It’s a very long time since I’ve felt so depressed about the future of the United States and of the world. In President-elect Donald Trump we have a man who, at least to judge from his pre-election rhetoric, seems to have not a single redeeming quality.
All politicians are sometimes guilty of telling only one side of the story, but Mr Trump didn’t seem to have the slightest compunction in stating as fact things which he must have known to be lies – as for example his long-held contention that President Obama was born in Kenya, or that Muslims in New Jersey danced in the streets as the World Trade Centre collapsed.
While making little attempt to hide the fact that he has been able to avoid paying federal income tax himself for some two decades, he has proposed the most extraordinarily regressive tax reductions – which would lead to those in the top 0.1% of the income distribution (those with incomes of at least US$3.7 million annually) getting an average tax cut of over 14% of after-tax income, while those in the bottom 20% of households would get a tax cut of less than 1% of their after-tax income.
And these tax cuts, regressive and all as they are, would not be paid for by spending restraint. On the contrary, candidate Trump proposed a big increase in spending on infrastructure, on the military, on veterans, on education and on child care. So the federal debt would explode with an inevitably sharp increase in interest rates.
He proposed to “renegotiate” the North American Free Trade Agreement, covering trade between the US, Canada and Mexico; put a 35% tariff on imports from Mexico; and a 45% tariff on imports from China. The Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington suggests that the resultant trade war would lead to a recession in the United States, with a major fall in private sector jobs, and GDP not returning to its current level before the mid-2020s. And that assumes that trade war wouldn’t provoke a real war, but as somebody once said, when goods can’t cross borders, soldiers will.
He has proposed to tear up the deal under which Iran agreed to suspend development of nuclear weapons for at least a decade, blithely ignoring the fact that this deal was not just between the United States and Iran but between the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China on the one hand and Iran on the other.
He has wondered aloud what the point of having nuclear weapons is if they are never used, and suggested that South Korea and Japan should get their own.
He has cast doubt on the decades-long commitment of the United States to come to the defence of a NATO member if attacked.
He wants to reintroduce water-boarding and “much worse”, and has suggested that he would target the families of ISIS terrorists to teach them a lesson.
He proposes to send 11 million Mexicans back to Mexico, to build an enormous wall along the Mexican/US border, and somehow to get the Mexicans to pay for this wall.
He is openly skeptical about global warming, and threatens to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement.
He threatened to refuse to accept the result of the election if he lost, claiming that it would be rigged, and threatened to imprison his opponent if he won.
He mocks those with physical disabilities, accepts endorsement from white racists, and gives every impression of regarding women as primarily objects for his sexual gratification – if they’re good-looking enough to meet his standards of beauty.
As President Obama remarked on the eve of the election, a man who can’t be trusted with his own Twitter account certainly can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes.
These are some of the facts which led The Economist weekly, published in London, to editorialize on the brink of the election that “the campaign has provided daily evidence that Mr Trump would be a terrible president”.
Well of course Mr Trump has been elected. He got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, and fewer votes than the Republican candidate who stood against President Obama in 2012, but he nevertheless got more votes in the crucial electorate college than Hillary Clinton, and that is what ultimately matters.
What happens next? Well Mr Trump’s acceptance speech was conciliatory and that was a good start. Some of the policies he promised during the campaign – such as scrapping Obamacare – are already being “modified”. His Vice President, Mike Pence, has long been a strong supporter of open trade and he has been appointed to head the “transition team”.
Some of the policies Mr Trump espoused during the campaign would require ratification by Congress and, although both the House of Representatives and the Senate are still controlled by the Republican Party (which was a constant restraint on what President Obama has been able to do in recent years), some Republicans in both the House and the Senate are quite strongly opposed to some of what Mr Trump advocated during the campaign. Indeed, many prominent Republicans, including George W Bush and Senator McCain openly refused to endorse him for President.
So perhaps there is some small ground for hope.
I nevertheless find myself in strong agreement with Matthew Hooton who, in his regular column in “The National Business Review” in mid-November, concluded:
“If [Mr Trump] turns out to be a lunatic and follows through on his promises, the US and the world risk near-certain global recession and possible catastrophic war. But if he turns out only to have been a liar, then how will his supporters react in four years if they feel betrayed yet again? Dark times lie ahead….”
Copyright © 2024 Don Brash.