The great tragedy of the Trump administration has been that the President’s obvious mental incapacity has tended to discredit, in the minds of the public, even the good policies that he (apparently randomly) chooses to endorse. As a result, many good policies will never get the consideration they’re due.
For example: Trump happens to be right that we can design a system a whole lot better than Obamacare. But he’s never explained why, and he’s never even attempted to sketch out what such a system might look like. This (appropriately, and probably accurately) makes him appear to be an idiot, and therefore (inappropriately) leads the public to dismiss meaningful health care reform as an idiotic policy.
Likewise: Trump happens to be right that lockdowns and other mandates have enormous costs, which need to be weighed against the benefits of fighting a pandemic. But instead of focusing on that important point, he’s garbled it all up with the ridiculous notion that you’d have to be dumb to wear a mask (and no, his occasional weasel words on this subject do not erase his primary message). This (appropriately, and probably accurately) makes him appear to be an idiot, and therefore (inappropriately) leads the public to dismiss meaningful cost-benefit analysis as an idiotic exercise.
There are a thousand more examples; feel free to share your favorites in comments.
I can think of a few ideas that he has pushed very imperfectly. Corporate tax rates, price competition in health care, right to try experimental medicine, general policy of negotiation as opposed to war.
I know it’s off topic but did you see this? https://www.google.com/amp/s/reason.com/2020/10/01/do-car-seat-mandates-reduce-the-number-of-children-families-have/%3famp
Here in the UK, we have the problem that the government has been arguing, albeit loosely, for cost-benefit analysis, talking up the need up reopen the economy, without seeming to even slightly acknowledge, let alone factor in, the very great potential economic benefits of lockdown. By which I mean primarily the fact that prematurely reopening the economy will tend to leave a great portion of the populace feeling that the risk is too great, and hence constraining their own social expenditure. Reopening too soon can result in a situation where you get enough people out there to restart the growth in spread, hospitalisations and deaths, but too few to really make a chunk of business activity viable.
So you want Trump to propose some grand schemes that will never pass? What’s the use of that? The Democrats control the House. Even when the Republicans controlled it, the Speaker was a Trump-hater.
What Trump does is talk about the changes that he can do, and that he is doing.
Trump has had mixed messages about wearing masks, but so have Fauci and other experts.
Obvious mental incapacity? Trump is running against Joe Biden. If this is your big complaint about Trump, you are going to see it a lot worse with Pres. Biden.
The biggest one for me is ending the military interventions. It seems like he has faced a lot of resistance on this point but still reduced troops and involvement in Syria, trying to negotiate peace in Afganistan, etc. etc. I wish he was doing even more but these are good first steps- much better than Bush and Obama, who each started multiple military conflicts. But like you say, he never spells it out: we are spending blood and treasure on things that deliver no concrete benefit to the average American, and lead to casualties and instability/loss of prosperity to non-Americans (most people care about this, but the common narratives never take this into account).
Also, very glad you are posting more often! I kept you on my RSS feed, glad I did you are one of my favorite writers.
Roger (#4):
Trump is running against Joe Biden.
The great tragedy of Trump is not that he might supplant Joe Biden. It’s that he did supplant Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush.
Last time, I voted in a primary for the first time in my life just to vote against Trump. But with a choice between Trump and Biden, is there really any good reason to prefer Biden? Biden spouts the same anti-trade nonsense as Trump does, he’s a lot fonder of wars, somewhat fonder of spending programs, and seems to like peace deals only with Iran. Sure, I’d prefer Cruz or even Bush to Trump, but that ship has sailed.
“is there really any good reason to prefer Biden?”
Emphatically, yes.
The biggest problem with Trump is not bad policies. These come and go and can be corrected. The problem is the undermining of the rule of law. This is a slippery concept, but essentially boils down to leaders not using their power for their own benefit. It is held together as much by norms as by rules. Trump breaks the norms, which may never come back.
An example is pardon power. Previous Presidents have faced criticism for occasionally pardoning allies in their final act as President. This may be undesirable, but it does not affect future actions because the President no longer has that power. Trump is prepared to pardon allies during his term, sending clear signals that his allies can get away with criminal acts if they help Trump.
After a Biden presidency we can be more or less certain that the rule of law will still operate. After a further 4 years of Trump, this is far from certain.
Although I am more Democrat than Republican, I would take almost any other Republican candidate than Trump if Biden would concede the election right now, even with his significant poll lead. This is not about parties, but personalities.
But what has Trump done well?
The First Step act is a welcome, if modest, policy at the Federal level to try to reduce the appalling incarceration rate in the USA. Trump has managed to avoid ballsing that one up somehow.
Harold,
>>>> I would take almost any other Republican candidate than Trump if Biden would concede the election right now
That would be a disaster. Consider what lesson Republicans would learn from that.
Over the last 4 years, they’ve been bending over to cover and defend Trump’s criminal behavior, and now you want to reward them by keeping them in power?
If the GOP is not brutally punished for the last 4 years, how do you think they are going to behave in the future?
The Faustian bargain I describe is clearly not actually on offer. My calculation was a 20% chance of Trump or zero % chance of Trump with 100% chance of republican win. That is based on 538’s estimate of Trump’s chances from current polling, giving 5:1 on Biden. That seems a big risk.
Trump simultaneously condemns the free-trade oriented Trans-Pacific Partnership, because, I guess, free trade is bad. Then, he adds tariffs against China to get the to negotiate more free trade.
This is just an extreme example of criticism of some particular proposal w/o presenting an alternative.
Yes, just as a broken (analog) clock is right twice a day, some of the things the current administration have done and/or proposed may be good for the country longer term. For example, our corporate tax rate was too high, and lowering it made sense HOWEVER keeping the various deductions and exceptions intact enabled multi-billion dollar firms to continue to pay deminimus taxes. Similarly our current health care system — where neither the suppliers (medical professionals, hospitals, etc.) nor the recipients (patients) have any idea of the costs, and where so much of the expenses can’t be controlled by either (try telling 911 which ER to go to when you’re having a heart attack) — is fatally flawed but this administration’s “plan” is as real as Nixon’s plan to end the Vietnam War.
Apart from the reasons that Harold pointed out, there is the ongoing embarrassment of having a President who says the things that Trump says. Just because we can’t “quantify” that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Trump is the only public figure I know of who said that vaccines cause autism AND mostly got away with it, because people were too busy responding to other things that he said which were even worse.
Among those other things, there are the ones that everybody has heard about (like claiming Obama was not born here), and there are lesser-known examples like the fact that he re-tweeted a white nationalist account claiming that 80% of white murder victims are killed by blacks:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/nov/23/donald-trump/trump-tweet-blacks-white-homicide-victims/
(That’s false; about 80% of murder victims, both black and white, are killed by members of their own race.) Trump never apologized. For most politicians, this would destroy their career; Trump is SO BAD that most people today don’t even know that this happened, because it was eclipsed by everything else.
The anti-vax is coming back to bite Trump. He wants a vaccine quickly, but FDA is adamant that safety needs to be more firmly established. It is the success of the anti-vaxxers that requires this and Trump’s comments helped their cause. Many Americans are sufficiently suspicious of vaccines that they will not take a Covid vaccine.
Trump supporters are particularly prone to anti vaccine attitudes. Trump’s earlier comments have made it harder to properly evaluate the costs and benefits of early roll out. It there are some adverse reactions it could undermine the entire vaccine program and see a resurgence of other diseases, such as measles. This means they must be more cautious than they would be otherwise. This is real consequence of the chaos that Trump spreads. Maybe in the absence of the anti-vax lobby the calculation would be that the risks of adverse reactions were small enough to warrant earlier distribution.
Trump rightfully points out that those states facing bankruptcy, do so for their own mismanagement. And refuses to subsidize their profligacy.
As you point out, he doesn’t phrase it too eloquently.
Bennett Haselton: “… the ongoing embarrassment of having a President who says the things that Trump says.”
You’ve been beguiled by the personality stuff, the “gotcha” stuff. These things are irrelevant to the substance of the executive branch.
Gov’t officials, at the local level, ought to be judged by character. On school board, mosquito abatement, water resources, the supervisors aren’t technical wizzes, they’re elected for reputation. At least, one would hope –
However, the federal gov’t has grown so overpowering, with fingers in every pie, trillion $$ budgets, that we’re now practically the Soviet States of America. Policy, not character or IQ, is really the only thing that matters. These considerations swamp the peccadillos which so disturb you. On policy, Trump is far less dangerous than the neo-communists rising among the Dems – especially considering that Kommie Harris might well sit on the throne, in 2022 –
Trump tossed around the idea of quarantining
NYC and the surrounding areas to slow the spread of COVID. This was perhaps too late to be effective and may not have been Constitutional, but I think this is one type of policy that would maybe get some consideration if it hadn’t been suggested by the Trump administration. Regional lockdowns may not be worth the cost (economic and loss of liberty), but I don’t think it should be influenced by politics.