Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Trump Through a Pinhole
At a business dinner in San Francisco last week, the host surprised me by asking me to say a few words about the administration. Unprepared, I stood, spoke–and found myself supporting the administration. The host was so surprised in turn–remember, this was in San Francisco–that he asked me to jot down my notes.
Here they are, a summary of the way things look to your humble servant seven months into the administration.
Trump Through a Pinhole
During the recent eclipse, NASA urged us all to protect our eyes by turning our backs on the sun itself, observing the eclipse only through pinhole cameras. A similar technique proves remarkably useful in observing the Trump administration. If you ignore the strangely dazzling figure of the president himself, examining instead the second order effects he’s producing, you’ll find that a certain reassuring clarity emerges. To wit:
Item: Effectiveness
Congress may have thwarted the administration’s effort to replace Obamacare, but wherever the administration has been able to take action on its own it has done just that, demonstrating not incompetence but considerable effectiveness.
Consider ISIS. When Trump gave him a free hand in dealing with the terrorist organization, Defense Secretary James Mattis announced that the United States and its allies would no longer permit Isis to recapture territory after staging merely tactical retreats. Instead we would encircle ISIS forces—and destroy them. Since then, the territory that Isis controls has fallen by roughly one half. Or look at illegal immigration. After three decades in which administrations of both parties have failed to enforce immigration laws that were already on the books, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has begun to do so. Illegal immigration has dropped by some 70 percent.
The list goes on. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has begun rolling back regulations, notably on clean water, that the EPA had used to usurp the legislative function of Congress. OMB Director Mick Mulvaney has announced that for every new regulation any federal agency promulgates it must eliminate two. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has overturned the sexual harassment rules that the Obama administration had forced on universities. The White House has followed the nomination of Neal Gorsuch to the Supreme Court with the nominations of more than 30 others to the federal bench—and each of those nominees is, like Gorsuch, a thoroughly vetted originalist.
Still only eight months old, the Trump administration has demonstrated the ability to absorb new information and adjust to circumstances—that is, to learn in real time. It has displayed seriousness. It has gotten things done.
Item: Animal spirits
After eight years in which Washington displayed an attitude toward business that looked a lot like passive aggression—remember the seven years it took the Obama administration to review the Keystone Pipeline before rejecting it?—every American in business knows at some basic level that the Trump administration is on his side. This releases energies in itself. As even Keynes admitted, “Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive…can only be taken as the result of animal spirits.” Capital formation, job creation, growth: We now have an administration that celebrates these things instead of denigrating them—and business is responding. As I write, the Dow Jones index has just set its third record in as many days, continuing the climb that began when President Trump took office.
Throughout the bureaucracy, members of the Trump administration are confronting federal overreach, attempting to reduce the regulatory burden on business. Now the President himself has begun to campaign for tax reform—over the next ten weeks, according to the White House, Trump will crisscross the nation to argue for lower, simpler taxes. Animal spirits and tax reform. Will that lift growth from two percent or lower, the rate we’ve experience since 2000, back to the historic norm of three percent or more? The markets seem to be betting that it will. I wouldn’t bet against them.
Item: Immigration
President George W. Bush and the “gang of eight” in the Senate both attempted to achieve comprehensive immigration reform—and both encountered exactly the same insuperable problem: the American people simply would not have it. There is a long story to be told here, but after three decades in which the federal government had failed to enforce the law at our borders, citizens brimmed with distrust. Stop illegal immigration, the people in effect said to Washington—in a word, do your job—and only then might we permit you to enact immigration reform. Winning back the trust of the American people by ending illegal immigration. For at least a decade, that has represented the necessary first step, the sine qua non, of immigration reform.
Now the Trump administration may be achieving it. Illegal immigration, as I noted above, is already down some 70 percent. The administration remains committed to building a wall on the southern border, to establishing e-verify, and to enacting the RAISE Act, which would replace chain immigration with a points-based immigration system like that in Canada. If the administration accomplishes all of that, it may create a political opening of the kind that Bush and the gang of eight could never find. Trump could still mess it up, of course—the DACA controversy that erupted displays his talent for ham-fistedness. Yet if Nixon could go to China, then Trump may be able to give us real reform, substantially ending illegal immigration while devising a legal status from at least some of the undocumented immigrants who are already here.
Yes, I know. Donald Trump remains Donald Trump—impulsive, vain, profane, and erratic. But when you look at him through a pinhole, so to speak, you can see that in his way he loves the country; that his instincts run to smaller government, lower taxes, and respect for the Constitution; and that he has surrounded himself with many serious and accomplished people.
A lot of good may yet come of this strange moment.
Published in General
everify is the only workable solution
@peterrobinson, thank you for your perspective on President “Still Not Hillary”. Yes, we would have had a more “effective” Congress had she been elected. But that would have been only due to the contrast between a committed leftist and Republican squishes set free to drag their feet before giving in. (The Republican leadership has not yet figured out how to put the Democrats in that role.) It energized voters to send money and cast votes to make Republicans the majority in Congress, but they needed only deliver rhetoric so long as Obama was in the White House. Now they are threatened with exposure as frauds. And Trump is holding a spotlight on them.
It should also be noted that after the new Administration saw to it that Homeland Security and other alphabet agencies look into sex trafficking INSIDE THE USA, there was a huge uptick in arrests.
Some 1600 perps have since been arrested, some for possession of child porn on their computers, but most significantly, others who were arrested for kidnapping children and turning them into prostitutes. Also there were arrests of immigrants who utilize the nail salons under their control to employ women working as manicurists during the day, but “escorts” at night.
Some 600 to 700 women and children have been freed from their lives as sex slaves. Something the Democrats did not show much interest in. (Because of friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, maybe?)
I hate to be a curmudgeon, but I dispute your contention that Trump “loves this country in his own way…” unless you mean in the same way a wife beater loves his punching bag. Trump was as convinced as anyone that he was going to lose this election. His goal was to start a TV/media empire [perhaps purchasing Glenn Beck’s faded infrastructure] and continually pouring acid on the foundation pillars of our democracy. That’s why he started the memes of vast illegal voting, the election was rigged, he would accept the results if the election was “plausible” or “fair,” etc. He has never retracted his contention that America is at least as morally compromised as his hero Putin, if not more so, since Bush might have had pre-knowledge of 911 and lied us into the Iraq war.
I understand why men of good will like Bill Bennett or yourself flinch from accepting that he has an empty place where his ethics and morality should be, but he remains fundamentally unfit to be our leader.
##################
Immigration is going to be a very hard nut to crack.
here is California, there is over 20 BILLIONS of dollars spent annually on immigration. These include direct subsidies like AFDC, like Food Stamps and housing vouchers. These types of monetary assistance so annoyed the citizens in California that back in the late 1980’s, we tried to stop it through Prop 187. The measure passed as an initiative on the ballot, but then the liberal Calif Supreme Court stated that it would be inhumane to deprive new comers to the same assistance that citizens receive.
Since then – population has gone from 29 million to 40 million. White people are now minority in the state.
The news media, be it TV, news print and various “resistance” blog sites insist on the fact that the poor beleagured immigrants should be the focus of everyone’s attention, 24/7. In part, this is because so much money has come into city coffers, county coffers & state programs to assist immigrants that no bureaucrats or elected officials want to see the Goose that lays the Golden Egg be made less fertile. There are entire classes of monied industries being part of it. Do Calif landlords want immigration to end? Or Calif RE agents? Or new car sales people, sweat shops or restaurant owners who like to pay people under the counter. (especially food prep etc.)
####################
As an indie reporter back in 2004, aligned with Black Box voting proponents, especially Andy Stephenson, I will say this: the ballot situation in this nation was and is an extremely hackable one.
And in 2004-05, Democratic Leaders were less open to the information possessed by those who were looking into the matter than the Republicans. Di Feinstein was not interested. The Clinton family was not interested.
Nor was Schumer or McCaskil of Missouri. They did not even want to consider gerrymandering. Liberal and progressive news orgs stayed away from the matter. (Can anyone say “George Soros” maybe?) Amy Goodman finally had a show or two on last year about threats to democracy posed by gerrymandering and black box voting. Far too little far too late. If elections are “cheat-able” it is because that is what is desired by the leaders in both parties.
Simply from watching what happens to Calif initiatives I can tell you this much – one million ballots in this state are at the disposal of which ever party ins in charge. (As long as they let Feinstein in the mix of course.) That is why they could tell the public that the GM labelling initiative had failed – before the final one million ballots had been counted. And I am rather certain that in Nov 2016, the same one million ballots got switched from Trump or Stein over to Herself. (With Trump losing far more than Stein did, of course.)
Thanks Peter. Well spoken and fair. It’s hard to find such comments in the mainstream of political thought these days.
CarolJoy,
I wholeheartedly agree Dems do not want any restraints on the ability of the disorganized and unself-disiplined to be able to vote on election day if offered a pack of cigarettes to do so, and they will try to defeat any Republican “vote suppression” to stop it. That is different than threatening to tell millions of yobs in the sticks that they should not consider Hillary legitimate even if she beat him fair and square. I call that dumping acid at the base of the foundation pillars of our democracy.
I think gerrymandering is the pernicious legacy of Lee Atwater’s jui jitsu on the shakedown artists and poverty pimps negotiating how to apply the conflicting and self-contradictory terms of the Voting Rights Act. Racist clowns like Luis Gutierrez or Cynthia McKinney were given minority-majority safe havens as long as Repubs could dominate the rest of the countryside.
I don’t think claims about illegal voting are crazy. Not only do you have the project veritas videos about busing across state lines and such, but you also have polls that indicate large numbers of non citizens are registered to vote with some admitting they do in fact vote illegally.
A source
Another example
A few thousand is different than more than 3 million.
Can someone identify just two of those many positive accomplishments that “are far less successful than they might otherwise have been because [Trump]”?”
I hope that this complaint is not merely a variation on the theme of perfect being the enemy of good.
I wonder how we could ever measure the marginal reduction of success in any underachieving positive accomplishments.
I further wonder how Trump’s many underachieving positive accomplishments compare to accomplishments that might have been accomplished during a Hillary Clinton presidency.
(My not-so-inner inner nerd is compelled to point out that the pinhole acts as the lens of a camera or a projector, through which an image of the eclipse was projected on another surface – Peter stated that much correctly in his post. The pinhole is not for looking through in order to view the eclipse (or the Trump), as some posts suggest.)