So What if Trump Had Won?

2020

 So, given that 2020 was a disastrous year, 2021 was a bad year, and this year is shaping up to be worse, would be have been better off if Donald Trump had won the election? (And by that I don't mean successfully overturned it, which would cause another set of problems, but had won fair and square).

Anyone arguing that has to begin with the obvious -- 2020.  That year saw a pandemic, shutdowns, economic upheaval, mass riots, and terrible forest fires with many people fearing to evacuate out of fear of Antifa.  Donald Trump and his supporters can give any number of reasons (of varying plausibility) why none of this is his fault.  And, indeed, one thing 2020 should make clear is that under our federal system the President's power is quite limited.  But the events of 2020 should also show anyone with any sense that Donald Trump is no miracle worker, and that his presence in the White House is no guarantee against disaster.

Still, given all the problems we have faced since, how would Trump have fared?

COVID

2020

My guess is he would have done better here in at least one regard.  He would have convinced his supporters to get vaccinated.  That would significantly lower our hospitalization and death rate.  Would it have convinced his opponents to refuse the Trump Vaccine?  If the vaccine came out after the election, rather than as an October Surprise, and if scientists vouched for it, my guess is his opponents would have gotten vaccinated, while denying it was the Trump Vaccine and pointing out the vaccine's shortcomings.  

I suspect Trump would not have gotten the vaccine out as quickly as Biden (he never appears to have had much of a plan in place), but the vaccine was getting out reasonably well anyhow, so I don't think that would be all that important. He would not have been able to stop the vaccine from starting to wear off after a few months.  Nor would he have prevented mutations of COVID from forming.  The only real way to stop mutations would have been to vaccinate the whole world.  Biden failed to do that and deserves our criticism.  But Mr. America First would certainly not have done any better.

My boss, while acknowledging that Trump would not have intimidated the virus into submission, says that he would have responded to failure of the vaccine by developing a better testing regimen. I will happily concede that our testing regimen sucks and the Biden could have done better.  But Trump was markedly hostile to testing from the start for fear it would show the full extent of the pandemic.  Given his overall track record, his most probable response to the Trump Vaccine not being as good as expected would be to try to happy talk it away and, once that failed, to lash out and blame anyone but himself for the problems.  He would no doubt promote treatment -- whether effective or not.  But overall Trump's chronic inability to acknowledge failure would have hampered him -- as always.

THE ECONOMY

2020

Inflation is a world-wide trend.  It would have been a world-wide trend under a second Trump term.  It is possible that under a Trump presidency we would have had a smaller stimulus, which would have led to less inflation.  But that would have come at the cost of a slower recovery.  Pick your poison. 

As for supply chain issues, they, too, are largely the result of recovery outrunning capacity, so much the same applies. I am absolutely certain Trump would not have been able to do anything about the computer chip shortage that has been a major bottle neck. Why?  Because computer chips are highly capital intensive to build and can take several years to ramp up.  That has nothing to do with who is in the White House.

THE BORDER

Trump would have left Remain in Mexico in place and greatly reduced border crossings.  Make of that what you will

CRIME

I would expect Trump to be rhetorically at least much tougher on crime than Biden and unveil federal initiatives to crack down.  How effective that would have been is anybody's guess, but it would have at least appeared to be doing something.

AFGHANISTAN

I think the general consensus on the Afghan withdrawal is that Biden was dealt a bad hand and played it badly.  What would Trump have done?  Well, one possibility I have heard is that he planned to withdraw right away without further ado.  This would have led to the collapse of the Afghan state as soon as the Taliban went on offensive in the spring, but by then we would be gone, so it would be somebody else's problem.  Alternately, other times Trump wanted to withdraw military forces, the military outfoxed him and kept them in place.  In Afghanistan that would have meant breaching our agreement and left the unpalatable choice between escalation and humiliating withdrawal.  I have no idea what Trump would have done.  But I am confident of one thing.  Biden deserves our condemnation for failing to save many of our Afghan allies.  Trump, to judge from his record, would not even have made the attempt.

THE UKRIANE CRISIS

I do not think Russia would be gearing up to invade Ukraine if Trump were in office.  Putin would have seen a friend in the White House and not have wanted to jeopardize that friendship.  Also, Trump would be in the process of wrecking NATO by picking senseless fights with allies.  Why unify them with an obvious threat?

OTHER

2024?

So, if Trump has won the White House, I would predict a higher vaccination rate leading to less COVID hospitalization and death, possibly a slower recovery that would not overstrain our capacity, a quiet border, the appearance of doing something about crime, and avoiding the current crisis.  Does that mean I regret my vote for Biden and wish Trump had won?

And the answer has to be no. Counterfactuals always seem better than reality because they assume that if we avoided our current problems, other problems would not take their place.  Trump was contemplating everything from withdrawing from NATO and South Korea to starting a war with Iran.  Certainly there is every reason to believe he intended to subvert the federal government more and more to make it an instrument of his personal power, to reward friends and punish enemies.  The grownups in the room were able to reign Trump in for his first term.  It is far from clear that they could have done so for a second.

And if All that is Not Terrifying Enough . . .

 

And just in case the news of imminent war is not terrifying enough, you can read Dmitri Alperovitch's thread* on the impending economic war, ruinous to all sides.  And in case that is not terrifying enough, he now has a new thread no where that can lead.  He warns first, that Western leaders are ready to slap Russian with severe economic sanctions, but not ready for retaliation (discussed in his previous thread). If that does not persuade us to back down, he warns, the Russians will mostly likely escalate to massive cyber attacks.  We naturally will retaliate.  And ever-escalating cyber warfare can even lead to an actual war.

Terrifying!

PS:  On the other hand, this may be overly alarmist. It seems much more likely that once it becomes clear that sanctions involve some pain for us, they will gradually collapse well short of all-out cyber war, let alone a shooting war.

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*Dmitri Alperovitch is the founder of Crowdstrike, the cyber security firm that first found the Russians had hacked the DNC server.

Hope, Fear, and Paranoia

It is very egocentric to look at the Ukrainian crisis solely from its effects on me when vast humanitarian and geopolitical issues are at stake. But I am not qualified to comment on those issues and have nothing really to contribute, so let me go with one powerless person's perspective.

Hope and fear are strangely linked.  For days I have been following the Ukrainian crisis, wavering between hope that war can be averted and fear that it has begun. But by now it is obvious based on many factors -- extension of military exercises that were supposed to end today, reports that the final order had been given, Russian forces moving into attack position, Russian propaganda treating war as inevitable, and Putin's arrogant dismissal of all attempts at diplomacy -- that war is at hand.

And for a time seeing war as inevitable made it seem just a little less terrifying.  Fatalism is a common way to overcome fear -- it means saying that what will happen will happen, so there is no point fearing it.  Fatalism also necessarily  means giving up hope.  Apparently I have not become completely fatalistic about the war, because I still keep fearfully peeking at News Today to see if it has happened yet.

Mostly I have found a coping mechanism.  It is based on the fact that Ukraine is nine hours ahead of where I am, and perhaps being overly influenced by the phrase "Attack at dawn."  So I tend to assume that any ground attack will take place in the early hours of the morning.  (Admittedly bombing and shelling can take place at night).  I get up at 7:00 a.m. and check News Today to see if war has begun.  Since Ukraine is nine hours ahead of us, that is 4:00 p.m. Ukrainian time and the maximum peril for the day has probably passed.  When it is 3:00 p.m. our time, it is midnight in Ukraine and another day has passed without war.  About 9:00 p.m. through 11:00 p.m. my time is 6:00 a.m. through 8:00 a.m. Ukraine time -- the time of maximum peril.  It is also 11:00 p.m. through 1:00 a.m. Eastern time.  Most media outlets have closed for the night, so they probably will not report a war till the next morning.  Besides, if I keep doomscrolling I will never sleep and what good is that?

Another point.  It was a very important insight at the beginning of my career reading an account by a psychiatrist who explained that the difference between paranoia in the colloquial sense and true clinical paranoia is one of degree, not of kind.  Anyone being bombarded with more data than they can process becomes suspicious.  People with hearing loss tend toward low-level suspicion because when they see people talking but can't hear the conversation, they wonder if people are talking about them, or if the see people laughing and can't understand the conversation, they wonder if they are being laughed at.  Much the same happens to people with normal hearing around people speaking an unfamiliar language.  Paranoia, he said, is simply a defect in people's data processing.

It explains a lot.  Particularly, it explains the rise in paranoia with the internet.  The internet means the people are being constantly bombarded with more data then they can process and become suspicious as a result.  Certainly one thing I have learned is that if you value your peace of mind, do not follow a twitter thread too far.  Otherwise you will be bombarded, not only with anger and invective, but with a great cacophony of conflicting opinions, all linked to seemingly credible sources that I am completely unqualified to evaluate.

And, indeed, the more I follow developments from Ukraine, the more anxious and paranoid I become.  The best remedy seems to be to keep my mind occupied with something -- anything -- else.  

Some advice from the novel version The Godfather on coping mechanisms for Mafia wives.  Invariably the women are kept in the dark about what is going on and only learn that there is trouble when their men are killed. Sonny Corleone has gone to rescue his sister from her abusive husband and is killed along the way.  Mama Corleone (we never learn her first name) is preparing for their arrival when her adoptive son gets the call that Sonny is dead.  He does not tell her and

[T]he old woman had not noticed anything amiss. Not that she could not have if she wanted to, but in her life with the Don she had learned it was far wiser not to perceive.  That if it was necessary to know something painful it would be told soon enough.  And if it was a pin that could be spared her, she could do without.

After long hours of doom scrolling, I am starting to think that is wise advice.

Economic WWIII: The Political Fallout

 

I will admit it. It is not just the economic effects of economic WWIII that I fear.  It is the political fallout.

Already Republicans are portraying 7% inflation and gas prices over $3 per gallon as an unprecedented disaster and utter ruin.  Now imagine how they will respond to all the possible results of economic warfare with Russia, or even just some of them.

Sweeping Republican landslides in 2022, with capture of the electoral machinery.  Republican victory in 2024, either by Trump himself or someone as much like him as possible.  And that not be so bad if nothing more were at stake that ordinary partisan politics -- defeat, yes, but with the proviso that no defeat is permanent, and that you can always live to fight another day.  But today's Republican Party has clearly given up on democratic politics and fancies itself as entitled to a monopoly on political power.  Give the Republicans a landslide now and expect them to entrench a one-party system like Mexico in the heyday of the PRI.

Presumably the end game of our sanctions is to bring down Putin.  I am skeptical that that will happen, or, if it does, that we will like his successor any better.  But the real fear that haunts me is that, in seeking to topple Putin, we topple our own democracy instead.

And now you know why it is hard for me to think about anything but the Ukrainian crisis.

Economic WWIII

So, let me focus on Ukraine.  The question by now is not whether there will be a war or even when.  The war has already started, with border clashes, ceasefire violations in the Donbass and the like.  I suppose there might be room to argue about the scale of the war, but I think the Russian buildup on Ukraine's borders answers that one.  The only remaining question is how long the Russians mean to stay, and in how much territory.  I don't think we can have any idea about that.

As I have said before, the good news is that the Russian invasion will not lead to WWIII.  We have ruled out military intervention.  But it will lead to economic WWIII. We may be in a position to hurt Russia, but Russia is in a position to hurt us as well. We all know that gas prices will skyrocket.  Europe receives as much as 40% of its oil from Russia.  There has never been an oil shock on that scale. Furthermore, increase oil prices have a ripple effect into all areas of the economy.  So much for inflation calming down any time soon.

Nor is it just oil.  Read this thread. It is terrifying.  

Our computer chip industry, already stretched past its limit, imports 90% of its Neon from Ukraine and 35% of its palladium from Russia.  Hypothetically, this could halt chip production altogether.  Chip manufacturers say they will get by.  I lack the knowledge to say whether this means they have alternatives, or whether it is just industry happy talk.  The article does have one reassuring comment.  Neon prices increased by 600% during the last Ukraine crisis.  The chip industry carried on.

Russia also has 25% of the world's titanium.  Military planes (for obvious reasons) do not use Russian titanium, but that just steers more commercial aircraft toward it.

Russia produces 2/3 of the world's ammonium nitrate fertilizer and stopped exporting on February 2.  This can only drive rising food prices even higher.

There will almost certainly be cyber attacks as well.  Remember that ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline?  Not to mention support for Iran in unpredictable ways.  The author concludes:

We could potentially find workarounds against most of these economic responses from Russia but, at a minimum, we should expect further spikes in inflation and pressures on supply chains across numerous critical industries

END

Let us also recall that that sanctions have generally been notable ineffective at toppling hostile governments or even getting them to change their ways.

Still, I suppose there is one bright spot if you want to call it that.  It avoids what I call the rolled-up newspaper problem (or maybe the "if you don't drop dead we'll kill you" problem) that Daniel Drezner writes extensively about.  Namely, how to you remove sanctions?  After all, if you impose sanctions to pressure a hostile country into changing its behavior, you have to be able to remove the sanctions if the behavior changes -- even if the country remains generally hostile otherwise.  

In a country with that much power to retaliate, I do not imagine that will be a problem.

The Inspector General's Report: In Sum

So, in short, the Inspector General's report found:

1. The FBI followed existing procedures in opening its investigation into the Trump campaign, although those procedures should probably be tightened to require DOJ approval;
2. The FBI followed existing procedures and appears to have acted appropriately in doing FBI file and open source investigation on campaign members, asking other government agencies for information, and opening an investigation on four members who seemed genuinely suspicious;
3. The FBI followed existing procedures in having confidential informants from outside of the Trump campaign talk Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, but those policies are incredible slack and should be tightened;
4. The FBI very properly did not insert any informants into the Trump campaign itself;
5. The FBI was not wrong to talk to Christopher Steele and investigate his leads, despite his working for Trump's political rivals (although it found serious problems in the nature of their relationship); however
6. The FBI seriously mismanaged the FISA application on Carter Page, using uncorroborated information from a dubious source and failing to include important exculpatory information. 

Reading between the lines two other things become apparent.  First the investigation came up dry.  It failed to find any evidence of a link between the Trump campaign and Russia.  This has led many Trump supporters to argue that the investigation should never have been launched.  But this ignores two things.  First, investigations do sometimes pursue false leads.  It is only in hindsight that we know which investigations will and will not turn up anything of importance..

Second, and relatedly, there wasn't much of an investigation.  Operation Crossfire Hurricane basically consisted of an open source search, a search of FBI files, inquiry to other agencies, several interviews by confidential informants, looking into the Steele Dossier, and a FISA warrant on Carter Page.  Really, that is rather thin.

Of course, the reason that Crossfire Hurricane was so skimpy was that it was operating under a serious handicap.  It had to conceal its existence.  That problem is endemic to all counter intelligence operations, but it was particularly acute in the case of Crossfire Hurricane because the target of the investigation was so high profile.  Actions like subpoenaing records might be doable in a lower profile case but would be detected what the target was a U.S. presidential campaign.  Crossfire Hurricane was therefore cut off from normal investigative techniques, like subpoenaing records and openly interviewing witnesses.  

Thus the story of the Trump investigation does not end with Crossfire Hurricane, but moves on to the Robert Mueller investigation.  The Robert Mueller investigation was able to use more open investigative techniques, but it, too, had a disadvantage.  The Mueller investigation was a criminal investigation.  That meant that it had to reach its conclusions based on evidence that would be admissible in court, and had to refrain from assumptions that, though reasonable, lacked an adequate evidentiary basis.  Although the Mueller Report did not find anything that could be charged as a criminal conspiracy, it did find disturbing happenings, in particular, that Paul Manafort was regularly sending polling data to a probably Russian spy, and that Michael Flynn was cruising the dark web for Hillary Clinton's deleted e-mails, unconcerned with the possibility that he might be talking to Russian spies.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, unhampered the the constraints of a criminal investigation, looking into these allegations in greater detail and did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, but found many decidedly disturbing event.  If this were a spy movie or mystery novel, the investigation would not have shifted from Crossfire Hurricane to Robert Mueller or the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Instead, the FBI, with the same personnel, would have been released from their constraints and completed the investigation.  

For me to complete the novel/movie, I should next read and post about the Senate Intelligence Committee report.  But I don't think I will do that just yet.  Why not?  Because right now Russia is gearing up for war on Ukraine.  We are hearing an endless drumbeat of reports that war could start any day.  In fact, at least some reports set the date as Wednesday, February 16.  And in Ukrainian time, it is already Wednesday, February 16, so the war could start, not just any day, but any hour.  A Russian invasion will not lead to WWIII because the US has ruled out military intervention.  But it will start an economic world war, with disastrous consequences for all parties.  Somehow everything else looks trivial by comparison.  So I do not expect to post on other topics until we see how things shake out.

The Inspector General's Report on the FISA Warrant

 

The bulk of the Inspector General's Report (pp. 121-34) deals with the FISA warrant against Carter Page, and finds numerous flaws in the process.  Even before receiving the Steele Report, agents had wanted to wiretap Page.*  To obtain a warrant, the FBI had to establish probably cause to believe that Page might be the agent of a foreign power.  Their interest was based on Page's past contacts with Russian intelligence agents and his visit to Moscow in July.  If there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, that seemed like the  most likely time for it to take place.  However, higher up's believed that the FBI was close, but not quite there (pp. 121-122).  The Steele report elevated the case for a wiretap from about 50/50 to what the FBI considered sufficient (p. 125).** 

The report found serious flaws in the application.  FISA applications should contain all relevant information, pro and con.  The application for Carter Page was based primarily ln the Steele report.  It included many of Steele's allegations about Page, including that he was serving as an intermediary between Manafort and Russia in a "well-developed conspiracy" regarding the hacks, that Russian officials offered him compromising materials on Hillary Clinton that they might be willing to share, that Russian officials discussed lifting sanctions with Page, and that Page was involved in Russia's release of DNC e-mails to Wikileaks (p. 130).  None of these allegations, it should be added, proved to be true, nor was there any corroboration at the time the application was made (p. 132)..  Meanwhile, the application left out significant exculpatory information (p. 127):

• Although the Steele Dossier portrayed Page as a liaison between Manafort and Russia, Page denied every having met or spoken to Paul Manafort.
• Page's denials of any knowledge of ties between Russia and Wikileaks or involvement in the Republican Party platform during a conversation with an informant (pp 146-147).
• Page's denials to the informant of meeting with sanctioned individuals in Moscow (p. 170).
• Papadopoulos' denials to an informant that the Trump campaign had any involvement with Russia or Wikileaks (pp. 166-167).  Such denials must be included, even if the FBI does not believe them (p. 168).
• Notice from the CIA (always referred to as "another government agency."  For some reason the Inspector General is extraordinarily coy about naming it) that Page was working for them in many of his Russia contacts.
• A serious exaggeration of Steele's reliability and importance

The FBI did also have some concerns about Steele being hired to do opposition research for the Democratic Party or the Clinton campaign (pp. 134-142).  At the same time, the FBI routinely uses biased or hostile sources in seeking warrants (friendly or neutral sources rarely have much dirt to offer) and considers this acceptable so long as the bias is include in application (p. 144).  That information was included in the Page warrant, in a footnote that was clearly visible in the main text (pp. 142-143). 

The FBI went on to apply for and receive three renewals of the application.  Although never expressly stated, the reason for the renewals appears to have been that they weren't getting any significant information, which was probably a sign to end the surveillance.  The first renewal application was not significantly different from the original application, except that it mentioned Steele had been fired for leaking information to Mother Jones.  It did not mention new information the FBI had received since the first application casting doubt on Steele's importance, reliability, and sources (pp. 202-204). 

The FBI applied for a second renewal in April, 2017 (p. 210).  By this time, they had spoken to Steele's primary sub-source and learned information from the sub-source that cast serious doubts on much of Steele's reporting (pp. 211-212).  Yet this was not included in the application (pp. 213, 215).  The same defects carried over into the FBI's third and final application (pp. 219-228).  

The Inspector General found that FBI procedures do allow the use of uncorroborated information in FISA applications, as was done with Page.  However, in those case, there has to be a thorough assessment of a source's reliability.  The FBI seriously failed in this requirement for Page (pp. 360-361).  It also found that many of the defects in the process were known to lower-level agents but did not make their way the top, so that higher ranking FBI officials approved the application unaware of its defects (p. 365).  This raises and obvious question -- how many of these problems are unique to this particular application and how many are chronic?  The report even found that one of the lawyers involved in the application tampered with an e-mail to state that Page was "not a source" for the CIA.  

If anyone is interested in the fine details of how the FBI makes FISA applications, I highly recommend the Inspector General's report.  For anyone else, the whole thing is deathly dull.  The report also contains interesting information for an outsider.  There are approximately 1,300 FISA applications submitted per year, and about 25-40 final applications per week (p. 133).

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*A FISA wiretap of George Papadopoulos was also considered but rejected (p. 128).

**For what it is worth, General Counsel James Baker believed there was sufficient information for a FISA warrant even without the Steele report (pp. 134-135).