Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America From Trump--And Democrats From Themselves

by Rick Wilson

  @PressSec: Correction: Mr. Miller did not eat the woman in question raw. Unlike degenerate migrants, Mr. Miller cooks his food.

  CRUELTY AS STATECRAFT

  All bullies display two distinct characteristics: cruelty and weakness.

  As for Trump’s cruelty, nothing represents it better than the way our government has treated immigrant children under his watch. The catalog of abuses belongs in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The administration’s immigration policy is deliberate, planned, and engineered to shock the conscience. Trump is often conflicted on whether he wants to own this policy; some days he denies it’s happening at all, other days he blames Obama, and still others he capers and giggles about it.

  On the days he doesn’t want the full heat of President Stephen Miller’s circus of child incarceration, mistreatment, and infant deaths to fall on him, he denies it with vigor. The pictures tell a damning story, and the statistics are worse. The man who never hesitates to never hesitate when it comes to tweeting is strangely inert on actually fixing the program.

  The first “kids in cages” moment was a turning point for Trump and the nation. In 2016, the insults he hurled at his fellow candidates, the disabled, John McCain, and others all had a towel-snapping edge to them, as if he was just a boobish bastard who didn’t know where the line was. Now, his impulses toward cruelty are backed by government policy, and the results are a human rights disaster.

  Trump lost control of the narrative the moment the story broke.

  The president’s political arsonists, desperate to stop the “browning of America,” believed they had a surefire winner for the core of the Trump base. I’m sure that during the planning meetings they felt secure in the knowledge that Fox, talk radio, and the Trump media would cheer his aggressive steps against the horde of toddler MS-13 trainees. Engineered as a political spectacle of cruelty, the plan failed in its efforts to stem the tide of refugees and asylum seekers from Central America, so of course the Trump team doubled down, over and over.

  Americans have powerfully rejected this policy, embraced the plight of these kids, and showed an outpouring of support that reflects the very best of America’s values. The reaction of the vast majority of Americans to Trump’s policy was and is horror.

  This cruelty is still playing out in squalid detention centers and ICE roundups along the U.S. border. As immigrant children are forcibly separated from their parents and placed in cages inside warehouses where they are maltreated and malnourished, America looks on in horror.

  If you’re looking for a referendum point on Trump with the suburban demo of former Republicans, this is it. If Democrats are looking for a referendum point with anyone with a basic scrap of humanity, this is it.

  The cliché “This is not who we are” has suddenly taken on more weight, and it’s important to outline for voters how Trump’s cruelty and bigotry damage our national soul. This is a message Democrats can and must use to complete the divorce of women voters from the GOP. If Democrats can’t build an entire suite of messages and ads around this story, I don’t know if anyone can help them.

  IT STARTS WITH KIDS IN CAGES. IMAGINE FOUR MORE YEARS.

  What do you think happens when this program gains additional bureaucratic momentum? What happens is a series of perverse incentives where instead of standing up to this deeply un-American, entirely outrageous, and inhumane cruelty the government normalizes it. It becomes the same old Nuremberg just-following-orders defense in which the outrageous becomes the expected and the cost in lives is offset by bonuses, performance awards, and promotions. Deep inside the bureaucracy, government is always unaccountable, and this is even more true of Trump’s government.

  The abuse of immigrants will accelerate for a host of reasons in the second term, the most consequential of which will be that the Republicans around Trump will understand that he’s saddled them with a generational problem with Hispanics. Even red states like Texas will experience profound erosions of Republican political strength, almost entirely because of the damage their cooperation with Trump has done to them with Hispanic voters. Set aside Texas for a moment and consider that Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina are experiencing rapid growth in the legal immigrant population of Hispanics, and those folks are going to be voting soon—and their American-born children will follow them. For them, Trump is a racist who hates them with a fiery passion, and in politics, people always return hate for hate.

  That’s why the efforts to close the border, to stop asylum seekers and refugees, and to largely end even legal immigration will be front and center in Trump’s second term. The abuses will ratchet up in order to frighten desperate immigrants—at least according to the designs of the architects of this monstrosity—into staying in their assigned shitholes. This is a last-ditch shot at the big prize of Making America White Again.

  Like junkies, the base of Trump’s anti-immigrant cult will need more. It’s not enough to just see children in cages. It’s not enough to see mothers having their kids torn out of their arms. Oh, no, they’ll need more to feed the monster, and Trump will provide it. Stephen Miller now largely runs the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so expect that the leaders of those agencies will be held to his standards.

  He wants a theater of abuse and cruelty, and he’ll get it.

  Tweets from Donald Trump’s Second Term

  @realDonaldTrump: No one has worked harder than my beautiful wife Melania to #BeBest even though no one on social media has been nicer than Your Favorite President. No wonder she is so attracted to me!

  @JustinTrudeau: Cool story, bro.

  @FLOTUS: Justin. DM me. XXX

  TRUMP’S ECONOMIC BULLSHIT MACHINE

  A central presumption of Trumpism was that he would ensure a unique and persistent form of economic prosperity. The sugar rush of the tax cut is waning and the end of the Fed’s easy money policy is coming. Trump is about to own a stock market correction, an overextended economy, massive new debt and deficits, and the inevitable train wreck of a trade war run by morons.

  All of his economic mistakes are accreting into a mass of errors and evils that will hit Trump voters, and hard.

  Democrats can and must use working- and middle-class examples of the foolishness of the Trump economic model to actually communicate that they give a damn instead of proposing some ephemeral and unsaleable “Yay, free college!” and “We’ll all build solar panels” nonsense that voters no longer buy. Trump is vulnerable in the area he perceives as his greatest strength.

  The trade war is a perfect example of Trumpism and its combination of blistering ignorance and robust cronyism. Part of a backward economic theory from the 1600s, it hurts the very people it was ostensibly launched to help. It has harmed farmers, ranchers, timber, manufacturing, tech companies, and small businesses all while driving up costs to American consumers. Far from being “easy to win,” this trade war is already lost, and Americans are paying the price.

  To reach the target set of voters Democrats absolutely must win in 2020, the most important countervailing message against Trump is simple: He lied to you. Political lies are perfect weapons for dividing previously loyal voters from the pack, and history is replete with examples. George H. W. Bush went to his grave knowing that, while he’d done the right thing for the government in 1991, the tax increase he supported broke a promise to the GOP base. “Read my lips” was the political lie that the GOP’s rank and file would never forgive. Barack Obama promised “You can keep your doctor” and lost the House of Representatives a year later.

  A fundamental predicate of Trump and Trumpism is that economic nationalism is the secret sauce both politically and as a national economic policy. After feeling screwed, pressured, abused, and left holding the economic bag in bad times and good for generations, American working people viewed the reality-TV character Trump played on The Appren
tice as a man who would restore good-paying jobs and increase their paychecks.

  But Trump has bent the economy to the point of subatomic collapse and continues to do so every day.

  The working class of America hasn’t seen wages rise, nor the prosperity of Silicon Valley and Wall Street trickle down to their neighborhoods. Trump promised a fundamental change from the way Americans outside the coastal prosperity zones lived, but every promise is a lie, every commitment nothing but a con, and every policy a Potemkin village. Polling shows that top-level happy talk about the economy is working; Americans are generally optimistic about their situation, as they were throughout the Obama era. But storm clouds loom, and as always, the bailouts won’t go to them but to Wall Street and the banks. They’re worried already.

  Below that is a deeper concern. The cost of housing, college, and healthcare haunts Americans. They can’t pay for retirement. They can’t afford to truly save money. The stock market bubble is a beautiful boat on a toxic ocean.

  From promising “great healthcare” to destroying the now-popular Affordable Care Act (can I get a sarcastic “Thanks, Obama” from the Trump-right media?), Trump’s broken promises now have a cost.

  The promised auto, coal, steel, and manufacturing jobs aren’t just fiction; they’re a cruel lie to people who spent the last three decades in a slow, painful decline.

  Trump’s lies convinced many working-class Americans for a reason. They’re rightly pissed off, stressed out, and lost. They’re looking for a return to a time when a guy or a girl with a high school education could hold a steady job, afford a home, raise a couple of kids—in short, lead a middle-class life. They aren’t trying to be the next tech billionaire. They simply want to live that American dream they grew up believing in.

  Both parties stood by as the world changed. From laissez-faire “let the markets decide” dickishness on the right to the vaporware promises on the left, neither party understood that these voters are pissed. Like all predators, Trump can sense the weakness in his marks, every time.

  Coal jobs ought to go the way of, well, coal jobs. We’re better than coal at this point for so many reasons, but Trump’s wily populist bullshit broke off parts of the Democratic vote in southwestern Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Trump’s pressure on companies to bow to his 1950s (or is it 1850s?) vision of industrial policy produced chaos, not opportunity. Coal, despite his promises, isn’t coming back.

  Democratic candidates can’t come in blind to their own failures. We saw both Clinton and Obama promise to restore jobs, manufacturing, unions, and the rest of the old signifiers of Rust Belt America with a gauzy, hazy “Well, we’ll retrain you to become an organic solar panel installer and holistic home healthcare aide.” This crap rings hollow for many of the people in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and the rest of the former industrial heartland.

  Trump’s lies had a different edge and character. His deceptions were more pointed, more racial, and xenophobic. In Trump’s portrayal, the evil MS-13 gangs weren’t here just to murder your entire family but also to take your job. Their insidious taco trucks would replace the local Culver’s just as their insidious DNA would brown your neighborhood beyond recognition.

  Democrats need to start hitting this message early and often, because many voters are already primed to listen. The slow growth of awareness about Trump’s inability to tell the truth on the economy even when he doesn’t need to lie has an arc something like this:

  “Well, Trump’s a salesman. He’s selling.”

  “Well, I still trust him. He may be a liar, but he’s our liar.”

  “Well, the media lies, too, so fuck off, libtard.”

  “Trump’s playing eighty-seven-dimensional chess and he’s lying to own the libs.”

  “I guess there aren’t going to be fifty new steel mills and coal mines here in Ohio.”

  “The bank just repossessed my John Deere combine harvester.”

  Here’s the painful irony: The big-picture economy, which is largely out of any president’s control, is the real source of this president’s political strength with voters who like him. The SSRN poll for CNN in June 2019 had a striking finding. Of those who approve of Trump, a plurality of 26 percent said they do so because of the economy, more than twice the next most-frequent answer. In the same economic issue basket, 8 percent cited jobs as a reason for liking him. On immigration, 4 percent said that’s the reason they like him.

  When it comes to other aspects of Trump’s persona, support falls to the single digits. Just 1 percent said they approve of him because he’s draining the proverbial D.C. swamp. A whopping 1 percent said they like him because he’s honest, which proves you can fool 1 percent of the people all the time.

  All of this is a sign of trouble ahead for Donald Trump, because his economic record is a rickety construction prone to collapse from external forces at any moment.

  A BUBBLE, READY TO POP

  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 by the old invisible hand. In the current economic case, the blizzard of Trumpian bullshit will inevitably hit the fan.

  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. We never did—and most likely never will—tackle entitlement reform. Nations don’t get to go bankrupt; they collapse.

  The GOP passed a tax bill that is performing exactly as expected and predicted: A handful of hedge funds, America’s top corporations, and a few dozen billionaires were given a trillion-dollar-plus tax benefit. Even the tax cut’s most fervent proponents know that its effects were short-lived, the bill is coming due, and 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.

  The lobbying class will make a final thrust for the remaining sectors of the economy not dependent on crony capitalism as facilitated by K Street. The president continues to pick winners and losers in the economy, selecting companies who are “nice to me” for favorable regulatory treatment.

  The current wave of consolidations, bigger-is-better, and monopoly-adjacent corporate mergers in tech, defense, agriculture, telecoms, and retail will be greased along by a Trump White House that does everything but post a price list outside the Oval Office. Canny CEOs will maximize shareholder value by sucking up to Trump in the usual ways: lavish campaign donations and even more lavish praise of the wonders of his fabulous leadership, incandescent intellect, and totally realistic-looking hair hat.

  The next four years of Trump will also bring an unprecedented amount of direct, personal, and, of course, economically disastrous interference from Trump in the business of the Federal Reserve. America’s central bank is, in the mind of the Donald, merely one more adjunct of the White House, another cabinet department to browbeat into submission.

  Trump’s public whining over the Fed’s slow grapple with interest rates at the end of a decade of easy lending and quantitative easing is understandable; the same Fed policies that fueled eight years of economic uplift under Obama have fueled the first part of
Trump’s administration.

  Trump wants the Fed not only to continue the current spending spree but to expand it. His slow escalation of pressure on the Fed finally got the attention of economists when he ripped out this doozy of a tweet on April 14, 2019: “If the Fed had done its job properly, which it has not, the Stock Market would have been up 5,000 to 10,000 additional points, and GDP would have been well over 4% instead of 3%…with almost no inflation. Quantitative tightening was a killer, should have done the exact opposite!”3

  Now, I know you’re thinking what I’m thinking: “Quantitative tightening” isn’t a phrase in the Trump lexicon, unless it has to do with plastic surgery for his spouse du jour. Not to mention that the guy who literally went bankrupt multiple times while running casinos is trying to tell the cautious, smart minds at the Federal Reserve how to manage the U.S. economy. This, as in all things Trump touches, will not end well.

  In the words of Noël Coward, “There are bad times just around the corner.” The gulf between prosperity at the highest reaches of the economy and stark terror at the lowest is growing wider. I’m not saying this as some kind of Bernie-bro socialist. I’m saying it as a conservative who sees that federal government protections have allowed the investment sector, and the folks who can afford to game the tax and regulatory systems, to enjoy a boom like no other.

  In a second term, President Trade-Wars-Are-Easy-to-Win will doubtless reap some of what his policies on trade have sown in the last few years. 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. As sweeping 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.