Posts tagged ‘Trump’

...And the Really Stupid Sh*t Begins

This was originally posted on 2-1-25 but was lost in a  server update. 

Trump's first few weeks have been a mix of good and bad for this libertarian, all against a backdrop of horror at how Imperial the presidency has become.  But as of today, perhaps the most destructive and stupid initiative has begun:

 

Because we are all tired of those fentanyl-toting Canadians crossing the border illegally.   I mean, we all saw the Proposal and know how all those Canadians are trying to cheat US immigration law.

Seriously, this is beyond awful -- and not just because of the threat of retaliation, though that is real.  Even if all the affected countries roll over and accept these modified tariffs without response, this is still a terrible step for the US.  No matter how Trump and his very very small group of protectionist economist friends sell this, this is a tax on 300 million US consumers to benefit a small group of producers.   I don't have time right now to give an updated lesson on free trade -- that will have to wait for when I am not on vacation.  But I will offer a few ironies:

  • After campaigning hard on inflation, Trump is slapping a 10-25% consumption tax on foreign goods.  That is a straight up consumer price increase for a variety of key products including much of the lumber we use to build homes, a lot of our oil and gas, a lot of our grain and beef, and many of our cars and appliances.
  • Much of this inflation is going to disproportionately hurt Trump's base.  No one is going to care much if a Hollywood actor has the fair trade coffee they buy at Whole Foods go up in price, but Trump voters are going to see a direct effect of this on prices at Wal-Mart.
  • Republicans have spent 4 years (rightly) condemning Federal and State governments for the economic disruptions of COVID lockdowns and restrictions.  While some of the inflation of the last 4 years was due to ridiculously high government deficits, another major cause was the COVID supply chain disruptions.  And now Trump is voluntarily recreating them.

The only small hope I have is that Trump is steeped from his business career in a certain style of brinksmanship bargaining that consists of taking an entirely destructive and irrational position in hopes that they folks on the other side of the table will back down and give him more than he should.  My son won poker tournaments like this because he would do so much crazy stuff that no one at the table wanted to challenge him.  I have always said that I don't think Trump is a particularly good business person -- he has run business after business that has failed.  But he is a good negotiator, and has exited numerous bankruptcies with his creditors giving him far more than one would think was necessary.

So I am sure his supporters would say that this is no different from the Columbia situation, when the Columbian president backed down quickly on not accepting repatriation of Columbian nationals under a storm of Trump threats.  Perhaps.  But even if this stuff is reversed, it is incredibly destructive because it is almost impossible for businesses to plan and make long-term investments when something so fundamental as tariff rates is changing so quickly and arbitrarily.

But there is yet another harm.  I know some folks are exhausted with the idea of American exceptionalism, in part because it has been a 75-year excuse to send our military bumbling around the world intervening in every conflict large and small, frequently overthrowing states only to have the replacement be even worse.

But there is one part of American exceptionalism that is important -- our example and our persuasion is a key support beam in upholding two great benefits for humanity -- free speech and free trade.  Every government official anywhere is a potential tyrant (if you think that is extreme, I would argue that this exact fear was one of the fundamental founding ideas behind our Constitution).  And tyrants want to have their opponents shut up and they want to shift economic activity to reward their supporters.  They love censorship and protectionism.

As such, in every country of the world, there is a tremendous headwind against free speech and free trade.  There is some natural gravity affecting government behavior that if there is not a constant, visible pressure to maintain free speech and free trade, they begin to be undermined.  And at least since 1945, the US has been the primary source of that pressure (one might add the UK to this, at least once upon a time, but looking at them now that is pretty much over).

Over the last 10 years, it has been incredibly depressing to see the US start to lose its commitment to free speech, particularly on the Left which has here-to-fore been the natural home of its defenders.  Trump and his supporters say things that seem like a positive step in returning to free speech, but I am a cynical man and I fear that we may only see censorship shifted to different topics rather than actually eliminated.  Time will tell, and I will have more on that later.

But in the case of trade, it is the Right in the US that has been the natural defender of free trade.  To see the Right not only abandon the defense of free trade, but actually start ramming torpedoes into its sinking carcass, is perhaps the most depressing part of Trump's order.

Biden's Dirty Trick -- To His Own People

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.

Paris Climate Accords and Article II, Section 2 of the Consititution

As expected, Trump gave notice yesterday to the UN that the US is pulling out of the Paris climate accords.  This marks the second time he has done so, making participation in these accords one of the EO ping pong balls that get swatted back and forth every inauguration day.

The reason this is possible is that supporters of these accords have never submitted the agreement to the Senate for ratification, which would make the terms of the agreement more legally binding and much harder to casually reverse.  Per Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution:

[the President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;

Woodrow Wilson spent a huge amount of time, most of his remaining prestige, and probably his remaining health negotiating the Versailles Treaty, but it was all for nothing in this country because the Senate did not approve the treat, which is why we were never in the League of Nations.**

My understanding is that something like the Paris Climate Accords there is actually a potentially less daunting way to adopt the accords as US law without getting a 2/3 vote in the Senate -- legislation could be crafted with rules mirroring the commitments in the Accords and then passed normally through the House and Senate.

Neither of these courses were pursued by President Obama or President Biden, even when they possessed Congressional majorities.  This is likely because -- whatever their public position is on climate change -- legislators know that adopting economically expensive mandates in an international agreement that are not matched by countries like China and India (see below) is wildly unpopular.  And so the basic approach has been to negotiate and "commit" the US to these agreements by unilateral executive action, and then attempt to use the regulatory tools available to the Administration to attempt to comply. [A more cynical view is that US Presidents have done what every other world leader has done in signing these pacts-- sign them as a virtue-signaling position with no idea of how to meet the commitments and perhaps no real intention of doing so].

Update:  This is really a stunning chart.  We have returned to the same carbon intensity we had before the Civil War.

 

** It is also why US wine producers, at least until a new treaty with the EU was approved in 2006, could legally use the word "champagne" to describe certain types of sparkling wine.  The history on this is complicated, and goes back further, but essentially the international agreement to not allow any wine outside of the Champagne region of France to use that name was embodied into the Treaty of Versailles, which the US did not ratify.  There is an organization called the CIVC which is essentially the Champagne union that defends the champagne IP, sometimes to ridiculous ends (reminiscent of the NFL and the word "Superbowl.")  I remember they sued Apple over calling a gold/bronze iphone color "champagne".