about a related and at least equally important subject: the policy effects. They could be profound enough to redefine the Trump presidency and the chief executive’s chances for reelection – even though the early indications seem to be saying exactly the opposite in ways that are sure to disappoint much of Mr. Trump’s political base. Here’s what I mean.

Ever since his administration’s opening months, I’ve believed that Mr. Trump’s policy choices have been strongly influenced by impeachment fears. Specifically, (and I have zero first-hand knowledge here) because President Trump feared that the Democrats and many mainstream Republicans were after his scalp, he concluded that he needed to appease his remaining allies in the latter’s ranks with policy initiatives they’ve long supported even though they broke with his own much less conventional and more populist campaign promises. 

In other words, it was the Russia and related scandal charges that were preventing “Trump from being Trump.”  

Moreover, this reasoning makes sense even if the President was certain that he faced no legal jeopardy. For impeachment ultimately is a political process, and although establishing criminal guilt is clearly helpful, it’s not essential.

The main evidence for my proposition has been the early Trump decision to prioritize Obamacare repeal over trade policy overhaul and infrastructure building; his almost libertarian-like initial budget proposal (at least when it comes to non-defense discretionary federal pending); his business-heavy tax cut; and numerous foreign policy moves that more closely resembled the globalist approaches he decried while running for the White House than the America First strategy his promised.

But although President Trump now seems certain to finish out his first term in office, he still seems to be currying favor with the Republican establishment. Just look at his latest budget proposal, and decision to go after Obamacare again – the healthcare move reportedly made despite the pleas of establishment Republicans like House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy to move on from an issue now stamped as a major loser politically and threat to the party’s 2020 election prospects across the board.

It’s true that many of Mr. Trump’s trade and immigration policies still clash with the donor-driven agenda of the Republican establishment, and especially the party’s Congressional leaders. But even on these signature issues, the President arguably could be breaking even more sharply with the longstanding Republican and conservative traditions.

For example, Mr. Trump continues to keep suspended his threat of higher tariffs on many imports from China in apparent hopes of reaching a successful trade deal even though Beijing still seems determined to avoid significant concessions on “structural issues” (like intellectual property theft and technology extortion) and on enforcement.

On immigration, the President has just raised the 2019 cap on visas for unskilled largely seasonal foreign guest workers to levels never reached even during the Obama years. His administration also has permitted visas for farm workers to hit record levels and done little to stem the growth of work permits for foreign graduates of U.S. college and universities that critics charge suppress wages for high skill native-born workers.

One intriguing explanation for this continuing policy schizophrenia comes from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. In a piece this past weekend, Douthat made the case that, although President Trump’s actual record has been largely heretical in mainstream conservative terms, when it comes to staffing (and especially key staff positions)

“there are effectively two Trump presidencies. One offers something like what the president promised on the campaign trail — a break with Paul Ryan’s green-eyeshade approach to entitlement reform, a more moderate tack on health care, an indifference to Obama-era conservative orthodoxies on fiscal and monetary policy.

“The other offers a continuation of the Tea Party’s insistence on spending cuts and Obamacare repeal, and appropriately its present leader is a former Tea Party congressman — Mick Mulvaney, the Zelig of the administration, whose zeal is apparently the main reason that the Obamacare lawsuit now has administration support.”

And the main reason for this confusing mix? The President has relied “on personnel who are associated with 2010-era G.O.P. orthodoxy, rather than elevating the kind of conservatives who have actively theorized for a more populist right.”

It’s so hard to argue with Douthat’s facts that I won’t. But they still leave the main puzzle unexplained – why so many of the President’s personnel picks have been so un-Trumpian. And much of the answer points to a problem that was clear to me ever since Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy achieved critical mass and momentum, and that doesn’t seem solvable for the foreseeable future.

Specifically, as I’ve previously noted, conservative populists (I’m never been thrilled with this description of “Trumpism,” but for the time being it’s convenient) have never created the institutions and therefore cohorts of first-rate policy specialists remotely capable of staffing a conservative populist administration. Even if you want to identify immigration as an exception – where organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies put out top-flight studies – it’s clear that nothing of the kind has ever existed on the trade and foreign policy fronts.

And even worse, because of the long lead-times needed to achieve these goals, Mr. Trump appears doomed to dealing with shortages of competent true-believers as far as the eye can see. In fact, he’ll face a special challenge in the next few months, as the second halves of first presidential terms tend to see the departures of many early, often burned out appointees. And of course, the Trump presidency has already experienced much more than its share of turnover.

So I’m expecting an indefinite continuation of the eye-popping sequence of events of the previous week – in which Trump Education Secretary Betsy deVos announced an end to federal funding of the popular Special Olympics program, a public outcry ensued, and the President abruptly reversed her decision.

It’s hard to imagine that this kind of zigging and zagging can win President Trump reelection. But it’s also conceivable that the post-impeachment situation will “Let Trump be Trump” just enough – especially if the Democrats err in picking an overall strategy for opposing him.  After all, nothing has been more common in recent American political history than completely off-base predictions of Mr. Trump’s demise.