THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Saturday, February 22, 2020
DONALD TRUMP: THE WHITE COLLAR CRIMINAL IN THE WHITE HOUSE - Will America endure his crime tidal wave?
rump Grants Clemency to Another Round of Crooks He Saw on Fox News
THE CABLE NEWS PRESIDENT
“I watched his wife on television,” Trump said of his decision to pardon Blago after seeing his spouse on Fox. The network seems to have influenced several of Tuesday’s pardons.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday granted clemency to 11 people, including several convicted felons who are either Fox News regulars or have been championed by the president’s favorite cable-news network. And in another case, the family of one pardon recipient dished out massive contributions to the president’s re-election campaign just months before Trump’s clemency spree.
Among those granted pardons or sentence commutations were former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempting to sell former President Barack Obama’s Senate seat; former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was sentenced to four years in 2010 for tax fraud and lying to the feds; and Michael Milken, the “junk-bonds king” whose early-'90s insider-trading conviction made him a poster boy of white-collar crime.
Unsurprisingly, a key influence that led to Trump’s decision, particularly as it related to Blagojevich, was Fox News. The same could partly be said of the decision on Kerik, a frequent Fox News guest whose pardon was backed by several of the network’s stars; Milken, whose pardon was supported by Fox Business Network host and Trump loyalist Maria Bartiromo; and Angela Stanton, an occasional pro-Trump TV pundit whose pardon was pushed by frequent Fox News guest and evangelical leader Alveda King.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Trump made the Fox News connection abundantly clear, telling reporters that he decided to commute the rest of Blagojevich’s sentence because he’d seen the ex-governor’s wife Patti Blagojevich pleading her husband’s case on Fox.
“I watched his wife on television,” Trump declared, adding that he didn’t know the ex-governor “very well” despite Blagojevich’s appearances on The Celebrity Apprentice years ago.
In mid-2018, the president repeatedly asked close advisers to explore a Blagojevich pardon and, while doing so, emphatically referenced clips he’d seen on Fox, including a segment on informal Trump adviser Jeanine Pirro’s weekend show, according to two sources who independently discussed the matter with the president at the time.
The hosts, meanwhile, didn’t even bother with subtlety during the interviews. For instance, Tucker Carlson asked Mrs. Blagojevich what she would say “if you could speak to the president.”
Kerik, meanwhile, has been a frequent guest of Fox News primetime programming for several years, generally offering on-air criticism of how Democrats handle New York City’s police department and criminal justice in general.
In what can generously be described as ironic, Kerik appeared the evening before his pardon on Tucker Carlson Tonight to rail against bail reform in New York while urging for harsher punishment for criminals, claiming crime was down when the police department increased arrests for “jumping turnstiles” and other low-level misdemeanors.
Kerik has also been used as a Trump-friendly critic of the so-called “deep state” on Fox News airwaves, at one point advocating for the arrest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) for trying to carry out an “attempted coup” of Trump with the whistleblower complaint and impeachment inquiry.
According to the White House, Kerik’s pardon was supported by Fox News stars like Geraldo Rivera and Judge Andrew Napolitano. Additionally, the administration said, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani—a frequent Fox News commentator and Kerik's one-time boss—backed the decision.
Pirro, meanwhile, celebrated Kerik’s pardon and Blagojevich’s commutation on Twitter, personally thanking the president while declaring that “political prosecutions have no place in this country.”
Thank you @realDonaldTrump for pardon of former NYPD Commissioner @BernardKerik and commutation of prison sentence of former Governor Rod Blagojevich. Political prosecutions have no place in this country.
The pro-Trump Fox News star, who brushed off Blagojevich’s crimes as “just practicing politics” in an April 2018 interview with Patti Blagojevich, has something of a sordid history with Kerik. Back in 2006, Pirro—who was then running as a Republican for New York attorney general—admitted she asked Kerik to bug her then-husband’s boat to see if he was having an affair after federal prosecutors began investigating whether she and Kerik illegally taped conversations.
While junk-bond king Michael Milken is not a Fox News regular by any measure, his pardon was backed by Bartiromo, yet another Fox star who has morphed into an unofficial mouthpiece of and adviser to President Trump.
Additionally, Angela Stanton, who was pardoned for her role in a stolen luxury-vehicle ring, has appeared on Fox News as a pro-Trump commentator—much like her godmother Alveda King, who backed her pardon—often arguing that Democrats want more poor women of color to have abortions.
Appearances on Fox News and Fox Business—two of Trump’s favorite networks—are popular vessels for those seeking to make their cases for pardons or clemency directly to the president, a voracious consumer of TV and cable news.
“[Trump] knows how people play this game,” said one source close to the president. “He’s even told me before something to the effect of, ‘All these people keep getting themselves on Fox News begging me for a pardon,’ so he’s self-conscious about this stuff. But it doesn’t matter, it still has an effect on him.”
For those who didn’t receive the Fox News treatment, it appears that in at least one case, cold hard cash did the talking. Paul Pogue, a construction company owner who pleaded guilty to underpaying his taxes by $473,000 and received three years probation, was issued a full pardon and clemency by the president.
According to FEC filings, Pogue’s family has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct contributions and in-kind air travel to the Trump Victory Committee. Beginning in August 2019, Ben Pogue—CEO of Pogue Construction and son of Paul Pogue—and his wife Ashleigh made over $200,000 in contributions to the campaign.
In August alone, Ben Pogue donated $85,000 to Trump Victory while Ashleigh Pogue contributed $50,000 that month. The following month, Ben Pogue made an in-kind air travel contribution of $75,404.40. The couple also made several large donations to the Republican National Committee and each donated $5,600 to Donald Trump for President Inc.
On the day of their first donation to the Trump campaign, Ashleigh posted an Instagram photo of her and her husband posing with Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at the Hamptons.
Prior to the Pogues’ sudden significant donating spree to Trump and the Republicans, the couple was not seen as big campaign spenders, having donated a few thousand dollars for Paul Ryan’s congressional campaign in 2017 and $5,400 for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s 2016 Republican presidential run.
Notably, one of the advocates for Pogue’s clemency: Santorum, who is now a CNN contributor.
11 Months From Today
A second term for Trump seems more possible than ever. But what would it look like?
Photo: Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow. Source Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images (Crowd); Robert Alexander/Getty Images (Trump Lettering)
Here is one starting point for contemplating a second Trump term: The Ukraine scandal only became a Trump scandal because Ukraine refused to submit to a pair of presidential demands that would have been fairly easy to satisfy. If Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky had merely announced that he was looking into a mysterious missing Democratic server and corruption by the Bidens, then the whole affair probably wouldn’t have become a Trump scandal at all. It would have become, to the American news-consuming public, a Biden scandal. Ukraine held off, though, for a very sensible reason. Ukrainians, analyzing American politics, calculated that Trump may not stay in office much beyond this year. It was a hedge against forever Trumpism.
Trump’s favorable rating fell faster than any other president-elect’s in the history of polling, dropping below 50 percent even before his inauguration, a fact that made him look to most civilians as well as politicians like a probable one-termer from the get-go. The assumption that his election was a terrible mistake that would be corrected in four years has been an invisible force propping up the resistance both domestic and international to his agenda. The Iran nuclear deal has primarily kept its head above water because Europe is still respecting the deal rather than joining in Trump’s saber-rattling. When Trump gutted the Obama administration’s fuel-mileage standards, auto companies steered clear, no doubt because it wouldn’t pay for them to invest in gas-guzzlers if a Democrat was to come in and force them to change again.
Only in the past few months has Trump’s reelection started to appear as likely as not. If he wins, a basic calculation about how to deal with him will tip for a whole range of players. Trump has leaned on social-media companies and the owners of such important organs as CNN and the Washington Post to suppress criticism and scrutiny of his administration and to dial up the praise. He has openly promised pardons to anybody who violates the law in the effort to deport migrants or complete his border fence, and as of yet, nobody has taken him up on the offer.
The natural assumption among those rooting for his failure is that four more years will be as unbearable as the first four. But they could in fact be significantly worse than that if a chunk of the resistance to Trump’s power suddenly gives way, revealing something enduring, even permanent, about America. Who else — in the bureaucracy, in business, in governments overseas — is holding off full collaboration with Trump on the premise that he’s just a passing fever? Here are 19 visions of this possible near future.
If he wins again, he’ll be impeached again; I guarantee that with 100 percent certainty. Pelosi cannot stop that freight train, and it’ll be Democrats’ only outlet, since we’ll keep the Senate. And if it’s for the same nothingburger they impeached him on this time, it’ll end the same way. I just don’t think Pelosi can control her caucus.
We’ll see Trump unleashed. Frankly, some of the stuff in the week since he’s been acquitted — even Hope Hicks coming back and Johnny McEntee, his former body guy, becoming head of the Office of Presidential Personnel — show that the guardrails that keep him in the boat have come completely off. So if anyone tells you what that means, policywise, they’re guessing. Nobody knows. There are signals from the conservatives in the administration that the second term is when deficit reduction starts, but that’s complete and utter b.s. I don’t think the president has ever campaigned on deficits or cared about deficits. Look at his budgets: Conservatives at the Office of Management and Budget have cut programs only for the president to try to walk back their decision days later. There may be another run at health care — not Obamacare repeal, but another run at some sort of health-care overhaul. Like the USMCA trade deal, a mushed-up version of reforms that nobody’s excited about.
It will be interesting to see politically, if he’s not on the ballot, if he still has the hold on the party that he does now. Half of the GOP senators are queasy every morning over tweets. Do they start to distance themselves or is it still MAGA town, where you have to stick with him or you will get your ass beat in the primary? Personally, I think the president makes life harder on himself and Republicans at times, but you cannot call yourself a Republican and not be happy about the last four years. All in for four more.
—Anonymous GOP Hill staffer
A Politics of Pure Revenge
The signal victory of Trump’s first term, ratified by his impeachment acquittal, was his triumph over the rule of law. In a second term, he will help himself to all the spoils he can.
Rudy Giuliani continues to travel to Ukraine in search of smears, in lieu of actual dirt, that can soil the Bidens. But surely that is not his entire brief. What “evidence” is now being manufactured by Giuliani and passed to William Barr to wreak vengeance on former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and other diplomats who testified before the House? Meanwhile, Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department, having followed up Trump’s acquittal by handing over Hunter Biden’s financial documents to a tarring-and-feathering committee of the Republican Senate, can be counted on to find pretexts to burrow into the finances of the Clintons, Mike Bloomberg, and their respective foundations, as well as the tax returns of Nancy Pelosi’s wealthy husband.
Perhaps highest on the White House enemies list is Mitt Romney, who has already been warned by a key Trump flunky, Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, that he might face physical violence were he to show up at CPAC’s annual conclave. If that line of revenge fails, one can imagine Trump finding a way to go after tax breaks and other federal benefits bestowed on Romney’s beloved Mormon church, which the president mocked as his nemesis’s “crutch” after his lonely vote to convict. Mormons, however conservative and Republican, have not signed on fully to Trump, and he has been less popular in Utah than in any other solid-red state. Trump does not need them, and one of his most powerful Christian supporters, the Dallas Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, has labeled Mormonism “a heresy from the pit of hell” besides. The president’s servile Evangelical base will delight in whatever pain he inflicts on Romney and his co-religionists.
When Trump claimed “America First” as a mantra, he called it “a brand-new, modern term,” oblivious of its historical provenance as a movement that attracted Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in America in the years before World War II. It’s a rare time when he probably was telling the truth. Such is his illiteracy that he probably hasn’t heard of the Night of the Long Knives either. But the evidence suggests that, if nothing else, he has mastered the fundamentals of Godfather 2.
—Frank Rich
The Justice Department Brought to Heel
Photo: Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow. Source Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images (Background and Trump body); Alex Wong/Getty Images (Trump head)
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch often said the Department of Justice is the only Cabinet agency named for an ideal. If Trump wins a second term, it is not clear whether that ideal can hold.
Any concerns about criminal activity by Trump or his campaign in winning the 2020 election? Those will die a quiet death under Attorney General William Barr’s new policy that he must approve any investigation into presidential campaigns before it may be opened. The Office of Legal Counsel will continue to issue opinions protecting Trump, such as those that the president cannot be criminally charged or investigated and that his aides need not respond to congressional subpoenas. The late Roy Cohn will become known as Joseph McCarthy’s William Barr.
On the civil side, DOJ could be used as a sword in the name of religious liberty by filing lawsuits challenging reproductive and LGBTQ rights.
Barr could starve for resources the divisions of DOJ that protect civil rights, voting rights, and the environment and use the Antitrust Division to promote the business interests of Trump’s political supporters while fighting mergers of companies he opposes. DOJ will fail to prioritize threats to national security by using a zero-tolerance approach to immigration enforcement, charging every undocumented grandmother they encounter instead of focusing resources on suspected terrorists.
Lawyers of integrity will continue to leave DOJ, replaced by Trump cronies who disrespect the rule of law and support authoritarian rule. Another four years of Trump, and the Department of Justice will no longer deserve its revered name.
Trump understands that what TV was to John F. Kennedy, what radio was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Twitter is to him. These companies have done nothing but help him. And he loves the stock market, and the first trillion-dollar companies are all tech stocks. It’s going to be hard for him to punish them.
At the same time, he has a huge antipathy for people richer than himself and with more accomplishments than him. He will continue to go after Jeff Bezos, because it’s a personal, weird obsession he has with conflating Amazon and the Washington Post. As long as the Washington Post keeps pressing on the Trump administration, Bezos will be linked to that and he will suffer for that. There’s also the contention that the right has been misrepresented on these platforms and that they’re trying to quiet conservative voices. The question is: Will he seek to intervene in how they’re governed, even though it’s in his best interest to let them be?
And the companies will keep their heads in the sand. Don’t expect them to be brave on immigration or anything else. They’re not showing up at a rally in a MAGA hat, that’s for sure, but they certainly are not going to be doing anything to oppose him. Why should they? It’s been great for them.
—Kara Swisher
The Death of Global Climate Efforts
Let’s start with a conservative estimate. Trump’s deregulatory environmental rampage completely stalls — rolling back no more protections against small-particulate pollutants or toxic carcinogens and nuking no more policies like the Clean Power Plan or parts of the Clean Water Act, but merely locking in the sadistic legacy of his first term — there will be as many as 80,000 additional American deaths over the course of the next decade. That’s roughly ten times as many as on D-Day, more than 20 times as many as on September 11, and almost 40 times the number of Japanese citizens who have died in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. One million more Americans, The Journal of the American Medical Association reports, will suffer from respiratory illness.
Most presidents spend second terms trying to leave a lasting mark on foreign policy, and it is abroad where Trump’s environmental cruelty is likely to be felt most intensely. This is not just about the 2016 Paris accords, which technically Trump can only pull out of on November 5, the day after he’s reelected. In the meantime, he’s already fatally undermined them, along with like-minded sadists Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil — a trio of world leaders who may come to be seen much more clearly, in a second term for Trump, as a climate axis of evil. In the latest round of post-Paris climate negotiations, the three countries spiked nearly every possibility of meaningful progress. If you add to the axis Vladimir Putin and his petrostate and Xi Jinping and his have-it-both-ways approach (building renewable farms alongside new coal fleets), the loose alliance of climate inaction accounts for more than half of all global emissions. That’s a very powerful veto.
It may sound glib and vacuously patriotic to say that the world needs American leadership, but the path of the last few years suggests, on climate at least, it is also distressingly true. That’s not because action within the U.S. is so important — the country is the second-biggest emitter, but responsible for only about 15 percent of the global total. It’s because, without American support, prospects for any coordinated international program seem distressingly dim. In Trump’s first term, the U.S. has dithered and, in part as a result, the rest of the world has, too — breaking emissions records in 2017, 2018, and 2019. This is not just because of Trump — or Morrison and Bolsonaro, Putin and Xi. It’s because even many self-styled global leaders on climate (Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron) have merely paid lip service to climate action (while approving new oil pipelines and failing to pass carbon taxes, for instance). It is not just “ecofascists” peddling delay anymore, but climate hypocrites.
These leaders don’t look or talk like Trump, but they share a concerning, nationalistic climate logic: that leaders should emphasize the material benefits to their people first, with the understanding that, at least for the time being, calculations about climate policy made by nations individually may turn them away from the path that would benefit the world as a whole. If the next years are presided over by Trump, they will likely spell the further breakdown of the international alliances on which any truly global solution to this global problem would, theoretically, depend. Which means they may also break the hope, sustained now through decades of frustration, that global cooperation must be the path forward, and initiate instead a terrifying new go-it-alone era of climate suffering and disaster. Policymakers the world over may start to deemphasize the project of reducing emissions and instead begin preparing nation-by-nation assessments of how to live with climate change and all its terrible brutality. And we may find ourselves, on the ground, asking less and less often what global actors are on the side of angels, and more often simply who is on our side.
—David Wallace-Wells
More Hunger
Trump doesn’t need Congress in order to cut benefits. As president, he controls federal agencies. Three proposed rule changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture may ultimately take food stamps away from 3.7 million people. And SNAP isn’t the only welfare program on the line. Through the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare, the White House has already approved changes to state Medicaid programs that cost thousands of people their health care. That’s why West Virginia teacher Sam Yurick is disturbed by the prospect of Trump’s reelection. Many of Yurick’s students live in poverty and often miss school because of their living conditions. “When they do make it in, they have headaches from not eating or aren’t completely recovered,” he said. Trump boasts of his support in West Virginia, but if he gets four more years to slash welfare, Yurick’s students might get sicker. “The amount and quality of instruction will get eaten into more and more,” he said, “as we put more and more of our energies into making up for ways the world outside our classrooms has failed the kids we serve.”
—Sarah Jones
MAGA Budgets
When you look at the budget cuts he’s proposing for 2021, they’re going to disproportionately impact the black community and low-income people and the most vulnerable. His white-supremacy agenda is reflected in his new budget proposal, his birther attitude toward African-Americans especially. So do his cuts in foreign aid, for example, and on the development front. Those accounts specifically are there to provide development assistance to what he calls the “s—hole countries.” Those are countries where you have majority people of color. It’s almost Make America White Again in terms of his budget cuts. I worry that people of color, African-Americans, the most vulnerable, will unfortunately be forced to pay the price for his outlandish policies.
Analyses suggest Trump could lose the popular vote by as many as 5 million, or potentially even more, and still win the Electoral College. (The Electoral College doesn’t care that you almost won Texas; it only cares that you lost Wisconsin.) Just to think about this for a second, if Trump wins the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, that would mean that, since Bush’s very contested, strange Electoral College win in 2000, fully half of presidential elections will have gone to the loser of the popular vote and the winner of the Electoral College, and, in each case, to a Republican. If this happens, if a younger, more urban, more diverse majority keeps growing but finds itself locked out of political power, there will be a backlash on the left against the legitimacy of a system that it feels, correctly, does not represent it and does not give it a fair shake. The scary thing is not just that the electoral geography is not reflecting the popular vote but that the party that is winning despite losing the popular vote realizes its only path to sustaining power is disenfranchisement. And that party begins passing more rules — from voter-ID laws to gerrymandering efforts to things like Citizens United — that build the power it fears it would lose and make it harder for the emergent popular-vote majority to express itself.
—Ezra Klein
A More Vulnerable Electoral College
Recognizing that getting approval of a constitutional amendment to switch to the popular vote would be an extremely difficult and lengthy process, the National Popular Vote Initiative, begun in 2006, aims to circumvent the Electoral College by getting enough states to collectively carry the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency to agree to cast them all for the national-popular-vote winner. What once looked quixotic is beginning to seem possible and may only become more so. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia, with a total of 196 electoral votes, have already joined the initiative, and another Trump win despite a loss in the popular vote could give it the momentum to get over the hump.
“Every year,” says National Popular Vote chair John Koza, “we add a state or two, and that’s what we plan to keep doing from now until it becomes law.” If not 2021, then 2023, after a likely strong second-midterm backlash against a Trump presidency, could be the year: All it would take is for Texas, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Minnesota to sign on.
—Ed Kilgore
Nuclear Brinkmanship
Trump seems poised to allow the last of the deals limiting U.S. and Russian arsenals, the New START Treaty, to expire in 2021. Meanwhile, his defense team is eager to build several types of new nuclear weapons on top of the estimated 6,185 we already have (second only to Russia’s total). The just unveiled federal budget would bring spending for maintaining and developing nuclear warheads 50 percent above its level when Trump took office. Trump has spoken eagerly about resuming nuclear testing, which the U.S. has not done since George H.W. Bush, though we are still contending with the health and environmental consequences. That might well open a rush of other nations following suit.
North Korea, meanwhile, is very likely to achieve a missile that can reliably deliver a nuclear warhead to the East Coast during a second Trump term — even as it grows its arsenal. It increasingly looks as if a second Trump term would also see Iran restart its program full speed. Those two events, plus Trump’s threats to withdraw U.S. nuclear deterrence from our allies, has voices in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — among others — saying their countries should get their own weapons. Those who believe a world with more nuclear powers is more stable would get a chance to see their theory play out. So would the rest of us.
—Heather Hurlburt
Extraordinary Stress
In the past four years, I saw people in my clinical practice experiencing a level of anxiety specific to the political climate that we really hadn’t seen before. It’s why I started writing about “Trump anxiety disorder.” The American Psychological Association does a “Stress in America” survey, and the 2019 one had 62 percent of American adults citing the current political climate as a source of stress, which has gone up since Trump took office. It’s not unlike a child living in a home that’s chaotic; we don’t have faith in the leaders we have historically put trust in, and that’s creating a lot of trauma. If Trump does get reelected, we’ll see a spike in this feeling of fear like we haven’t seen before. People will have to come to terms with the prospect of another four years of trying to keep up the fight. We can feel anxious for only so long, because anxiety is exhausting, and eventually that fatigue could transform into depression and leave us feeling really helpless. All of that could lead to more civil unrest or unhealthy behaviors such as drinking and emotional eating — people trying to deal with the stress in any way they can.
—Dr. Jennifer Panning
Red-State Entertainment
Photo: Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow. Source Photo: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images (Senate and Trump body); Drew Angerer/Getty Images (Trump head)
Expect more fumbling studio attempts to reach a red-state demographic. The trouble is that no one on either side of the political spectrum seems able to agree on what a conservative movie looks like. Consider the box-office failure of Richard Jewell, which looked from afar like a surefire appeal to the resentful quadrant: a movie in which cackling media hordes descend upon and destroy the life of an innocent white man, made by a seeming stalwart like Clint Eastwood. It has proved easier to stir up right-wing outrage against a release, as demonstrated by the baffling furor that bumped the thriller The Hunt, sneering liberal villains and all, from the schedule last year. Look for studios to steer into tried-and-true territory, investing more in faith-based films like Breakthrough (the reason Chrissy Metz sang that song at the Oscars) and rah-rah war movies (because who could get mad at 1917?). But also be ready for more ex–Trump staffers to be anointed with normalization by way of reality-competition shows, along with the second coming of Mel Gibson, who has basically been welcomed back into the fold with his already-in-the-works follow-up to The Passion of the Christ.
—Alison Willmore
Escalating Trade Wars
Trump will get more out of the box on economic policy, and 2021 will be his big chance to take the fight to China. This year’s “Phase One” trade agreement was a pause in hostilities to avoid preelection economic damage, but after he has won, he’ll be free to impose more tariffs and further impede global trade without fear of immediate electoral consequences from the economic drag those actions will cause.
If Trump cranks up the trade war, he will need more help from the Federal Reserve, cutting interest rates to offset the economic damage it causes. So you can expect Trump to replace Fed chairman Jay Powell — whom he has called naïve and a “bonehead” who is “like a golfer who can’t putt” and whom he “maybe” regrets appointing to the job in the first place — with a more loyal leader who is more likely to cut interest rates when Trump wants them cut.
In Trump’s second term, maybe a financial crisis or an energy crisis or a geopolitical crisis will drag down the U.S. economy. Or maybe fundamentals will shift so that his favorite economic tools don’t work anymore — maybe big deficits will slow the economy or low interest rates will push up inflation. But if I had to guess, I’d say economic performance in Trump’s second term would probably be similar to the first. The pattern since Trump’s election is his pursuit of output-boosting policy in two key areas: fiscal (cutting taxes while growing spending) and monetary (pushing for lower interest rates). Expansionary policy in these areas can cover up a lot of sins, such as an expanded trade war.
—Josh Barro
And Escalating Self-Dealings
Amonth after Trump’s inauguration, his sons Don Jr. and Eric laid out an ambitious plan for the future of their father’s real-estate and branding empire. In a front-page article in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of the two posed authoritatively at a shiny boardroom table, they touted developments under way in Vancouver and Dubai and a new domestic hotel chain called Scion, which Eric said would be focused on “trendy” cities like Austin.
The Scion chain never went anywhere after its first reported location attracted resistance-led street protests. A second expansion plan, for a heartland-based budget chain called American Idea, also imploded, and the Trumps’ partner in the project was charged last year with stealing luggage from an airport baggage turnstile. Many of the family’s overseas partners have been revealed to have unsavory pasts, and Trump’s own behavior as president has turned his brand toxic.
But Trump’s reelection could serve as an adrenaline shot to his moribund company. “I think Trump unleashed in a second term,” says Andrea Bernstein, author of a book about the Trump family business, American Oligarchs, “means he continues to find ways to get people to pay him, and that becomes turbocharged.” Bernstein points out that, so far, the financial bright spot in the Trump Organization’s portfolio has been the place that most baldly trades in influence: the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. (With an uncertain election on the horizon, the company is reportedly trying to cash in by selling the hotel for as much as $500 million.) Trump has also sought to capitalize by selling access to his private club in Mar-a-Lago — which doubled the joining fee to $200,000 after he was elected — and only fierce criticism from key Republicans kept him from staging the next G7 summit at his ailing golf resort in Doral, Florida. Look for that brand of audacity to be deployed more creatively after 2020.
The most obvious direction for the Trump Organization to expand would be overseas. In a raucous press conference before he was inaugurated, Trump promised he would do “no new foreign deals,” but the pledge was purely voluntary. For now, it may be that the Trump family has discovered a more lucrative line of business. Hundreds of millions of dollars in donations flow through political campaigns, creating an immense opportunity for consultants and fund-raisers — not to mention hoteliers and caterers. “The business of Trump in the next year is the business of getting Trump reelected,” Bernstein says. “It is an incredible money machine.”
—Andrew Rice
A Generation of Judges
In just three years, Trump has already filled 51 vacancies on U.S. Courts of Appeals, the “circuits” that provide much of the guidance federal trial judges utilize. His appointees now represent more than one-fourth of appeals-court judges, and he has succeeded in “flipping” three of the 13 circuits from Democratic-appointed majorities to Republican-appointed majorities. This administration has installed 135 district-court judges and is on pace to significantly exceed Obama’s 268 in much less time — if Trump is reelected and Republicans hold on to the Senate (which they are likely to do in most “Trump wins” scenarios).
Trump’s judicial counterrevolution could happen most decisively in the Supreme Court. He quickly exploited two openings on SCOTUS, and, in a second Trump term, the odds of court liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who will turn 87 this year and was recently treated for pancreatic cancer) and Stephen Breyer (who will be 82 this summer) hanging on until the next Democratic administration will go down significantly. One more flip of a liberal seat on the Court could produce a landmark conservative era in constitutional law, almost certainly including the reversal or significant modification of Roe v. Wade and other key precedents, not to mention a decisive new era of sympathy for corporations, reactionary state governments, nativists, vote suppressors, and foes of civil liberties. Names reportedly on Trump’s short list include Kavanaugh runner-up and Seventh Circuit judge Amy Coney Barrett, a favorite of hard-core cultural conservatives; Sixth Circuit judge Joan Larsen, who is viewed as hostile to LGBTQ rights; another Sixth Circuit judge, Amul Thapar, a Kentuckian who is close to Mitch McConnell; and Tenth Circuit judge Allison Eid, a former Clarence Thomas clerk. The relatively diverse nature of this group reflects the feeling that three white men in a row might be a bit much.
—Ed Kilgore
A Crisis of Faith
“The fact is, no President has ever done what I have done for Evangelicals, or religion itself!,” Donald Trump tweeted last year. A dubious claim, but it could come true — just not in the way he thinks. His alliance with white born-again Christians helped make him president. It may also help end American Evangelicalism as we know it.
Trump is unpopular with America’s youngest adults in a moment when Evangelical Christianity is desperate for young members. Last May, Christianity Today — the same publication whose editor called for Trump’s impeachment and inspired that defensive presidential tweet — reported that merely half of all children raised Southern Baptist stay Southern Baptist as adults. The politically conservative, mostly white denomination isn’t winning enough souls to make up its losses, either. Overall membership in the Southern Baptist Convention hit a 30-year low in 2018.
Southern Baptists aren’t the only Protestants with shrinking churches; liberal traditions are losing young members too. But the values held by young adults are at odds with those behind the political goals of white Evangelicalism. According to one Associated Press poll, young adults are more likely than members of any other age group to say they disapprove of Trump. For white Evangelicals, Trump may prove a Moloch, an idol who devours the young in exchange for his favors.
—Sarah Jones
The Wall, Abandoned
By the time he exits the office, the president has said he wants a 1,000-mile structure along the border, an ambitious goal considering that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has only completed 100 miles in the past three years — around 90 miles of which serve as replacement for run-down barriers already in the ground. Though Trump has permanently altered legal immigration to the U.S. through his travel ban and nativist policies like restricting immigrant access to safety-net programs, a finished wall along the 1,954-mile southern border will not be an enduring piece of the administration’s legacy for a simple reason: It will not get done. According to construction-cost estimator Ed Zarenski, it’s just unfeasible to build such a substantial structure in such harsh, remote territory. At his low-end estimate of $22 billion, it would take 10,000 workers 11 years to build 1,000 miles of steel-slat barrier. “But you might not be able to get concrete trucks to deliver to such faraway sites,” he explains, “meaning the contractors would have to build plants along the way. That is unlikely to happen.” Another practical concern: “Where do these men stay overnight? That cost isn’t built into any estimates, and there aren’t hotels along this 1,000-mile corridor for people to stay in.” These infrastructural problems don’t address the apparent quality of the barrier. Despite Trump’s claim that “this wall is not something that can be really knocked down,” in January a strong gust of wind toppled newly settled panels in Southern California. “I can’t believe that an engineer designed what photos show them using for foundations on that wall,” Zarenski says. “They’ve taken a lot of liberties in how things are getting built to get it done as cheaply as they can.” The current taxpayer cost for the wall sits at $18.4 billion.
—Matt Stieb
Don Jr. 2024
If social media seems particularly vitriolic, deceptive, and stupid in 2020, wait until 2024. The top executives at platforms like Facebook and Twitter have already demonstrated a willingness to bend backward to satisfy baseless Republican accusations of suppression; just as the news media found itself bullied into false equivalencies by charges of bias at the end of the 20th century, social media will feel obligated to give conservatives more leeway in what they post. One particular beneficiary of this will be Donald Trump Jr., who already has an Instagram account with 2.4 million followers and a Twitter account with 4.4 million followers — both larger than any current Democratic presidential candidate besides Bernie Sanders — to which he posts unbelievably popular jokes, memes, and complaints. Newly empowered by his father’s victory in 2020, Don Jr.’s online presence will only get louder.
But Don Jr. isn’t just shitposting on Instagram. He’s building a political base for himself. President Trump will not run for a third term in 2024, less for any particular legal reasons (by then, his party would have an inescapable Supreme Court majority), than because he’ll be turning 78 and will be exhausted from another four years of security briefings and Cabinet meetings that take him away from his true vocation: watching and tweeting about cable news programs. What reason would he have to continue in a job he hates, especially if he could garner nearly all the benefits of the presidency — the graft, the platform, the attention — by handing the job off to someone tied closely to him? Like, say, his son?
Don Jr., among his father’s most energetic and devoted surrogates, is already highly popular in the Republican Party. He has openly speculated about running for governor of New York, but more recently he’s said to be considering a run in a more Trump-friendly state in the Mountain West. (Some allies have reportedly pushed Don Jr. for chairmanship of the RNC.) An Axios–Survey Monkey poll from December found that 29 percent of Republicans already would consider voting for Donald Trump Jr. in the 2024 election. That’s nearly double the support for his more polished sister, Ivanka, and behind only Vice-President Pence. Assuming enough of Trumpism’s senior-citizen base is still alive, Don Jr. could sail to the presidency or at least face off in a fiery run against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trump Senior, meanwhile, could keep tweeting about politics to his heart’s content.
Roger Stone arrives for his sentencing at federal court in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020. Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
It’s easy to get lost in the details of the scandal now roiling the Justice Department; easy to get caught in the minutiae of federal sentencing guidelines or post-conviction procedures or the zany conspiracy theories that now surround the obvious and proven crimes committed by Roger Stone, one of President Trump’s least successful grifters. U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson Thursday cut to the heart of the matter. Before she sentenced Stone to 40 months in prison, before she incurred the inevitable new round of vitriol from the president, she told Stone’s lawyers, and the world, “the truth still exists. The truth still matters.” And it does.
Start with Stone himself. He is not some poor indigent defendant railroaded by a judge and prosecutor into a wrongful conviction. He is not a victim. Nor is he like the thousands of prisoners sitting today in state or federal penitentiaries who would benefit from the sort of prosecutorial charity Barr offered last week in reducing Stone’s sentencing recommendation. Stone was caught red-handed lying to Congress and then caught trying to obstruct justice by impeding the testimony of a witness who would have exposed his lies. He was convicted by a federal jury following a contested trial in which he was ably represented.
If that were all Stone had done it would have been enough — dayenu — to justify a significant prison sentence. But while his case was pending he demonstrated his lack of remorse or regret by threatening Judge Jackson by posting a picture of her with crosshairs on it, as if she were or ought to be a target of gun violence. The idea that a defendant could make such a threat and then earn leniency from the Justice Department is part of the reason why the Federal Judges Association held an emergency conference call this week to discuss Trump’s continuing attacks on judges whose decisions he dislikes. The truth still matters to them.
That’s why Stone will go to prison soon, unless the president intercedes with the pardon he’s been hinting at for months. In America, at least for now, the truth still matters, evidence still counts, and a jury’s verdict still reverberates. “He has not been prosecuted by his adversaries or anyone else’s adversaries,” Judge Jackson said of Stone before she sentenced him. “He was not prosecuted by anyone to gain political advantage.” Of course he wasn’t. Nor was Barr “vindicated” by Stone’s sentence. It was less than what prosecutors sought and more than the defense wanted — just like virtually every other sentence handed down by a judge.
The truth still matters. The truth about the Justice Department’s descent into political corruption still matters, too, now that another chapter in the Stone saga has ended. There are dozens of questions left unanswered by the misconduct of the attorney general, and the president, who have no valid arguments justifying their ongoing efforts to turn the Justice Department into a sword against the president’s political opponents and a shield benefiting the president’s friends. What’s happening now at the Justice Department is a clear and present danger to the administration of justice in America that shows no sign of ending.
Judge Jackson raised some of these questions Thursday and answered others. But who will ensure that more answers follow? House Democrats say that the attorney general will appear on Capitol Hill at the end of March to answer questions but there is no guarantee that he will show up or, if he does, that he will answer fully or candidly. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats have not subpoenaed a single witness to the scandal to come tell their story. That is not just the absence of meaningful legislative oversight. It’s another form of political abdication, and in the context of this administration’s continuing malfeasance, it’s inexplicable.
The truth still matters to all four of Stone’s trial prosecutors, who quit the case or resigned from the Justice Department outright last week because their bosses had signed off on Stone’s original sentencing recommendation and then Barr came back and undercut them all at the president’s behest. Don’t believe me? Take Trump’s word for it. Don’t believe him? Believe the colloquy Thursday between Judge Jackson and federal prosecutors, who told the judge in open court that the original sentencing recommendation had been vetted by “Main Justice,” meaning high-ranking DOJ officials in Washington.
The truth still matters to those 2,000 former federal prosecutors, and counting, who have signed an open letter demanding that Barr resign or be fired because of his role in the Stone scandal. These protesters didn’t go on the record in this fashion because of some petty disagreement over the scope of the federal sentencing guidelines. They aren’t even doing it because Barr’s special treatment of Stone exposes the rank hypocrisy of the administration’s approach to prosecutorial discretion (it’s okay when the Feds do it, not okay when local prosecutors — elected officials — choose to do it).
No, these former prosecutors, from Republican administrations and Democratic ones, are protesting as loudly as they are because they see Barr’s misconduct in the Roger Stone case, and his recent move to interfere in the case of Michael Flynn, another convicted Trump crony, as complicity in the president’s authoritarian approach to justice itself. Trump himself has only strengthened that argument in the week since that open letter became public — now he’s raging after the jury foreperson in the Stone case and declaring falsely that he, not Barr, is the nation’s chief law enforcement official.
The truth still matters, Judge Jackson said, and “Roger Stone’s insistence that it doesn’t, his belligerence, his pride in his own lies are a threat to … our democracy.” She could have said the same thing about the president or the attorney general. The former insists he can interfere at will in the work of the Justice Department. The latter evidently doesn’t see such relentless political interference as something so destructive to the work of an attorney general and to the reputation of the Justice Department that it merits a resignation in protest.
This is one of those moments in American history where we don’t need the passage of time, or the publication of memoirs, to see clearly what is happening. This is not a case of bureaucratic misunderstandings or legitimate disagreements among public servants. This is the nation’s chief law enforcement official subverting the independence of the Justice Department. This is worse than Watergate, or the Saturday Night Massacre. Indeed, there is no precedent for it in our nation’s history. Judge Jackson knows it, even though she couldn’t bring herself to say so explicitly before ordering Stone to start a new life as a federal prisoner.
Trump’s Presidency Isn’t a Dark Comedy — It’s an Absurd Tragedy
The idea that Donald J. Trump is a president best defined by his weakness has always carried a kind of knowing, world-weary authority. It’s basically the Washington Republican response when you’re freaking out about Trump’s incessant power grabs. Calm down, they tell us; he’s not really effective; he’s a shiny object to keep non-college-educated whites in the GOP’s grip; we’re still having elections; he’s only behaving like presidents before Watergate; the economy is fine; he’s more in touch with America than the rest of you. And so on.
And I should say I really, really want to believe Republicans when they say this. I’d love to adopt a more laconic and nuanced attitude in these nerve-racking times, and I’m worried about my blood pressure. I’m not hostile to every part of the Trump policy agenda, and I can happily accept some mitigating factors in Trump’s defense: Some rogue courts that have denied legitimate presidential authority (especially in immigration matters) only to be rebuffed in the end by SCOTUS; worrying errors in the FISA process early on (Carter Page, ahem); bureaucratic resistance rooted in ideology and partisanship; the shift of the mainstream media into a woke cul-de-sac; and the fever-swamp Maddowism that tried to re-up the Cold War to shore up the reputation of Hillary Clinton. These are points worth taking.
I also admire the sangfroid of some non-hysterics. In an age of high emotionality, the calm-down chorus has managed to summon up an air of coolness, detachment, moderation. To take one of the more persuasive advocates of this basic position: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He argued a while back that the best way to see the Trump administration was more as LBJ than Mussolini. This week, he described the Trump era as a “black comedy” — something unmistakably dark but ultimately unserious. On February 1, Ross made the broader case that Trump is “a reckless and distracted figure, a serial squanderer of opportunities, who barely won the presidency and whose coalition is united only in partisan solidarity and fear of liberalism. He may not be removable by the impeachment process, but is not a king; he is a widely hated, legislatively constrained president facing a difficult re-election … A failed impeachment doesn’t give him new powers or new popularity.”
And that’s where I get off the calm-down bus. The way Trump has been operating since he was acquitted by the Senate suggests to me that he is quite obviously seeking and practicing new powers, as he has been since he was sworn in; and that he has been rewarded, chillingly, with new popularity despite or because of it. He has brazenly pardoned a whole slew of his political allies and personal friends, initiated a purge of anyone in government who exposed malfeasance, fired an acting director of National Intelligence because an underling warned of Russian interference in the 2020 election, and kept suggesting to a judge that if she returned a harsh sentence for one of his goons, Roger Stone, he would almost certainly commute it or pardon Stone entirely. (Since Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s moderate sentence on Thursday, Trump has refused to take a pardon off the table.)
And to make sure we fully understand and witness what he’s doing, he has also declared himself as “I guess, the chief law enforcement officer” of the United States, and made a series of very public assertions that he can do anything he wants in the criminal-justice sphere. For all this, he is at 49 percent high in the Gallup poll, at a yearslong peak of 44.2 percent in the FiveThirtyEight poll of polls and 46 percent in RealClearPolitics’ average.
Yes, presidents before Trump did bad things we would today deplore (like spying on domestic political opponents). Yes, they committed impeachable offenses which did not lead to exposure, let alone removal from office. Yes, some flouted the rule of law. And, yes, we have tightened standards of executive accountability since Watergate. But no president, however malign, has ever declared that he has an absolute right to commit abuse of power — while he was doing it. Even when Nixon said, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” it was way after his departure from the White House, and prompted gasps. What Trump is doing is openly mocking constitutional constraints on the presidency even as he abuses his office — and has prompted only indifference among Republicans and exhaustion among Democrats.
Look at the precedents that have already been set: A president can now ignore Congress’ power of the purse, by redirecting funds from Congress’ priorities to his own (as in the wall); he can invent a “national emergency” out of nothing and exercise powers that are, at their worst, dictatorial (as Trump did to fund his wall); he can broadly refuse to cooperate with any legitimate congressional inquiries — and defy all congressional subpoenas (as he did with impeachment); he can, reportedly, order illegal acts and promise his subordinates he will subsequently pardon them if they are discovered; he can dangle pardons, obstruct justice, and intimidate witnesses with impunity; he can slander judges and accuse the FBI and CIA of being part of a seditious “deep state.”
He can wage war unilaterally and instantly, without any congressional approval, while lying about the reason (what Iranian imminent attack?) and denying the consequences (the serious injuries that were inflicted on U.S. service members in Iraq); he can stack his Cabinet with many lackeys who never have to undergo Senate hearings — because they’re only ever “acting” Cabinet members; he can threaten media entities (like Amazon) with antitrust actions because of negative coverage; and he can leverage American military aid against Congress’ wishes in order to get a foreign government to smear his potential political opponents and describe it as a “perfect” presidential act. We also know that a president in this polarized deadlock will almost never be subject to a veto override — and that the judiciary is being packed with adherents to untrammeled executive power.
Are we supposed to believe these precedents will not be cited and deployed by every wannabe strongman president in the future? Are we supposed to regard these massive holes below the waterline of the ship of state as no big deal? And with these precedents in his first term, are we supposed to regard what could Trump get away with in a second term as a form of black comedy? I’m sorry but I don’t get the joke.
And look at the latest response to Trumpism among some Establishment Democrats: a multibillionaire autocrat who admires the Chinese system of government, effectively harassed an entire generation of brown and black Americans as mayor of New York City, and finagled a previously impermissible third term in that position! Yeah, let’s elect the guy who already fixed the system to extend his time in office! That’s a huge shift — and a big win for the elected monarchy Trump understands the presidency to be. We’ve had business-dictator wannabes before — think Ross Perot — but not an entire possible presidential race between two moneyed, outsider authoritarians. “Ripe for tyranny?” We’re begging for it.
We’ve also learned that the appeal of rank, tribal demagoguery has not waned. After all the shocks and scandals, and all the violations of key norms and practices, the cult of Trump is as strong as ever. One chilling fact: In New Hampshire, in the Republican primary, basically uncontested, almost 130,000 people showed up to vote for their president. At a similar point in their reelection bids, Bush and Obama only mustered about half that number in the state.
This is a cult. It’s sustained by constant fanatical rallies, buoyed by a campaign of deliberate falsehoods, and thriving in an alternate reality created by a media company’s propaganda. This is more dangerous than a monarchy, because it is based on charismatic authority, not tradition. And Trump’s demagogic and Twitter skills remain underrated by too many who can’t see the menace behind the circus. The economy, meanwhile, is strong — thanks in part to adding a trillion more dollars each year to the debt — and people at the bottom of the ladder are actually seeing real wage gains for the first time in a long while. It is therefore more likely than not that this president will be reelected.
If that happens, every authoritarian precedent being set now will be given deeper democratic legitimacy. Yes, this is exactly how republics die. As in Rome, the forms remain, but the essence has shifted — away from democratic discourse, separation of powers, compromise and coalition and toward cultish, one-man strongman presidencies, buoyed by the tribal loyalties of half the country.
And that, of course, is not the worst option. Competing cult leaders is bad enough; but our current president is also threatening the integrity of our elections by his indifference toward foreign influence, his refusal to commit to obeying an election result in advance, his grotesque past claims of voter fraud, and his toying with a third or fourth term. Last year, Trump tweeted a GIF that showed him winning elections in 2024, 2028, and on and on. And it was one thing to swallow all this gamesmanship and trolling from a rogue candidate in 2016 — but from a sitting president heading into an election year? And then we have a genuine potential nightmare: If the election is close, can we be sure that the president will accept the result, and act in the interests of the country, rather than himself?
With Trump, for the first time in the history of the presidency, the answer is no. If you have followed this man’s business career, or witnessed the last three and a half years, you will notice that Trump never concedes anything. So why do we assume he would concede an election? And who would make him? And when you examine the nature of the party he has now remade in his image, and observe its evolution in recent decades, you see that the GOP’s core belief seems to have become that the other party is inherently illegitimate, and must be crushed by any means to hand. Which means to say that the GOP is a party now dedicated to the maintenance of its own power before any other principle. That was the core meaning of Trump’s nomination. It means that we have no idea if we’ll see a normal transfer of power this fall if the president loses.
I’m sorry not sorry to be a Cassandra about this — and I sure hope I’m wrong. But confronted with this reality, it is staggering to me that anyone can say we should chill. The nature of Trump’s instinctual tyranny is that it never stops by itself. And, like any psychological disorder, it never rests. It has an energy all its own. Each new beachhead of power is simply a means to acquire more of it in an ever-more ambitious and dynamic form. This is not a comedy; it’s a tragedy we want to believe is a comedy. Because the alternative is too nightmarish. A Kierkegaard quote, of all things, popped on Twitter this week that seemed to capture the dynamic beautifully: “A fire broke out behind stage at a theater. The clown walked out to warn the public and they thought it was a joke and they applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s exactly how the world will end: to generous applause from wits who think it’s a joke.”
Haha, as the kids say. Haha. Now that’s a black comedy.
Having Enough of Experts
The surest economic forecasts made in the 2016 referendum campaign were that Brexit would be a catastrophe for the British economy. This was the view not only of the Remain campaign but of the U.K. government itself. The Treasury published a formal set of prognostications about Brexit’s economic impact in 2016 and they were grim: a recession immediately after the vote to leave, a jump in unemployment, and a soaring deficit. This was not a warning about the possible long-term future economic impact of Brexit, but about the immediate aftermath of the vote. And the Treasury was wrong. In the following three quarters, they predicted a cumulative decline of 0.3 percent, which would put the U.K. formally into a recession. In fact, growth has increased by 1.4 percent. There was no recession; and none has subsequently arrived.
Unemployment was 4.9 percent in mid-2016; in early 2020 it’s down to 3.8 percent, a near record low. More interesting is the employment rate: “The number of employed people rose by a sharp 180,000, its strongest in two years, and helped push the employment rate to another record high of 76.5%.” So Brexit has brought a bunch of people previously outside the workforce inside it, and generated more jobs than ever before. Compare Britain’s unemployment rate with France’s (8.1 percent) or Italy’s (9.8 percent) or Spain’s (13.8) or, more broadly, the eurozone (7.4).
Growth? Last year, the U.K. had slightly higher growth than the rest of the E.U., and the IMF just predicted that the U.K. economy would also grow marginally faster than the eurozone countries for the next two years, as long as there isn’t a screwup in the transition out of the E.U. During the referendum campaign, leading Tory and Leave politician Michael Gove was widely mocked for saying that Britons “have had enough of experts” when talking about the economy and Brexit. But it turns out that 51 percent of the people were right and almost all the experts were wrong.
But now the real test. A key factor in Brexit was control of mass immigration. And mass immigration often favored low-skilled workers in service and health industries — giving businesses cheap and easy labor on demand. With the new immigration law proposed by Boris Johnson, that cheap labor will disappear, as non-skilled immigrants will be barred. A points system for all migrants will be applied, restricted largely to skilled workers with a job offer and fluent in English.
Will that hurt growth? One mitigating factor is that the new government has allowed all current E.U. citizens to stay in Britain if they want — and 3.2 million have applied to. As for those jobs now filled by cheap migrant labor? The government points to a population of 8 million Brits currently deemed economically inactive who could fill those gaps. And then the government simply calls on businesses to adjust — by training U.K. workers, and raising wages to retain and attract employees in a tighter labor market: “It is important that employers move away from a reliance on the U.K.’s immigration system as an alternative to investment in staff retention, productivity and wider investment in technology and automation.”
It’s too soon to see how this will work out — but it’s something to judge the Johnson government by. If growth continues, if the transition out of the E.U. is smooth, if immigration levels decrease and wages for unskilled workers go up, then Boris will have fundamentally reshaped the British economy to help the unskilled working class. That will be a huge vindication for Brexit and Johnson if it pans out — and could realign British politics for a generation. It might reinvigorate the American economics-of-immigration debate as well.
Inconvenient Pioneers
Every now and again, I take a moment to take stock of how deep gay integration has gotten in my adult lifetime. This past week, our politics featured two relatively young men, on both sides of the political divide, whose sexual orientation is both clear and irrelevant. Pete Buttigieg has been at the top of the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, one of seven remaining candidates, and in the circular flamethrower squad of Wednesday’s debate, he once again held his own. More than that: He was relentless in his attacks on Amy Klobuchar and more than a little blunt about Bernie Sanders’s plans to take private health insurance away from everyone (something that doesn’t even happen in socialized health care in Britain). There was not the slightest whiff of defensiveness about him.
His moderate politics (on most subjects) is filtered through a seemingly brutal, calculating Rhodes Scholar–style ambition. And why can’t gays as well as straights harbor that? It’s fantastic also that he is a man of Christian faith — like countless other gays and lesbians in America. Who would have imagined that the pioneering gay figure of 2020 would be a married Christian who got a standing ovation in a Fox News town hall? But that’s old news now.
It’s also fantastic that, for the most part, his sexual orientation is ignored. Yes, the queer left hates him — but they hate a lot of gay success in public life if it doesn’t exactly fit their ideological niche. And Rush Limbaugh indeed took a slightly homophobic dig the other day. But I doubt Trump would openly use Pete’s orientation as a way to demean him. And that’s not just because Trump is not personally homophobic but because he knows it would look ugly, and be counterproductive. That’s how far we’ve come.
Richard Grenell has not subjected himself to getting elected anywhere, but, like Buttigieg, he’s a classic careerist D.C. meritocrat (and why the fuck not?). From the heartland, he got a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School and then attached himself to Republican pols — notably George Pataki and George W. Bush, who made him communications director for the U.S. seat at the U.N., a post he held for seven years. Launching his own communications shop, Grenell subsequently worked Fox News gigs even as he was a signatory to an amicus brief in defense of the right of gay couples to marry. By all accounts he has been a disaster as ambassador to Germany, trolling the E.U. and German elites, although I doubt Trump sees his regular Twitter provocations as a liability.
But check out a simple video of Grenell being sworn in for the Germany job. Mike Pence, of all people, officiates as Grenell’s longtime partner, Matt Lashey, holds the family Bible. This week his appointment as acting director of National Intelligence was widely panned — and is not expected to last long. But he nonetheless became the first-ever openly gay member of the Cabinet in U.S. history. You missed that? All the better. But for some of us, it’s a quiet landmark tarred only by the fact that most gay groups won’t even acknowledge it. The Human Rights Campaign’s Twitter feed has made no mention at all — even as they are rightly touting the first lesbian mother in Congress. Why is the first openly gay Cabinet member a nonevent? Because he’s a conservative. And to the activist left and too many of the Establishment liberals in the gay movement, that means he’s not really gay.
My politics tilt more toward Buttigieg than Grenell — but a moment like this should not be filtered entirely through ideology. History matters too. When I was a very lonely openly gay figure in Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, the idea that I would live to see an openly gay and successful presidential candidate and an openly gay Cabinet member at the same time would have been preposterous. And now it’s virtually normal. I’ll take that.
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