You're Fired: The Perfect Guide to Beating Donald Trump

by Paul Begala

Whereas inflation-adjusted average weekly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers—middle-class working people—have increased 2.4 percent since Trump took office, that is a far cry from the 6.4 percent they went up under President Clinton, or the 4 percent they rose under President Obama.

why didn’t working people—the folks he claims to fight for—see more of the gains? Because the real gains have gone to corporations. The St. Louis Fed, analyzing data over decades, wrote in 2018, “Never have corporate profits outgrown employee compensation so clearly and for so long.”

Obama inherited an economy that was hemorrhaging jobs—with as many as 700,000 lost per month. He turned that around and created 15.6 million jobs in the private sector alone.

Get this: with corporate profits at a record high, Trump and his fellow Republicans spent $1.9 trillion of your money to cut taxes on—wait for it—corporate profits.

In just one quarter, the amount of revenue Washington received from corporate taxes fell from $264 billion per year to $149 billion per year. As a share of the American economy, corporate taxes fell to their lowest level in history.

In the early 1950s—you know, when America was great—corporate taxes were more than 7 percent of the US economy. After the Trump tax cut, they fell a bit: to 0.77 percent.

In his campaign, Trump pledged to raise taxes on “hedge fund guys that are making a lot of money that aren’t paying anything in taxes.” He later said, “The hedge fund guys are getting away with murder. They’re paying nothing and it’s ridiculous. I want to save the middle class… The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”

See next highlight.

Well, hedge fund managers aren’t actually the principal beneficiaries. Private equity managers are, as well as venture capital firms. Oh, and real estate managers. Wait. What? Yep, the Trump tax bill was a boon to real estate moguls. He may be a buffoon and a crook, The Donald: sure can run a con.

One estimate, by Just Capital, found that 6 percent of the gargantuan tax cut ever made it into the hands of working men and women, boosting their pay by $6.21 a week.

you’re in the top 10 percent, your wages have risen. We already knew this. And, of course, the higher you are on that economic pyramid, the greater your gains. The top 1 percent far outpaces the 9 percent below them, and so it is with the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and on and on. But if you have a high school degree or less, your wages have declined in the last thirty-nine years. A lot. If you’re in the middle of the middle class—the 50th percentile of earners—you’re making 12.3 percent less than you were making in 1979, adjusted for inflation.

Americans with a high school education or less—18 percent of the electorate—voted for Trump by a 5-point margin. But when you disaggregate by race and gender, you see that high school–educated white women preferred Trump by 27 percent. And high school–educated white men—the very heart of the Trump vote—well, 71 percent of them voted for their blue-collar billionaire.

the deficit in the proposed 2021 budget is well over $1 trillion—about 5 percent of GDP. And that was before the Trump/Corona crash necessitated massive deficit.

Trump should have paid down the deficit while times were good. That would have left us in a stronger fiscal position when the virus closed the economy.

when Trump aides briefed him in 2017 about a looming “hockey stick”–shaped spike in the national debt, Trump noted that it would not happen until after a potential second term for him. “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” he said.

How Democrats Should Run on This As populists! This is not difficult, people. Turn all Trump’s economic embellishment against him. Trump, like all incumbents, faces a challenge: he must defend his record, on the one hand, but also make a future-oriented appeal for a second term, on the other. Wait. I almost forgot: he’s Trump. All he will do is boast and brag and bloviate.

but don’t attack Trump’s voters. Convert those you can, then respectfully disagree with those you can’t.

A Pew Research Center survey found that, even during the so-called boom, the overwhelming majority of Americans said “today’s economy is helping people who are already wealthy.” Sixty-nine percent say that—including 63 percent of Republicans.

Under our current system, an American who works for a salary pays about twice the taxrate as someone who’s living off inherited money and doesn’t work at all. We tax capital at half of what we tax labor. It’s a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of our rich people do.

“Among Democrats, 71 percent say climate change is an urgent problem. That is a 42-point increase since 1999. For independent voters, 47 percent say they want action taken on climate change, a figure that is up 22 points since 1999.”

“Only 15 percent [of Republicans] see a pressing need to deal with the issue. More noteworthy than the difference, however, is the stability of the Republican figure. That 15 percent mark is unchanged since the same question was asked in 1999.”

The “green” Democrats should be talking about is money. Rather than focus on how terrible the American people are for burning coal or driving cars, Democrats should focus on the jobs we will create, the wealth we will build, the cool toys we will have. Stop being scolds and nags; start being salespeople of a new prosperity. This allows you to sidestep the debate about whether climate science is real.

Preach the prosperity gospel on climate change, Democrats. “We’re all gonna get rich” is a more appealing message than “We’re all gonna die.” In fact, both are true. I’m just advocating that we accentuate the positive.

By a two-to-one margin, Americans wanted a hearing for Judge Garland. Only 32 percent thought that the Republicans were right to leave the pick to the next president; 61 percent thought that they were wrong. But for that one-third of the nation, the courts are a voting issue. In a razor-close race, the right’s deep, emotional, passionate commitment to controlling the court might have made the difference.

At this writing, Mitch McConnell has nearly four hundred House-passed bills sitting on his desk, on issues ranging from raising the minimum wage, to lowering the cost of prescription drugs, to cleaning up corruption in Washington.

To put it into perspective, over the course of eight years, President Obama named fifty-five appeals court judges. In just three, Trump has named fifty. By comparison, after three years, Reagan had named only twenty-five appeals court judges. President Clinton named thirty; President George W. Bush, thirty-four.

At the district court level, Trump has nominated 112 judges.

Why has Trump been able to name so many judges? Because McConnell stalled or stopped so many Obama judges. In Obama’s final two years, during which McConnell was running the Senate, just two appeals court judg...

During the last two years of George W. Bush’s term, when Democrats controlled the Senate, mean old Harry Reid (D-NV) confirmed te...

Democrats should take on Trump’s Washington sleaze in the 2020 campaign: as with all issues, make it about the voters. How has Trump’s corruption hurt an everyday working person?

Trump loves lobbyists.

He has appointed more ex-lobbyists, an Associated Press analysis found, in his first three years than his two predecessors did in eight.

The nonprofit ProPublica catalogued 187 lobbyists in the Trump administration,

Trump repealed President Obama’s blanket ban on hiring anyone who had been a lobbyist a year before joining the government. Trump’s new rule says a former lobbyist can’t work on anything they specifically lobbied on for two years, but that word “specifically” is a loophole you could drive a limousine though.

Trump’s Interior Department is led by Secretary David Bernhardt. But before he was called Mr. Secretary, he was Mr. Big Oil, earning his law firm a reported $5 million as a lawyer and lobbyist for energy interests. As a Public Citizen exposé reported by Mother Jones found, Secretary Bernhardt’s former clients are keenly interested in his work at Interior. They have spent a combined $29.9 million lobbying his department.

he was called Mr. Secretary, he was Mr. Big Oil, earning his law firm a reported

let’s stipulate that they wouldn’t be spending that kind of dough if they didn’t think they were getting a return on their investment.

for Donald Trump to put lobbyists and corporate interests ahead of the safety of working people on rigs, well, it is nothing less than a sin.

When he took office, Donald Juggernaut Trump had business interests in 144 companies in at least twenty-five countries. He had business relationships in South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America.

The nonprofit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has kept count of all of Trump’s conflicts of interest. As of late 2019, the number was 2,905.

To put it into perspective, the proposed 2020 US defense budget is $718.3 billion—but that doesn’t come close to counting everything the United States spends on national security. One estimate puts total American spending for national security at $989 billion. Per year. Again, Russia spends $46 billion; we spend close to a trillion. And yet Putin is pushing America around? It makes no sense.

Russia has one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov. It took nine years to build and was commissioned in 1990.

The United States Navy, by contrast, has eleven aircraft carriers, all of them nuclear-powered.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it best when she stood up in the Cabinet Room, stared daggers at Donald Trump, and said, “All roads with you lead to Putin.”

Two months later, Trump had his first face-to-face meeting with Putin, at the G20 summit in Hamburg. And, without telling anyone, he had his second meeting with Putin there as well.

In the second meeting, the only translator was Putin’s. Curious. No other US staff was present. Admiral John Kirby, who had served as chief spokesman for both the Pentagon and the State Department, told CNN that the lack of US staff and translator was problematic, since the American side would not have a careful translation of the conversation, nor even a record of what was discussed. “In this case,” Kirby said, “we have none of these things. And the Russians will have a transcript.

I work in a multilingual international organization abroad. Translation is key to much of the work I do in this environment. One translator can easily misinterpret (unintentionally or not). Word choice. Misinterpretation of intent. Inattentiveness. Emotion confusing the issue. It happens often. At the very highest levels of government, where literally life and death decisions are at stake, it’s impossible to imagine the US and the Russians wouldn’t want their own interpreters present. While some could call this a rookie mistake on the President’s part, for someone who has business dealings with 144 companies in 25 countries, it is absolutely certain that Trump has vast experience working with interpreters. He absolutely knew what he was doing when he chose to not have a US interpreter present.

For a guy who wears his psyche on his Twitter fingers, Trump is remarkably closed-mouthed about his dealings with Russia.

It turns out that after that first meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Trump went so far as to confiscate the notes from the US translator, according to the Washington Post. He also ordered the translator not to discuss the meeting with other administration officials. That is, other Trum...

Trump’s secrecy regarding Putin is so important to him that there is little or no record—even a classified record—of at least five personal meetings he had with Putin. As the Washington Post put it, “Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what US intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.”

But all of that was just a windup for Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki. That meeting, on July 16, 2018, will live in infamy as the most ignominious presidential surrender in history.

Standing next to Putin, and in front of the world’s press, Trump rebuked US intelligence agencies and sided with a hostile foreign power against his own country.