George Will, the conservative pundit, gave the best description of Trump’s incoherence in a Washington Post Op-ed: “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”
This was a leading conservative writer’s prediction of what did happen in President Trump’s first term as President—chaos. Trump’s second term should be a rerun if he succeeds in getting most of his initial cabinet picks confirmed by (or rammed through) the U.S. Senate.
Many have no qualifications for those jobs, just as in Trump’s first term when most were lobbyists with blatant conflicts of interest, which resulted in many having to resign when their corruption was uncovered. Such dysfunctional behavior was a reason President Trump lost the House of Representatives to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in 2018, and Trump lost to President Biden in 2020.
Sadly, the incoming all-Republican congress will probably give him the tax cuts, inflationary tariffs and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants that will be a repeat of Trump’s first term. And many in the working class who voted for him will suffer again, and as they have throughout Trump’s working life.
A 2016 USA TODAY article catalogued more than 3,500 lawsuits filed by or against Donald Trump over his business career. Many were filed by small businesspeople and firms that Trump refused to pay for work done on his various real estate holdings.
“Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will “protect your job.” But the USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump, or his companies have refused to pay them.”
The Friel’s family cabinetry business, founded in the 1940s by Edward’s father, finished its work in 1984 and submitted its final bill to the general contractor for the Trump Organization, the resort’s builder, said USA TODAY.
Edward’s son, Paul, who was the firm’s accountant, still remembers the amount of that bill more than 30 years later: $83,600. The reason: the money never came. “That began the demise of the Edward J. Friel Company… which has been around since my grandfather,” he said.
I wrote then, “The greatest nightmare of 2017 may be the record income inequity that was exemplified in the just-passed tax cuts that are to be paid for with up to $3 trillion in added federal debt plus spending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next ten years, which will impoverish the poorest among us.
Professors Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez were the first to examine 100 years of income tax returns that highlighted the wide swings in income inequality. They found that income inequality rose substantially between 1979 and 2002 because the top 10 percent of the income distribution took 91 percent of the income growth during that period. As the real incomes of the top 10 percent soared, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent stagnated..
With nothing to replace the economic destruction that will follow Trump’s policies, other than the “Drill baby Drill” for more fossil fuels, we will be poorer with predictions for an additional $5 trillion added to the national debt. As in his first term, I do not foresee a happy two years ahead, at the least.
It turns out very few of us need a tax cut. MarketWatch economist Rex Nutting calculated that those in the 60 percent middle-income brackets—from $32,000 to $140,000 per year—pay just an average 2.5 percent in income taxes. It’s only the richest 0.1 to 1 percent income earners that pay more, and so want the huge tax cuts congress and the Trump administration are proposing.
“A bill that cuts federal income taxes for middle-class families makes absolutely no sense, except as a sad way of camouflaging the real intent of the bill: Giving millions of dollars to the very wealthy, who happen to be the only people who are really benefiting from our uneven economic growth,” said Nutting.
It was Trump and his family that profited most from his first term in retaining ownership of his assets rather than either divesting or putting them in a blind trust, blatantly ignoring the emoluments clause of the constitution that forbid profiting from foreign governments seeking his favor.
Donald Trump suffered no consequences for his lawless behavior as has former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is banned from running again until 2030 for casting doubt on Brazil’s 2022 election outcome that voted him out of office.
The greatest chaos may come from his pick of Pam Bondi for Attorney General, who is replacing Matt Gaetz. She has sworn revenge for perceived weaponization of the Justice Department by weaponizing it even more to persecute his perceived enemies.
“When will the 2017 nightmare end?” I wrote in 2017. “Maybe in 2018, if most Americans realize the fantasy world the current administration and congress has created is not theirs. Americans desire a world in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is available to all, not just the few.”
That is what happened in Trump’s first term. Must it get even worse before it gets better?
Harlan Green © 2024
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
