This is a man who tried to exploit Londoners’ fears following a horrific terrorist attack on our city, amplified the tweets of a British far-right racist group, denounced as fake news robust scientific evidence warning of the dangers of climate change, and is now trying to interfere shamelessly in the Conservative party leadership race by backing Boris Johnson because he believes it would enable him to gain an ally in Number 10 for his divisive agenda. Donald Trump is just one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat.
The funny thing is that although Khan is right, I don’t really agree with him. That is, Trump has done all that stuff, but I don’t think he’s much of a global threat.
Maybe my glasses are rosier than they should be, but I view Trump as authoritarian in the same way that I view five-year-olds as authoritarian: they yell, they cry, they whine, they demand that everything be about them, but in the end nobody pays them any serious attention. Who cares about a five-year-old’s routine tantrums, after all?
Now, it’s true that Trump can do more damage than a five-year-old, but not that much more. After all, even his allies and supporters basically agree that he’s a buffoon. The only things they really wanted from him were a tax cut and a bunch of conservative judges, and they got that. Beyond that they mostly just humor him.
If Trump weren’t so ignorant and unaware, he might be a serious danger. But he is, so he’s not. It’s possible that his relentless race baiting has done some serious damage, but even there I suspect that his impact is fleeting. If we get rid of Trump in 2020, it will be like waking up from an outlandish dream. Within ten minutes it will all be forgotten and no one will ever care about anything he says or does again.
Today the New York Times rounds up several estimates of the impact of Donald Trump’s beloved tariffs. So far. According to the Tax Foundation, they’ll raise $69 billion, which comes to $530 per household. According to the New York Fed, they’ll raise $106 billion when you account for deadweight losses—or $831 per household. The Penn Wharton Budget Model figures Trump’s tariffs will cost the average household about $500. But that’s not all:
So there you have it. The tariffs will cost you $500; they’ll cut growth; they’ll reduce wages; and they’ll eliminate 155,000 jobs. But other than that, how was the show, Mrs. Lincoln?
Look Like You’re Doing Something
But don’t actually do anything.
The link is to an Alex Pareene piece about a prescription drug plan that’s supported by Nancy Pelosi. The plan is pretty simple: the HHS secretary would be required to negotiate lower prices for at least 25 prescription drugs each year. If a negotiation is unsuccessful, the GAO would be allowed to set a price close to the typical amount charged for the drug in other countries. Here’s Pareene:
Do Democrats Actually Want to Make Drugs Cheaper?
Or are they just looking to cut a deal for the sake of cutting a deal?
….The basic, blinding flaw in this proposal is to task Donald Trump’s health and human services secretary, a former pharmaceutical industry executive and lobbyist, with deciding, at his personal discretion, to negotiate the prices of “at least” 25 drugs. But even without that bit of biographical detail, you can already figure out the various ways that a price intervention all but designed to function as anything but a serious curb on drug pricing can’t possibly work, right?
For one thing, America’s unique dilemma in need of remedy is “drug costs,” not “25 drugs’ costs.”…AARP’s Public Policy Institute last year tracked the retail prices of hundreds of brand-name drugs commonly prescribed to older Americans and found that more than 200 of them increased in price beyond the rate of inflation in 2017.
….We must again remind any readers given to policy transports driven by logic and sound political calculation that the current, non-hypothetical HHS secretary is a former pharmaceutical industry executive. We must also gingerly remind said readers that all available evidence from the last 40 or so years of hard-right governance in Washington shows that Republicans will always place industry profits above their constituents’ needs.
I adore Pareene’s Dorothy-Parkeresque poison pen, and I’m reluctant to run the risk of having it turned on me. It would probably seem a little less charming then. Still, I want to point out that Pelosi is likely a step ahead of him. Sure, this plan will accomplish nothing now, but how about in 2021, after President Warren nominates Michael Moore to be her HHS secretary? It would be handy to have a law already in place that allows—nay, requires—the negotiation of “at least” 25 drug prices. My guess is that this would be translated as “approximately all” and that Mr. Roger & Me would be delighted to allow negotiations to fail so that prices could default to a European level. This could be one of the greatest bills of all time!
Needless to say, there are at least one or two Republicans who can figure this out too, which means this plan has no chance of going anywhere. So why not support it and make Republicans look like the bad guys? What’s not to like?
A ten-year-old girl compares her hand to Bette Davis’s at the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. It fits pretty well! Bette Davis must have had mighty small hands.
hahahahahahaha… oh man… looking forward to being lectured on the internet by the entire NYT politics team about why it’s actually good journalism to write a super flimsy hit piece and then immediately take a job for the people who benefitted from it. https://t.co/mlzAjVtv9I
The Queen gave President Trump an *abridged* edition of Winston Churchill’s Second World War in a tacky red-and-gold binding. Never let it be said that HM lacks a sense of occasion.
I don’t really know about the red carpet and the lack of crowds, but the abridged edition of Churchill’s World War II history? That’s priceless. I wonder if Trump has any idea of the implied insult here?
For those of you who have actual lives and don’t know what the Great David French Debate is, congratulations! Sadly, I do know, which says nothing good about the quality of my life. In the tiniest possible nutshell, it’s a debate about whether social conservatives should be nice people (like David French) or fire-breathing Torquemadas who understand just how bad things are and are willing to do what it takes to crush secular liberalism.
Now, this was all set off by one guy who used French as a stand-in for milquetoast social conservatism, so I’m not sure just how Great this debate really is. But it might be! I don’t know. It’s not as if I spend a ton of time paying attention to intra-troglodyte debate, after all.
Oddly, though, I think Yglesias’s position deserves some pushback—though not in a way that conservative Christians will like much. There are two reasons for this pushback. The first thing to understand is just how demoralized conservative and evangelical Christians felt in 2016. It started in the aughts; increased during Obama’s presidency; and culminated in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case that represented their final and utter defeat on the question of gay marriage. Like me, you probably think it was great that they were definitively routed on this issue, but it’s not hard to imagine how they felt: as if moral decay, after 50 years of steady ascension, had finally completed its nationwide victory. Even the sodomists had a grip on our kids now! And that wasn’t all. By 2016, three-quarters of Americans agreed that religion was losing influence. The evangelical share of the population had declined by a quarter. The fastest growing religious group was “none.”
In other words, from the point of view of evangelicals this really did look like a crisis. All their old warhorses were dead or close to it, and their new leaders were increasingly turning away from traditional moral hot buttons. There was no end in sight. Everywhere they looked, they were losing and the Great Liar was winning.
And then, out of nowhere, comes Donald Trump. Sure, he doesn’t seem like much of a churchgoer, and yes, he was a big-time playboy in the 80s. Still, in public he’s not just a Christian, he’s a muscular, Bible-thumping, hit-em-where-they-live Christian. He’s the kind of person—maybe the only kind of person—who can turn things around. Are you really going to let some womanizing get in the way of supporting him? Get real. This isn’t a game, after all.
And that brings us to the second reason for pushback: there’s nothing new here. Conservative Christian leaders have always tolerated womanizers. They’ve always supported overseas wars. They’ve always been xenophobic. They’ve always appealed to the wealthy. They’ve always admired strong-man politicians. They’ve alway turned a blind eye to hypocrisy in their personal lives. They’ve always been super-patriots. They’ve always disliked Muslims. They’ve always been mostly white. And at least since the Reagan era, they’ve tolerated divorce just fine.
As you probably see by now, this is a pretty mild pushback. If you want to think of evangelicals as hypocrites, that’s fine. But don’t think of them that way because of Donald Trump. He is practically the apotheosis of conservative Christianity in America, not some weird, blustering outlier. No one should be either surprised or shocked that they love him. In a crisis, he was inevitable.
Fifteen years ago, Japan found itself stuck with a problem: sinking inflation, interest rates near zero and a limited ability to generate higher prices. Five years ago, Europe faced the same challenge.
The worry haunting Federal Reserve officials is that they will be caught in a similar trap within the next decade. This concern is animating their yearlong review taking center stage with a two-day research conference beginning Tuesday in Chicago….“We’re trying to think of ways of making that inflation 2% target highly credible, so that inflation averages around 2%, rather than only averaging 2% in good times and then averaging way less than that in bad times,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in February.
The fact that the Fed is “trying to think” of ways to increase inflation confirms what I’ve long thought: they don’t know how to do it. Neither did Japan’s central bank. Or Europe’s.
In theory, central banks are supposed to have absolute control over inflation. And in theory, maybe they do: flood the country with enough money for long enough and eventually inflation will rise. But the amount it takes in the face of a fundamentally deflationary economy is apparently so enormous that in practice it’s not always possible.
Most likely this has something to do with the aging of the population. Japan got there first, Europe got there next, and we’re inching in that direction too. What’s the answer to that?
Donald Trump’s worst quality—which has been obvious since the first day of his presidential campaign—is that he’s a race-baiter. He appeals relentlessly to white racial resentment, sometimes explicitly and sometimes a little less so, but always and everywhere in a way we haven’t seen on a national level since Jesse Helms went to his reward.
There are many reasons that Republicans with any integrity should abandon Trump, but this is by far the biggest. Trump’s bigoted behavior is disgusting and despicable.
For those who continue to deny this, here’s a list. It starts on the day he announced his candidacy. It is by no means exhaustive—not even close—and any single item on it could be written off as a mistake or a bad moment. But all of them put together? There’s only one conclusion you can draw.
2015
June 16, in the kickoff to his presidential campaign, calls for the construction of a wall on the southwest border and says of Mexicans: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
November 22: Retweets a racist graphic claiming that blacks are responsible for 81 percent of murdered whites. (The actual number is 16 percent.)
November 22: Asked about his obvious lie that thousands of people in Jersey City cheered when the World Trade Center was hit, says: “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.”
December 7: Trump calls for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
2016
January 22: Retweets a bit of anti-Jeb Bush snark from an account called @WhiteGenocideTM.
February 28, asked about the endorsement of white supremacist David Duke, pretends he has no idea who Duke was: “I just don’t know anything about him.”
April 21, speaking on TV about the plan to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill: “I think it’s pure political correctness”
June 10: Begins referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahantas.”
September 29, avowed white supremacists tell the LA Times that Trump’s campaign has been great for them. Richard Spencer: “Before Trump, our identity ideas, national ideas, they had no place to go.” David Duke: “I love it. The fact that Donald Trump’s doing so well, it proves that I’m winning. I am winning.” Andrew Anglin, editor of the Daily Stormer: “Trump had me at ‘build a wall.’ Virtually every alt-right Nazi I know is volunteering for the Trump campaign.”
2017
January 27: Signs an executive order that (a) temporarily bans visits from residents of seven predominantly Muslim countries and (b) effectively prioritizes the immigration of Christians from the Middle East over Muslims.
February 20: Establishes the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office, which is instructed to ensure that crime victims are “provided information about the offender, including the offender’s immigration status.”
May 1, in an interview, dismisses the adamant refusal of the white South to give up slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War: “I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War….People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
August 1: The Justice Department announces its intent to focus the civil rights division on litigation “related to intentional race-based discrimination.” This is a reference to affirmative action programs that assist blacks and other minority groups.
August 12, in response to neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, refuses to specifically call out white supremacist violence: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”
August 14, under pressure from his staff, Trump reads a statement forcefully denouncing “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups,” but later tells his aides the statement was “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made.”
August 15, backtracking from the previous day’s statement: “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group … that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
September 22, speaking to a mostly white crowd, goes after black quarterback Colin Kaepernick for kneeling to protest racism and police brutality: “You know what’s hurting the game? When people like yourselves turn on television, and you see those people taking the knee when they are playing our great national anthem.”
October 20, after hearing a report that crime was up 13 percent in Britain, falsely says it happened “amid spread of Radical Islamic terror.”
Just out report: “United Kingdom crime rises 13% annually amid spread of Radical Islamic terror.” Not good, we must keep America safe!
November 29: Trump retweets three anti-Muslim videos originally posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of a right-wing nationalist party called Britain First. The videos are titled “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!,” “Muslim destroys a statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!”
December 14, upon leaving her White House job, Omarosa Manigault Newman defends Trump by saying: “The things that he says, the types of pushback that he gives, involve people of color. These are racial exchanges. Yes, I will acknowledge many of the exchanges—particularly in the last six months—have been racially charged. Do we then just stop and label him as a racist? No.”
2018
January 11, asked about protections for people from Haiti and various African countries during a meeting about immigration, replies: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here” instead of more people from Norway?
February 5, in his State of the Union address, for the third straight year, Trump highlights murders committed by undocumented immigrants: “Here tonight is Debra Bissell. Just three weeks ago, Debra’s parents, Gerald and Sharon, were burglarized and shot to death in their Reno, Nevada home by an illegal alien. They were in their 80s and are survived by four children, 11 grandchildren, and 20 great-grandchildren. Also here tonight are Gerald and Sharon’s granddaughter, Heather, and great‑granddaughter, Madison.”
February 20: The LA Times reports that the Trump administration is separating families at the border.
May 23: HUD suspends two rules designed to reduce housing discrimination.
August 3: Trump insults the intelligence of LeBron James, continuing a pattern of attacking black athletes and others (Maxine Waters, Stephen Curry, Jemele Hill, Colin Kaepernick, Meghan Markle, Abby Phillip, April Ryan, Don Lemon, and many more).
August 21, Omarosa Manigault Newman changes her mind about Trump, saying: “It is very clear Donald Trump is a racist and he’s trying to undermine our democracy.”
August 22: Trump asks Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” the false charge that the “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.”
I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson@FoxNews
March 17, after revelations that (a) Tucker Carlson had referred to Iraqis as “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and (b) Jeanine Pirro suggested that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab might mean she supports sharia law, tweets: “Keep fighting for Tucker, and fight hard for @JudgeJeanine. Your competitors are jealous – they all want what you’ve got – NUMBER ONE. Don’t hand it to them on a silver platter. They can’t beat you, you can only beat yourselves!”
May 22: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin delays plans to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill until Trump is out of office. The New York Times reports that this is because he was “concerned that the president might create an uproar by canceling the new bill altogether.”
May 30: The New York Times reports that the origin of Trump’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census was a study which concluded that it “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
Today: Jared Kushner swallows nervously and begs off having to comment on Trump’s birtherism and anti-Muslim executive orders.
Q) Has Trump ever said anything racist?
KUSHNER: “Absolutely not. You can’t not be a racist for 69 years then run for president and be a racist.”
Q) Was Birtherism racist?
KUSHNER: “Um, look I wasn’t really involved in that…that was a long time ago.”pic.twitter.com/GzdB9pafCi
“It may be rejected. Could be in the end, folks will say, ‘It’s not particularly original, it doesn’t particularly work for me,’ that is, ‘It’s got two good things and nine bad things, I’m out,’ ” Pompeo said in an audio recording of the private meeting obtained by The Washington Post.
….He also recognized the popular notion that the agreement will be one-sided in favor of the Israeli government. “I get why people think this is going to be a deal that only the Israelis could love,” he said. “I understand the perception of that. I hope everyone will just give the space to listen and let it settle in a little bit.”
Pompeo is a good soldier. He’ll defend anything that comes out of the White House, no matter how excruciatingly horrible. So if even Pompeo is bearish on this plan, I think it’s safe to say that it’s going to be a train wreck.
And we respect that! But maybe you’re of a mind to support our work directly instead? We have until December 31 to raise the last $400,000 we need to keep our nonprofit newsroom running at full strength into 2026. Will you make a gift today?
We noticed you have an ad blocker on. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism?
Billionaires own the media,
but they don’t own us.
At Mother Jones we know these aren’t conventional times, and they require unconventional coverage. That’s what deliver every day: fierce, independent journalism you can’t find elsewhere. Perhaps never in the history of our country has that been more necessary than now. But we can’t do it without reader support—your support. Please chip in today.
Billionaires own the media,
but they don’t own us.
At Mother Jones we know these aren’t conventional times, and they require unconventional coverage. That’s what deliver every day: fierce, independent journalism you can’t find elsewhere. Perhaps never in the history of our country has that been more necessary than now. But we can’t do it without reader support—your support. Please chip in today.
