by Rick Wilson
All of this is building toward an economic disaster out of proportion to the mere correction we would experience after a long period of growth, all else being equal. No, the collapse next time won’t just be awful; it’ll be made more dangerous and destructive by an economic ignoramus trying to rage-tweet the country away from the economic cliff.
My suggested portfolio in the coming Trump depression is gold, ammunition, and canned goods.
Tweets from Donald Trump’s Second Term
@realDonaldTrump: Because You are so Proud of the Greet Job I do as your FAVORITE PRECEDENT, I have issued an executive order which is totally legal and cool to do called Prima Noctis. Lay back and think of Trump, American lady women.
@BigBillBarr: Totally legal, sir! If the President says it, it’s law. That’s in the REAL Constitution.
@realDonaldTrump: THANK YOU Bill Barr for stoping the Witch Haunt!
@HillaryClinton: Da fuq?
GENERALISSIMO TRUMP AND PILLOW FORTRESS AMERICA
Democrats lost a meaningful fraction of their male base after 1980 because they were perceived to be weak on national security. They reinforced this impression over and over, squandering the Democratic foreign and military policy legacies of FDR, Truman, and JFK. They now have an enormous opportunity, as both a moral and a political force, to take back the high ground on defense, security, and terrorism—to mount a ringing, Kennedy- and Reaganesque defense of America’s role as a force for good in the world. Part of the referendum on Donald Trump is to show where the grubby rhetoric of the United States as a transactional, mercenary force leads, and how a man fueled by profound ignorance, low biases, irresistible impulses, and obvious weaknesses for praise and money put America at risk in an unstable world.
Even in the first term, the indictment is powerful. Trump has given the Democratic nominee a perfect opportunity to reclaim the mantle of being the national security grown-up in the room. He’s a foreign policy failure and a constant danger to national security. The case makes itself: From Putin to North Korea to Iran to ISIS to Saudi Arabia to NATO, Trump turned U.S. foreign policy into a pay-to-play humiliation, coupled with a juvenile, shit-talking style that sounds more like something from a third-world, beret-wearing caudillo from the 1970s.
We’re suffering from diminished credibility, influence, and security in the world, and the knock-on effects of this era will ripple out for decades, building a series of problems that will haunt our diplomats and damage our interests. America’s foreign and military policy inflection points are marked by big, transformative moments and small mistakes that mushroom into slow-burn conflicts we can’t quite win but don’t quite lose.
Trump’s endless self-aggrandizement as the Greatest Negotiator in the History of Mankind™, a human quantum computer of deal-making prowess that would break the wills, hearts, and backs of our trading competitors, military rivals, and players on the global stage turned out to be the largest nothingburger in the history of dealmaking. At this point, I wouldn’t trust Donald Trump to negotiate for a 1999 Hyundai at a used-car lot, and no one else who’s watched him over the last two and a half years would either.
On trade, every single deal that Trump promised would be quick, easy, and immediately profitable has been a flop. The rebranded NAFTA is still NAFTA. The trade war with China has left the Xi government in a stronger position than ever, while devastating Midwest farms and industries. Trump’s trade record is one long on bluster and higher costs for Americans, followed by concessions to the ostensible targets of his policy.
On foreign relations, from NATO to the Baltics to South America to the Persian Gulf, Trump has left allies wondering at the source of his affection for their enemies and his animus toward their leaders. From the Helsinki debacle in which Trump sided with the Russian leader over his own intelligence services4 to the weakening of NATO to Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, Trump has been outstanding as Vladimir Putin’s lapdog. He treats journalist-murdering Saudi Arabian rising-star Mohammed bin Salman with kid gloves, including providing U.S. intelligence and firepower for the Saudi war against Yemen.5 Far from making America safer, the president has left even our most loyal friends in doubt about our intention to honor our commitments abroad. He’s cast us as a pay-to-play mercenary force and has divorced us from the international priorities that once defined American power in the world.
We once were a beacon of freedom and liberation for the oppressed and those held in tyranny. A long line of presidents from both parties held that America plays a unique role in the world as a trusted defender of freedom, a model for other nations. But Trump’s America is transactional. With Trump, it’s “Fuck you, pay me.”
In July 2019, diplomatic cables sent by the British ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, were leaked, resulting in his resignation. In the leaked emails, Darroch stated the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction-riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.” The ambassador described Trump and his team as “uniquely dysfunctional” and noted the deep divisions and internecine warfare inside the White House. He predicted the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace.” Remember, these are the observations of an ally.6
GATHERING STORMS
What does four more years of the Trump Doctrine look like on the world stage?
Best case? A diminished America. Worst case? Cleansing sea of radioactive fire.
Global economic downturns often lead nations to do stupid shit on the world stage and at home. The Great Depression is only the best-known example of this, but the pattern repeats, and with the global economy riding the brakes since the fall of 2019, our chances of economic conflicts erupting into international conflicts are rising fast. Add in the disruptive nature of Trump’s trade war with China and the deliberate destruction of generational alliances, and Trump will be uniquely remembered as a president whose policies weakened the nation at every turn. His fool’s luck has been that—so far—we have avoided the horror of a terrorist attack, a hot military confrontation, or some other foreign policy externality. Luck, however, is not a national security strategy, and luck famously and consistently runs out.
Our overseas partners’ confidence in America’s national security and intelligence community is severely damaged; they know Donald Trump’s hatred for the IC, and they know he is filling its leadership ranks with his toadies. An unsung story of American foreign policy success that was built on a foundation of quiet work by intelligence professionals working with our allies has fallen apart and will degrade further under Donald Trump in his second term.
Our close alliances are strained as never before. A frazzled NATO feels the eager heat of Russia’s breath in the east, with the Baltic states, Poland, and Germany wondering if we’re about to see a new Cold War, only this time with the United States more friendly to Russia than to the West. America’s role as a NATO ally will continue to degrade as Trump’s bromance with Putin, his extortion of the allies, and his utter ignorance of the traditions and meaning of the Western Alliance is demonstrated time and again. But hey, Trump Tower Moscow will make it worthwhile, right?
South Korea and Japan, our closest Asian allies, will face a China unconstrained by the leverage of U.S. trade to normalize its behavior and a North Korea emboldened by Trump’s elevation of Kim Jong-un to the status of an equal partner. Kim has been able to survive sanctions and threatens the stability of the region only by Trump’s goodwill. The DPRK will have enjoyed a long head start on developing effective intermediate-range nuclear weapons because Donald Trump gave it to them on a platter.
At least Jared Kushner will broker Middle East peace in the second term.
Oh. Wait.
The State Department will become an even more demoralized mess. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
has gone down a path toward being the ultimate Trump sycophant. His leadership in U.S. diplomacy and protection of our allies is constantly compromised by attempts to apply the proper suction to Trump’s ass.
Trump’s eagerness for “wins” will continue to collide with the realities of a hard world of hard leaders. The Chinese will never give him a victory. The Taliban are salivating for the departure of U.S. forces from Afghanistan so they can return to their accustomed medieval savagery toward women and apostates. Russia will continue to behave as if they have—to paraphrase LBJ—Trump’s pecker in their pocket. And by “pecker” I mean “mushroom-shaped object.”
Trump’s short temper, lack of knowledge or experience in national security matters, and inability to see beyond the time horizon of his next tweet will, in the event of a more kinetic crisis, leave American forces and interests at risk. God forbid an American warship fails in battle, or a Special Forces unit can’t complete a mission. He’ll likely declare them enemies of the people and issue a tweet to mock their shortcomings.
The bad guys know the same things our allies know: This is a weak man in a weak White House. He is unreliable, untruthful, and unmanageable. No matter how many flyovers and tank displays are arranged to keep him clapping like a toddler, and no matter how tough he talks on Twitter, they’ve got his number…and America in their sights.
Tweets from Donald Trump’s Second Term
@realDonaldTrump: Fake news media and Democrat haters and losers won’t admit my new Cabinet Member are the greatest Cabinet in history! No one can disagree that I am the best Cabinet secretary and I’m doing a GREAT job for America!
@nytimes: In a controversial move, President Trump replaces Cabinet with 16 mirrors.
ALL RISE: PRESIDENT MCCONNELL’S COURTS
If you want to know the most potent excuse any Republican has for defending Trump, it’s the courts. Give Trump four more years in office and President Mitch McConnell and Vice President Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society will have fundamentally reshaped the federal bench.
The next person elected president, even if we only play out the usual actuarial results, will name at least two new justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump’s approval of the McConnell-selected Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh is already a powerful judicial legacy.
McConnell, a canny player at this game, has been given carte blanche by this White House to pick young, smart, Federalist Society–approved judges for these seats, and he has moved with lightning speed. The courts will be a long echo of McConnell’s and Leo’s ideological preferences, and Democrats underestimate this at their enormous peril.
Now, Trump wouldn’t know any of his nominees beyond Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they came up and bit him on the ass, but he is crafty enough to know that his people love them some judges. He has learned the language of conservative judicial fetishism—the mirror image of the old language of liberal judicial fetishism. “We can’t win the policy outcomes we want in Congress or in the states, so we’ll name our ideological fellow-travelers to the bench to get what we want.” It’s the ultimate spoils system; your besties get jobs on the bench for life, and you get to rack up policy wins that have the force of law. When liberals did this for a generation, I was told it was Very Very Bad and Must Be Stopped. Now? Not so much.
Democrats do need to saddle a bit of the blame here. In November 2013, Harry Reid undid the judicial filibuster rule for lower-court nominees. Everyone warned Reid at the time that someday Democrats would reap a terrible whirlwind for blowing up one of the Senate’s long-standing norms. Reid was hailed as a masterful legislative player, a genius, a man who would finally help Obama get his people on the federal bench.
What could go wrong?
Mitch Fucking McConnell could go wrong, you dolts.
If you know Mitch, you knew the moment Reid nuked the judicial filibuster that McConnell was making book on the day he’d be able to return the favor. He looks harmless, but Cocaine Mitch is a specialist in the political art of “Fuck me? No, fuck you,” and when McConnell fucks you, you stay fucked.
Democrats have almost no tools in the toolbox, even with the Senate currently split with fifty-three Republicans, forty-five Democrats, and two Democratic-leaning independents, to stop McConnell from filling up spots on the federal bench with conservative judges. In the old days, it took forty-one votes to pop the brakes on any nominee. Now the GOP has enough wiggle room to lose three squishes in any tough vote and still have Mike Pence as a hole card. Pence, as you might imagine, relishes the prospect, and said as much during the confirmation battle over Brett Kavanaugh.7
The scorecard as of the summer of 2019 is grim for the Democrats. President McConnell’s two Supreme Court picks were confirmed, with Democrats impotent to stop either. The lesson that the contentious, ugly Kavanaugh fight taught Republicans was that the base loves one thing more than Donald Trump: conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Even Trump-skeptical Republicans were drawn into the fight on the side of Kavanaugh; it was a rare moment of almost complete unity on the right.
In the U.S. courts of appeals, the legacy is even more powerful. The Senate has confirmed forty-one nominees to that bench, including a number of fresh, young conservative faces to the notoriously left-leaning Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. For those of you not inside the conservative judicial movement (try it, the parties are lit), the Ninth is an article of particular obsession with conservatives.8
At the district court level, there are almost a hundred new judges seated as of today. My liberal friends may think, “Oh, these are dumbfuck Trump cronies. Most of them didn’t even go to Harvard Law.” This is a mistake.
These conservatives are young, sharp, and aggressive players of legal and judicial hardball. They’ll have a profound effect on the legal landscape of this country. You don’t have to like the Federalist Society, but you have to respect the farm-team system and the Long March strategy they adopted. What they’ve executed in two short years is a remarkable feat of judicial engineering.
More are coming. Many, many more.
If Trump wins four more years, McConnell and the Senate Republicans (in the likely case they maintain their majority) will move to fill more judicial vacancies at every level; they’ll work with partners outside government to push cases through the increasingly conservative judiciary to engineer results that future Democratic presidents and Congresses will have enormous difficulty overturning.
As a conservative, I don’t hate every one of President McConnell’s choices, but also as a conservative, I dislike judicial activism on either side of the political equation and abhor judicial fetishism. A few conservatives are quietly wondering if some of the nominees moving through the system and onto the bench aren’t a wee bit too committed to a view of the law that may not, you know, fully embrace the rights of individuals over corporate interests.
Liberal folk heroine Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933) is impressively spry, but the clock of mortality is running in us all, and her chances of surviving Trump 2.0 are, again according to the actuarial tables, not high. Sonya Sotomayor (b. 1954) and Elena Kagan (b. 1960) are hale, but Stephen Breyer (b. 1938) is getting up there. Among the conservatives, Clarence Thomas (b. 1948) isn’t exactly a spring chicken, but liberals will be less exercised if it’s a conservative replacing a conservative. Trump’s chances of naming another justice if he’s reelected aren’t just good, they’re almost inevitable.
If that’s not a motivation for my Democratic friends to do whatever it takes to mount a winning 2020 campaign, imagine a Supreme Court with four McConnell-picked justices. It’s hardly an impossible scenario.
Hell, if they really need a kick in the pants, try this on for size: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Lindsey Graham.
Tweets from Donald Trump’s Second Term
@realDonaldTrump: Mike Pence was a man I barely knew. A part-time volunetter covfe
ve boy who no one really saw. Everyone knows Ivanka will be the best VP in History.
@VP: I’m honored to have served the tallest, most handsome, most brilliant President in the history of all mankind, in this or any other universe.
@FoxNews: Tune in this Saturday at 3:30am Eastern for the premiere of the Mike and Mike Gospel Comedy Hour as Mike Pence and Mike Huckabee present their wholesomely heterosexual comedy stylings.
THE ENVIRONMENT
If you wanted to build a caricature of a movie-villain environmental monster, Donald Trump fits the bill. His love of coal is as irrational as his fear of cancer-causing windmills.9 (Honestly, I don’t know either, folks. Some of his cray is just utterly inexplicable.) Trump knows he’s on the wrong side of this, but that sweet, sweet lobbying money and those working-class voters who buy into the cruel nostalgia of hard-workin’ coal miners in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and elsewhere are a powerful draw.
Part of his contempt for the environment and the natural world comes from his upbringing in New York City. Trump is a germophobic weirdo who spent the majority of his life in a glass tower. His rare moments in the natural world are on groomed, highly fertilized golf courses. Teddy Roosevelt was a famous outdoorsman and adventurer. Ronald Reagan was most at home under the clear skies of his beloved California ranch, on horseback or cutting brush. George H. W. Bush loved the waters off Maine. His son embraced the wide, sere spaces of Texas and his ranch. Barack Obama, raised in Kenya’s…sorry, Hawaii’s pristine environment, loved biking and swimming.10 He took his family to national parks, and while perhaps you couldn’t call him a rugged outdoorsman, he was at least happy to be out in the sun.