by Robert Gore, Straight Line Logic:
How’s that lesser-evil thing working out?
As el gato malo recently observed, there are two types of Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS. One afflicts a subset of those who don’t like him; one afflicts a subset of those who do. Among the afflicted, mere mention of his name evokes either foaming-at-the-mouth rage or enraptured paroxysms.
Trump is the vessel for a lot of hopes and dreams, most of which won’t come true. Should he win, he would again be taking on a multi-trillion dollar totalitarian monstrosity (the term “Blob” is too benign), its remit every important aspect of life within the United States and around the world. Those trillions support millions of government employees, contractors, and beneficiaries. The monstrosity resists any challenge, even if that challenge is only rhetorical. Trump’s challenge the first time was exclusively rhetorical. The monstrosity was bigger, more powerful, more indebted, and more monstrous at the end of his term than at the beginning.
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Elected officials come and go; the monstrosity is perpetual. It buries, sometimes literally, anything or anyone contrary to its interests. Even if Trump hadn’t been plagued by Russiagate and other schemes to cripple his presidency, even if he had devoted all his waking hours to vanquishing the monstrosity, it never sleeps and his effort would have amounted to a pinprick.
Judging him by what he did versus what he said, on all the most important issues Trump was in alignment with the monstrosity. He appointed monsters John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Wilbur Ross, Gina Haspel etc. and got rid of initial appointments who were outside the mainstream, like Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Rex Tillerson. Policy is rooted in some sort of philosophy. The monstrosity’s philosophy, if an all-consuming drive can be called that, is expand and command: grow the government and command an ever larger share of the nation’s resources and activities. Against that, Trump, who has no political philosophy beyond self-aggrandizement, was easily rolled.
America’s national debt ($34.5+ trillion) is like a giant goiter. The afflicted has other features, but the goiter is so grotesquely outsize that it compels your attention.
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The goiter is malignant and metastasizing. The tumors spread: economic contraction, unemployment, higher interest rates, dedollarization, central bank debt monetization, and inflation. Average annual real GDP growth for Trump’s “strong economy” was 1.25 percent, lower than every president back to Eisenhower. Public debt increased $2.334 trillion per year. The metastasis continues under Biden. Back out so-called growth bought with debt and actual growth is negative for both presidents. Real incomes have stagnated since the turn of the century. The economy is not peachy and regular people know it, regardless of Washington’s propaganda statistics.
Trump used debt during his business career. It usually generated a return higher than its interest rate, although he had a few bankruptcies. Public debt funds consumption, corruption, weapons, forever wars, and, ominously, mounting interest on the debt, none of which generates an economic return. A debt implosion in the U.S. and much of the rest of the debt-saturated world is guaranteed, whether or not Trump is elected.
Trump promised an “America First” foreign policy that recognized U.S., Russian, and Chinese spheres of influence. However, Russiagate, unrelenting opposition, and the media’s “Putin’s puppet” label killed his initial inclination to try to improve relations with Russia.
Success has a hundred fathers; failure is an orphan. An inconvenient truth for those hopeful that Trump will extract the U.S. from its odious failure in Ukraine (he’s said he’ll end the war on his first day in office) is that Trump was one of its fathers. The U.S.-sponsored coup in 2014, when the war actually began, was on Obama’s watch, and the 2022 escalation was on Biden’s. However, Obama refused to send weapons to Ukraine as the regime-changed government made war on Russian-oriented Donbass separatists, violating the Minsk Agreements. Trump sent weapons. The monstrosity claims that shipping weapons to a belligerent isn’t an act of war. The rest of world doesn’t see it that way.
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