by Joe Walsh
Talks with China continue in a very congenial manner—there is absolutely no need to rush—as Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods & products. These massive payments go directly to the Treasury of the U.S. . . .
. . . . The process has begun to place additional Tariffs at 25% on the remaining 325 Billion Dollars. The U.S. only sells China approximately 100 Billion Dollars of goods & products, a very big imbalance (1). With the over 100 Billion Dollars in Tariffs that we take in, we will buy. . . . .
. . . . agricultural products from our Great Farmers, in larger amounts than China ever did (2), and ship it to poor & starving countries in the form of humanitarian assistance. In the meantime we will continue to negotiate with China in the hopes that they do not again try to redo deal!
Tariffs will bring in FAR MORE wealth to our Country than even a phenomenal deal of the traditional kind (3). Also, much easier & quicker to do. Our Farmers will do better, faster (4), and starving nations can now be helped (5). Waivers on some products will be granted, or go to new source!
. . . . If we bought 15 Billion Dollars of Agriculture from our Farmers, far more than China buys now, we would have more than 85 Billion Dollars left over for new Infrastructure, Healthcare, or anything else (6). China would greatly slow down (7), and we would automatically speed up (8)!27
So that’s one, two, three . . . five . . . seven . . . ah, hell. Let’s begin in order. This tweet storm:
1. Demonstrates, once more, Trump’s misunderstanding of trade deficits. It’s one thing to say that another country should open its markets to our businesses; it’s another entirely to say that importing more from a country than we export to it is necessarily bad. Let’s say this loudly: IT’S NOT. NECESSARILY. BAD.
2. Is an example of Trump bragging about farm welfare. It makes no sense. It’s not a competition—at least no competition that a real conservative would ever want to be a part of.
3. Completely ignores the costs of tariffs to the consumers and businesses that were highlighted earlier in this chapter. There’s also zero economic evidence that Country 1 bashing Country 2 over the head with tariffs ends up making Country 1 wealthier than do “traditional” trade deals, which I interpret to mean more intelligent ones.
4. Is another statement without evidence.
5. Is just so brazen. In September 2019, it was reported that the Trump administration was about to unveil an overhaul of foreign aid policy to “prioritize countries that ‘support’ America’s goals,” wrote Politico. “The move would upend at least a generation of largely bipartisan foreign aid policy, which has long operated under the principle—at least in theory if not always in practice—that financial assistance should prioritize humanitarian need, not political allegiance.” (My emphasis.)28 Tired: providing humanitarian aid directly. Wired: providing humanitarian aid by taxing imports at an indirect cost to American consumers and businesses and dedicating a portion of the tariff money to humanitarian aid.*
6. Again ignores that tariffs are essentially taxes on things Americans buy and make. Tariffs are just about the least cost-effective way to raise funds for an initiative such as rebuilding the country’s infrastructure.
7. Is the perfect encapsulation of Trump seeing international trade as zero sum. Somebody else is lagging; we must be gaining! Not how it works.
8. Is another comment that should make all of us ask “Where is the evidence?” If anything, the evidence shows that the trade war has slowed us down.
I just want to say something really quickly: this is one tweet thread, everybody. One. There are at least eight things in here that make me think “Eh, the President of the United States should be better than that. The president should be smarter than that. The president should at least be more informed than that.” This president is not better, not smarter, not more informed—he is lesser, on all counts, for conservatives and for the country.
I wrote a few pages ago that there were many ways to look at Trump’s trade aid to the agricultural sector, including its merits and effectiveness and fairness. If you listen to the farmers on the ground, the assistance has been effective the same way that the government running your grocery store out of the neighborhood and giving you 50 percent of what you would’ve made otherwise to make up for it is “effective.” In July 2019, Trump tweeted, “Farmers are starting to do great again.”29 The president of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, Brian Thalmann, told Secretary Perdue during a farm forum, “We’re not starting to do great again. Things are going downhill and downhill quickly.”30 The New York Times reported this in July 2019: “ ‘I think people are generally disappointed to have to get a subsidy,’ said Brad Kremer, a soybean farmer from central Wisconsin. ‘It’s a hardworking, prideful people where I live.’ Still, Mr. Kremer said that farmers in Wisconsin were grateful for the assistance because without it, many of them would have gone out of business. Given the difficult economic conditions, he planted only 60 acres of soybeans this year compared with the 600 acres he usually plants.”31
The fairness of the assistance doesn’t seem to grade any higher; an Associated Press review found that large farms found legal workarounds to receive more aid from the first pot of assistance than they were eligible to receive32 and the initial bailouts were weighted heavily toward soybeans.33 (In the past, conservatives have called such behavior “picking winners and losers.”) The USDA updated its disbursement formula for the second round,34 and Reuters reported that “widely varying payouts in the second round have confused and irritated farmers nationwide, according to Reuters interviews with more than three dozen growers. Farmers also complained of software problems and poor training of local USDA employees, who have struggled to process applications and payments, farmers and government workers said.”35
But let’s talk a little more about the merits—because they tie into the Trump cult. I’ve already written why the substance of Trump’s trade war is rotten. I haven’t elaborated on the origins of it, though, and how they call into question how charitably we should judge the idea of such a thing. One of Trump’s top trade advisers, who “has developed a reputation in Washington as a Rasputin-like China hawk who whispers anti-China musings in President Trump’s ear,” the journalist Alan Rappeport wrote,36 is the aforementioned Peter Navarro, an economist and the White House’s director of trade and manufacturing policy. Navarro is the author of several books, many of which are critical of China and quote anti-Chinese commentary by a person named “Ron Vara.” As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in October 201937—and as Navarro himself confirmed38—there is no such person as Ron Vara. The name is an anagram of Navarro. Navarro, of course, works for a man who posed as fake spokesmen in phone interactions with reporters.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is supposed to be the United States’ dream team for trade.
Navarro, in practice, is the brain behind Trump’s adversarial trade policy. Sure, he serves to confirm his boss’s suspicions about the issue and so in many ways comes off as merely a yes-man. But Navarro applies the substance to the president’s instincts. That substance is tougher, judging by Navarro’s words, than even Trump could offer. A story in Fortune quotes him: “[E]ven as economic uncertainty has coincided with the tariff tit-for-tat, it seems unlikely that Navarro would suggest that his boss stand down from a trade war. As we hear in [his documentary] ‘Death by China,’ ‘Every time a consumer walks into a Walmart,’ says Navarro, ‘the first thing they have to do is be aware enough to look for the label. Then when they pick up that good and it says “Made in China,” I want them to think, hmmm, it might either break down or could kill me, number one. [Also], this thing might cost me or someone in my family, or my friend, their job. Lastly, if I buy this, this money is going to go over to help finance what is essentially the most rapid military buildup of a totalitarian regime since when? The thirties.’ ”39
Trump, it should be obvious, is an agitator. Navarro complements him pe
rfectly by being an instigator. Like the president, he has a predetermined set of beliefs about trade and China—many of which are discredited by modern economists—and the eagerness and permission to put them into practice. Anyone that bullheaded about an approach to government policy had better come with at least some sort of acclamation or positive reputation. But as the Washington Post reported, he’s made enemies with Trump’s other economic advisers over his hard-line and unthinking approach to work: “He just makes s—t up,” said Trump’s former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, according to former administration officials cited by the Post.40 Foreign Policy magazine ran the damning headline “Trump’s Top China Expert Isn’t a China Expert.”41 And as The Atlantic reported, “[E]conomists on both the left and the right say that Navarro’s fundamental views of trade are outdated, misguided, or just plain wrong.” One of them is former President George W. Bush’s economic adviser Greg Mankiw, a professor at Harvard, where an introductory economics course is referred to as “ec 10.”
The Atlantic quotes Mankiw as saying “Navarro’s understanding of trade economics would not make sense to ‘even a freshman at the end of ec 10.’ ”42
“Trust Trump” is bad advice. So is “Trust Navarro.” So is “Trust these people on trade.”
Chapter 11
Fixing Immigration
My approach to politics has always been to just say what I think. It’s always been about resisting the partisan pressure to toe the party line no matter what, or, in these days of Trump, to support the cult. For example: just on the merits, Donald Trump’s harshest skeptics on the left would support a lot of the arguments I’ve made so far in these pages, such as the ones calling out the president’s abuse of power, his white-identity politics, his authoritarian mind-set, and his serial, virtually pathological lying. But that does not make them left-wing arguments—or make me anything close to a left-winger. It simply means I belong to a taxonomy that includes a level above my ideological beliefs: my beliefs in the values of democracy. Put it this way: as I’ve said about the southern border, I want the wall, but if I had to choose between (1) having a wall and having a king or (2) having no wall and having a president, I’d take no wall. I’d take a president over a king. And that is not something I will compromise on.
That’s how I want to frame this chapter about immigration. I set out in this book to make a credible argument from the right that who Trump is and what he’s done to our form of government are the most pressing issues facing voters today. Of course, I can’t cinch the “credible” part of that unless I convince conservative readers that I, too, am a conservative. I can’t think of a better way for someone specifically like me to do it than to talk about the immigration issue, which was a gigantic priority for Trump voters in 2016. It was a gigantic priority for me, too—one of the reasons, in fact, that I voted for him. I believe that the following things about the United States’ immigration policy are true:
It’s utterly broken.
To fix it, one of the solutions we need is a wall along the border with Mexico. As Trump said during a visit to the border in early 2019: “They say ‘a wall is medieval.’ Well, so is a wheel. . . . There are some things that work. You know what, a wheel works, and a wall works.”1 He’s right! You know he’s right. You can oppose a wall for a variety of legitimate reasons, but don’t say that walls don’t work. They do.
But a wall isn’t the be-all, end-all response. We need complementary changes to border enforcement, too, including better technological surveillance and more manpower.
The backlog in our immigration courts is just outrageous—more than a million cases as of August 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported.2 That’s partly the product of a poorly designed process for adjudicating asylum claims, partly the product of putting off deportations, and partly the product of our lacking enough deterrents for illegal immigration in the first place.
Democrats have failed to address those problems. Republicans have failed to do it. Washington, DC, has failed to do it. Period.
And I agree with President Obama about the nature of becoming and being an American: “We have a right and duty to protect our borders. We can insist to those already here that with citizenship come obligations—to a common language, common loyalties, a common purpose, a common destiny,” he wrote in The Audacity of Hope.3
The bottom line is that I believe in a strong border. I don’t believe that anyone should be here illegally. And I believe that people should come here only if they assimilate to the values spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
But Donald Trump has taken the immigration issue to a dark, bigoted, xenophobic place that no one should welcome. His simplemindedness has reduced the policy portion of it to a single variable (the wall). Since he’s incompetent, he hasn’t been able to solve for that single variable. He’s failed to negotiate for it with Congress. He’s violated the Constitution and asked his subordinates to break the law to make up for it. And he’s lied about his success with it for all the world to see literally more than two hundred times.4 But that misrepresentation of reality is ignored by the Trump cult. You can see all his worst traits wrapped up in this: the racial arson, the overestimation of his intellect, the narcissism, the lawbreaking, the alternative facts becoming reality just because he’s repeated them enough. This, right here, is the representation of Trump that makes crystal clear that he’s not a conservative. He’s actually an opportunist. And above all, he’s a demagogue.
The debasing way he speaks of immigrants provides one set of evidence. Instead of drawing a line between illegal and legal immigration, he’s implied that there’s a line between immigrants of color and immigrants from majority-white countries, a line that separates desirable folks from undesirable folks. He’s questioned the patriotism of members of Congress specifically because of their immigrant heritage, as when he told a group of congresswomen including representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”5 He’s questioned the impartiality of a federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against one of his ventures because Trump wants a wall and the judge is of Mexican descent.6 He’s described entire ethnic groups of nonwhite people as though they have no dignity. Just look at how he generalizes and cheapens the culture of the Middle East: “If Syria wants to fight for their land, that’s up to Turkey and Syria, as it has been for hundreds of years, they’ve been fighting. And the Kurds have been fighting for hundreds of years—that whole mess. It’s been going along for a long time. . . . It’s a lot of sand. They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So, there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.”7 I don’t want to hear the excuse that he was harmlessly imagining a bombed-out haven for terrorists. He could’ve been describing Jordan or Iraq or Egypt—or Israel. That “lot of sand” is where Jesus came from. That “lot of sand” is where mathematics came from. Trump writes off the worth of people from places abroad that have zero personal value to him. That’s an awfully shitty look for the guy who’s supposed to be “the leader of the free world.”
His demagoguery on immigration extends to government policy, as well. As I said, he’s a Johnny-one-note with his opinion of a wall with Mexico. It’s the imagery that’s attractive to him: “It’s going to be a big, fat, beautiful wall,” he said who knows how many times during the 2016 presidential campaign.8 The imagery is attractive to a lot of Americans who are worried about our national identity, too. Sure, you can think that a wall is a practical tool to help stop the flow of immigrants coming here illegally, and I do. But it’s a hell of a lot more than that to many people when the idea of a wall sparks a deafening chant of “Build the wall!” at a Trump rally and when Trump says he’s going to make Mexico pay for it. That’s the demagoguery at work: ripping one prong from a complicated issue of government policy and using it to thump a drum of nativist sentiment. It’s an ugly piece of politics.
It’s a dumb one,
too. Just read the words of John Kelly, who was Trump’s secretary of homeland security before becoming White House chief of staff, about how a wall fits into a broader strategy of border security:
“A physical barrier in and of itself—certainly as a military person that understands defense and defenses—a physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job. It has to be, really, a layered defense. If you were to build a wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, you’d still have to back that wall up with patrolling by human beings, by sensors, by observation devices. But as I’ve said to many of the senators present—and I’ve said, I think, for three years—really I believe the defense of the southwest border really starts about 1,500 miles south. And that is partnering with some great countries as far south as Peru, really, that are very cooperative with us in terms of getting after the drug production, transport, very, very good with us, to include Mexico.”—January 10, 2017, in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee9
“Through the recently released FY 2017 Budget Amendment and the FY 2018 President’s Budget currently under development, DHS is seeking to take immediate steps to implement a full complement of solutions to meet border security requirements. These investments extend beyond physical barriers we think of as wall or fence to include advanced detection capabilities such as surveillance systems, tethered and tactical aerostats, unmanned aircraft systems and ground sensors, all which work in conjunction with improvements to tactical border infrastructure and increased manpower. . . . The barriers work. Technology also works. But all of it doesn’t work at all unless you have men and women who are willing to patrol the border, develop relationships, which they do, with their Mexican counterparts directly across the border. . . . It’s unlikely that we will build a wall or physical barrier from sea to shining sea, but it is very likely—I’m committed to putting it where the men and women (of DHS) say we should put it.”—April 5, 2017, in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee10