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by
Rick Wilson
Read between
April 17 - May 4, 2020
The long, sweet climb in economic prosperity we’ve enjoyed for a decade comes down to the decisions of two men and one institution: George W. Bush in taking the vastly unpopular step of bailing out Wall Street in the 2009 economic crisis, and Barack Obama for flooding the economy with economic stimulus in his first term. The Federal Reserve enabled both of these decisions by issuing an ocean of low- or zero-interest credit for ten years. Sure, the bill will come due someday, but the party is still going. While Trump took short-term political advantage of it, every bubble gets pricked
We’re awash in trillion-dollar deficits, the national debt is asymptotically approaching infinity, and we have a president who’s never hesitated to borrow and spend well beyond his means, or to simply throw up his hands and declare bankruptcy when it suits him.
GOP passed a tax bill that is performing exactly as expected
in 2022 or thereabouts it’s going to lead to annual deficits of close to $2 trillion.
When the bubble pops, the correction hits, and Wall Street investment firms and banks go tango uniform, Trump will bail them out before you can say “golden parachute.” The “average guy with a 401k” who is going to get crushed in the next drop? Not so much.
Trump wants the Fed not only to continue the current spending spree but to expand
“There are bad times just around the corner.”
The global order of (largely) free and (mostly) fair trade is shifting quickly to our economic, political, and military rivals in the world, opening new markets where we have now boxed ourselves out.
change continues to move the global economy toward technology, services, and nano- and biotech, Trump’s retro trade policy will continue to bankrupt American farmers and manufacturers, strengthen our adversaries, and cost American consumers billions in new taxes.
the collapse next time won’t just be awful; it’ll be made more dangerous and destructive by an economic ignoramus
enormous opportunity, as both a moral and a political force, to take back the high ground on defense, security, and terrorism—to
From Putin to North Korea to Iran to ISIS to Saudi Arabia to NATO, Trump turned U.S. foreign policy into a pay-to-play humiliation,
We’re suffering from diminished credibility, influence, and security in the world, and the knock-on effects of this era will ripple out for decades, building a series of problems that will haunt our diplomats and damage our interests. America’s foreign and military policy inflection points are marked by big, transformative moments and small mistakes that mushroom into slow-burn conflicts we can’t quite win but don’t quite lose.
The rebranded NAFTA is still NAFTA. The trade war with China has left the Xi government in a stronger position than ever, while devastating Midwest farms and industries. Trump’s trade record is one long on bluster and higher costs for Americans, followed by concessions to the ostensible targets of his policy. On foreign relations, from NATO to the Baltics to South America to the Persian Gulf, Trump has left allies wondering at the source of his affection for their enemies and his animus toward their leaders. From the Helsinki debacle in which Trump sided with the Russian leader over his own
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In July 2019, diplomatic cables sent by the British ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, were leaked, resulting in his resignation. In the leaked emails, Darroch stated the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction-riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.” The ambassador described Trump and his team as “uniquely dysfunctional” and noted the deep divisions and internecine warfare inside the White House. He predicted the Trump presidency could
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Global economic downturns often lead nations to do stupid shit on the world stage and at home.
our chances of economic conflicts erupting into international conflicts are rising fast. Add in the disruptive nature of Trump’s trade war with China and the deliberate destruction of generational alliances, and Trump will be uniquely remembered as a president whose policies weakened the nation at every turn. His fool’s luck has been that—so far—we have avoided the horror of a terrorist attack, a hot military confrontation, or some other foreign policy externality. Luck, however, is not a national security strategy, and luck famously and consistently runs out. Our overseas partners’ confidence
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A frazzled NATO feels the eager heat of Russia’s breath in the east, with the Baltic states, Poland, and Germany wondering if we’re about to see a new Cold War, only this time with the United States more friendly to Russia than to the West. America’s role as a NATO ally will continue to degrade as Trump’s bromance with Putin, his extortion of the allies, and his utter ignorance of the traditions and meaning of the Western Alliance is demonstrated time and again. But hey, Trump Tower Moscow will make it worthwhile, right? South Korea and Japan, our closest Asian allies, will face a China
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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has gone down a path toward being the ultimate Trump sycophant.
Trump’s eagerness for “wins” will continue to collide with the realities of a hard world of hard leaders. The Chinese will never give him a victory. The Taliban are salivating for the departure of U.S. forces from Afghanistan so they can return to their accustomed medieval savagery toward women and apostates. Russia will continue to behave as if they have—to paraphrase LBJ—Trump’s pecker in their pocket.
The bad guys know the same things our allies know: This is a weak man in a weak White House. He is unreliable, untruthful, and unmanageable.
If you want to know the most potent excuse any Republican has for defending Trump, it’s the courts.
The next person elected president, even if we only play out the usual actuarial results, will name at least two new justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump’s approval of the McConnell-selected Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh is already a powerful judicial legacy. McConnell, a canny player at this game, has been given carte blanche by this White House to pick young, smart, Federalist Society–approved judges for these seats, and he has moved with lightning speed. The courts will be a long echo of McConnell’s and Leo’s ideological preferences, and Democrats underestimate this at their enormous
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In November 2013, Harry Reid undid the judicial filibuster rule for lower-court nominees. Everyone warned Reid at the time that someday Democrats would reap a terrible whirlwind for blowing up one of the Senate’s long-standing norms. Reid was hailed as a masterful legislative player, a genius, a man who would finally help Obama get his people on the federal bench. What could go wrong? Mitch Fucking McConnell could go wrong, you dolts. If you know Mitch, you knew the moment Reid nuked the judicial filibuster that McConnell was making book on the day he’d be able to return the favor. He looks
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the base loves one thing more than Donald Trump: conservative justices on the Supreme Court.
In the U.S. courts of appeals, the legacy is even more powerful. The Senate has confirmed forty-one nominees to that bench, including a number of fresh, young conservative faces to the notoriously left-leaning Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
At the district court level, there are almost a hundred new judges seated as of today.
These conservatives are young, sharp, and aggressive players of legal and judicial hardball. They’ll have a profound effect on the legal landscape of this country. You don’t have to like the Federalist Society, but you have to respect the farm-team system and the Long March strategy they adopted. What they’ve executed in two short years is a remarkable feat of judicial engineering.
If Trump wins four more years, McConnell and the Senate Republicans (in the likely case they maintain their majority) will move to fill more judicial vacancies at every level; they’ll work with partners outside government to push cases through the increasingly conservative judiciary to engineer results that future Democratic presidents and Congresses will have enormous difficulty overturning.
If that’s not a motivation for my Democratic friends to do whatever it takes to mount a winning 2020 campaign, imagine a Supreme Court with four McConnell-picked justices.
Part of his contempt for the environment and the natural world comes from his upbringing in New York City. Trump is a germophobic weirdo who spent the majority of his life in a glass tower. His rare moments in the natural world are on groomed, highly fertilized golf courses.
Trump’s 2019 promise to gut the Endangered Species Act is a hideous measure of how low his regard for posterity has sunk. The insistence that the protections in the act are somehow stopping the American economy from growing will have ramifications that stretch far beyond his lifetime—extinction is forever. Gutting protections for wildlife, and removing wilderness and parks designations that comprise vital ecosystems for these species, is a deliberate, ugly element of the Trump state.
He’s gotten away with most of it in the first term under a frenzy of executive orders and the fog of war generated by other scandals, the Mueller investigation, and his usual cloud of bullshit that darkens the sun with its density. Washington has essentially been too busy to focus on the damage his EPA and White House are doing to America’s environment. When the second-term political pressure is off, the oil and natural gas folks are already expecting a bonanza in that he’ll radically expand offshore oil and gas drilling leases and permissions, including off the coast of Florida.
Florida may be deep red on some issues—income taxes, guns, and school choice, to name a few—but it is powerfully pro-environment when it comes to preserving the unique quality of life we all enjoy.
If there’s a unifying issue in my home state, it’s that everyone—white, black, Hispanic, rich, poor, coastal, and inland—hates offshore drilling.
April 2010, with the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, it was game over. The massive oil spew cost the Panhandle billions and caused environmental damage from which the region is still recovering. Now the fear is very rational. Our lives and economy depend on a clean environment.
As for climate accords of any sort, forget it. We’ll fall behind the rest of the world not only in the emerging clean energy sector but in any meaningful reductions in carbon emissions.
regulations are a cost seeking to induce behavior, and they’re going to flood the zone in favor of the carbon economy
Team Trump’s EPA and Department of the Interior are catchments for people who are poorly qualified and deeply unethical,
Trump won’t worry about the politics of drilling off the coasts, of coal mines dumping waste into creeks and rivers, and Lord knows what supervillain-level industrial and agricultural products that will get to either enter or stay on the market because the right lobbyists stroked the right check.
Trump’s expansive use of executive orders to accomplish things Congress wouldn’t touch with a long, sterilized pole will continue,
The Trump family—including the creepy automaton Jared Kushner—will continue to view the American government not as a sacred trust but as an ATM for their crapulous enterprises and nation-state-level grifting.
the corruption and collapse of the GOP as a party will enable their dynastic fantasies to play out with real consequences for the country.
Trump treated Pence like any other wife or business partner and has already signaled he’s going to fuck him,
2019 Jared and Ivanka had become the awkward party guests at events like the Tokyo G20 meeting.
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
after he took the highest office in the land with a series of brazen deceptions and help from hostile foreign governments,16 he faced absolutely no consequences.
Trump and his acolytes display a fundamental contempt for the American experiment and an obvious, persistent attachment to the trappings, affect, and untrammeled power of strongmen. A decent president would view these men with contempt and disgust; Trump views them with envy.
Madison wrote in Federalist 10, “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”17 Trump is a complete package of the Founders’ greatest fears—delusions of royalty, appeals to the basest appetites of the polity, populism over small-r republicanism, and vulnerability to the blandishments of foreign powers who so obviously are welcome to corrupt him with gifts or flattery of his ravenous ego.
To date, his actions have had the possible check of the 2020 election hanging over him, which has influenced him whether or not he admits it. Trump needs to win reelection to continue his nation-state level, god-tier grifting and to avoid prosecution. He thrives not on a competition of ideas but on the division of the country. Our parties and politics will follow him down, fighting a dirtier, more savage battle until we’ve forgotten what it means to share even the most common baseline with our fellow Americans.
