Advice to Trump Opponents (That No One Will See)

Look, I'm as bad an offender as anyone else (hence the illustrations), but really we have to stop catastrophizing everything Donald Trump does.  It makes us look like Chicken Little.

Withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, threats of protective tariffs, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the war of words with North Korea and now withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. Every time Trump's opponents predict some unspeakable horror will result from his latest action and it fails to appear, we just reinforce his supporters in their belief that Trump is a lot smarter that the Establishment that criticizes him.

Look, I remain firmly of the opinion that deliberately wrecking the civilian federal government through corruption and incompetence and running foreign policy based on who flatters you most are not going to end well.  But the system is proving more resilient than many of us anticipated.  Saying this will end badly doesn't necessarily mean it will end in disaster (except in Puerto Rico, which no one ultimately cares about), much less that disaster will occur overnight.  Maybe deliberately wrecking the civilian federal government and running foreign policy by caprice will instead cause a variety of small problems that get bigger and bigger over time.  There is a definite pattern.

Republicans proposed legislation to repeal Obamacare and strip over 20 million people of their health insurance.  The great outcry stopped them, but instead they are now slowly undermining the exchanges and seeking to bring them down.  Stripping 20 million of their health insurance overnight is a political disaster, but stripping a mere 5 million of their health insurance each year for 4 years can achieve equal results with less attention.

Likewise, when Trump threatened trade, hysteria as a little misplaced given that he had no actual plans in place for doing so.  So nothing happened at least immediately.  Now we are in trade talks with China and they are not going well.  Most likely outcome -- not the ruinous trade war that some people are predicting, but a ramping-up of trade barriers that will bite and hurt.

During Trump's war of words with North Korea, some people noted that there was no actual heightened military alert.  And cooler heads in Iran are now pointing out that neither us reimposing the old sanctions nor Iran developing a nuclear weapon will happen overnight or easily.  But there are any number of less dramatic ways that things can go down hill.

So, please, folks.  By all means let us criticize Trump, as he so richly deserves.  But don't let it spill over into hysteria or we will only make ourselves look foolish.