Coyote Blog

Headlines on Conservative outlets bragged that Trump was already turning the economy around. Breitbart was typical with this headline:

US Manufacturing Expands For Second Month Under Trump, Driven by Stronger Demand and Policy Shifts

In the body of the story they write:

After years of stagnation, the U.S. manufacturing sector is showing renewed strength under President Trump’s leadership. The latest data signal a reversal from the prolonged contraction during Biden’s term. Businesses are responding to policy shifts aimed at strengthening domestic industry, securing supply chains, and encouraging investment. [ed: no evidence is supplied for this last sentence]

This is an example of a the totally irritating genre of media stories that take the form of "President blames his predecessor for bad economic numbers" and "President takes credit for good economic numbers." Politicians' ability to do this, even when the narrative they use reverses month to month, is just amazing. Biden to the end of his Presidency was blaming Trump for every bad economic story and now, barely 42 days into in term, Trump supporters are taking credit for good economic numbers, even those magically created by time-travelling Trump in the first 20 days of January.

This connection between Jan/Feb manufacturing numbers and Trump is dead wrong for two reasons

1. The economy does not work this fast. The economy is a massive river like the Mississippi where changes in flow in Minneapolis won't be seen for quite some time in New Orleans. In particular, manufacturers are producing to orders they received weeks or months ago for customers in turn who likely are responding to orders and demand they saw even further in the past. If they are sourcing from overseas or selling overseas the delay is even longer. And negative things flow through more slowly than positive. I suppose the President on January 20 could order the CEO's of the 3 largest companies in America put up against a wall and shot and we might see the panic in the economic numbers by March 3, but I am not even sure of that.
2. I can say with total confidence -- having been a strategic planner at the top levels of Emerson Electric, Honeywell, and AlliedSignal -- that there are very few manufacturing companies in the last 60 days who have been racing to expand their business. The chaos of Trump's changing tariff demands is making planning impossible. Again, nothing changes quickly and projects in progress have to be finished, but I guarantee no one is starting new capital investments in manufacturing that they can defer. Everyone is frozen. And anyone doing business with the government or who needs Federal approval of permits is totally frozen as well because none of that work is getting done. Even if we give Trump the benefit of the doubt to say his intention is to streamline permitting and approvals, right now it is total gridlock. In government offices right now, it is gridlock where everyone has walked away from their cars. I think it is a total lock that we are going to see a dip in manufacturing investment in the coming months.

Economists have given this chaos the name "regime uncertainty" and among many free market economists exactly this sort of shifting regulatory environment under FDR gets part of the blame for the length of the Great Depression. Alex Tabarrok has more here.

When Trump took office in 2017, I thought there was a reasonable chance that he would pardon Hillary Clinton.  I thought this was just the sort of schoolyard trick Trump might play -- after all, what better way to tar someone as guilty when they have not even been indicted for anything**. Trump didn't do it.

But now Biden has.  And to his own family.  Wow.

In his last hours of office Biden issued pre-emptive pardons for numerous people who have not even been charged with any crime.  Sort of blanket get out of jail free cards for any federal offense they might be accused of.  The act feels unprecedented, though I remember that President Bush did something similar for Donald Rumsfeld.  But it is certainly unprecedented in its scope.  He pardoned

• General Milley (who called Trump "fascist to the core" and a "wannabe dictator")
• Much of his family, including all his siblings and their spouses.  Republican Congressional investigators believe that Biden family members funneled foreign bribe money to Biden when he was Vice-President.   Certainly their family has extraordinarily complex financial arrangements, sending money to each other through a variety of shell corporations
• The entire J6 committee, which is sort of weird as they already should have immunity through the speech and debate clause
• Anthony Fauci

The legal case most folks are looking at right now is Burdick vs United States  which says that 1) a pardon can be rejected and 2) acceptance of a pardon carries "an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it," though it is disputed whether this latter is a binding precedent.  Getting such an un-asked for blanket pardon certainly seems a mixed blessing.  Think about John Owens, his brother-in-law.  Did anyone have him on their radar before, because NOW they do.

I know some are p*ssed off that they cannot put Liz Cheney or Anthony Fauci in jail.  Personally I am relieved.  The Biden administration set some horrible precedents in prosecution of its enemies, perhaps some of the worst since Nixon.  We are at a tipping point between dialing back on this sort of banana-republic-style political retribution or going into full-on Sicilian vendetta wars.  I have had lots of people disagree with me on this, but I think we need to turn the other cheek here and find intermediate ways to enforce accountability.  Trump's revocation of the security clearances of the folks who made up a Russian conspiracy to discredit the evidence of Hunter Biden's laptop seems like a reasonable approach.

But there is a silver lining to all this that I posted on X the morning the pardons were announced -- without the looming threat of prosecution, there is no room to plead the 5th.  The most interesting person to get under oath to answer questions is going to be Fauci, of course.  I worry that we have not found the boundaries of gain-of-function research and that dangerous research is still going on and being funded by government organizations (most recently I have seen rumors that the Department of Agriculture has been funding gain of function on diseases that affect livestock).  There is so much this guy needs to be asked under oath -- Covid origins, suppression of opposing speech, the vaccine trials, coordination with the teachers unions on school recommendations, etc etc -- that the hearings could last weeks.

Biden's legacy, such that it is, could also be in some danger.  No one is going to prosecute the guy, for the same reason that Hur did not, but there are sure a lot of suspicious financial transactions running back and forth through his family and a myriad of shell companies.

**Postscript:  For those with a short memory, Clinton moved her email to a private server in an attempt avoid FOIA and in so doing probably allowed classified information to sit on a poorly secured computer in her house.  I would have said that neither of these sorts of errors or crimes would reasonably ever be prosecuted (at least at that seniority), that is until I saw FBI agents descend on Mar-a-Lago looking for poorly secured classified documents.  It should be noted that despite the fears of many folks on the Left, Trump did not prosecute Clinton.