Definite Signs that Trump's Power is Waning

When I say that Donald Trump's power is waning, I don't just mean that he has lost control of the House of Representatives, and that Democrats may begin investigating him.

I mean that Republicans in Congress are becoming increasingly bold in disagreeing with him.  I mean that I am beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue the Republican Establishment would not let him off the hook after all.

The signs are everywhere.  Losing the House is one, of course.  The possibility that our economy may be hitting a soft spot, and that Trump's popularity would suffer as a result is another.  But most significant is that Trump seems to be doing things that the Republican Establishment simply can't tolerate.  They seem to be breaking with him over at least three issues.

Saudi Arabia:  Trump hasn't shot anyone in the middle of Fifth Avenue yet, but his friends, the Saudis, have murdered a US legal resident in their consulate in Turkey and Trump seems determined to cover up for them.  Murder in a consulate is, in some ways, even less deniable than murder in the middle of Fifth Avenue.  If the murder had taken place in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the Saudis might have made at least some half-hearted attempt to disassociate themselves from it.  But when a murder takes place in a diplomatic facility under the sole control of a government, attempts to blame rogue operatives just don't pass the laugh test.  Senators who have seen the evidence have unanimously, across party lines, blamed the Saudis in general and the Crown Prince in particular.  Nor does it end with the murder of Khashoggi.  The murder of Khashoggi has made a lot of people sit up and notice that the Saudis are waging a very nasty war on Yemen, blockading the nation in an attempt to starve it into submission, bombing civilian targets, and so forth.  Yes, it may be hypocrisy not to notice this until after the Saudis killed someone more relatable, but better late than never.  There is a growing, bipartisan revolt in Congress against our support for Saudi Arabia in its Yemeni war.

Payoffs to mistresses:  Look, I agree it's ridiculous that of all the scandals surrounding Trump, the one that Republicans are finally taking seriously is payoffs to an ex-mistress, but there you have it.  I'm honestly not sure why.  Is it because with Cohen's testimony the evidence is so overwhelming that no denial is possible?  That Republicans are just touchy about sexual impropriety?  That after making attempts to conceal an affair a big deal for Bill Clinton and John Edwards, they are caught on their own hook?  Or because this is bad enough to dissociate yourself from Trump but not so bad as to be impeachable, which makes it the sort of scandal you can acknowledge.

Withdrawal from Syria:  The Blob is furious about Trump's decision to withdraw troops from Syria.  Washington Republicans, as members in good standing of the Blob, are outraged.  First the withdrawal of our 2000 troops in Syria meant that the entire Mideast would explode into all-out war and be taken over by Russia and/or Iran and/or ISIS.  Calming down a little, the story changed to okay, maybe not the entire Middle East, but our Kurdish friends would be slaughtered by the Turks.  And now it is beginning to look as though maybe the Kurds won't be slaughtered, but will cut a deal with Assad, which will hand the Middle East over to Russia/Iran.  Well, maybe not all the Middle East, maybe just one country in the Middle East, but still. 

Look, I'm sure there are good arguments to be made, pro and con, about withdrawing from Syria.  The Blob is opting for hysteria instead.  The best arguments for withdrawal ought to acknowledge that a better-managed, less precipitous withdrawal would be much better. And the best arguments for staying ought to acknowledge that really, 2,000 troops are not all that is holding back the forces of Armageddon. 

One final thought.  Clearly the issue that Republicans are most willing to break with Trump about is over foreign policy.*  On the bright side, that means that stories about Republicans being blackmailed by Russia seem most unlikely.  Republicans are most likely to confront Trump for being insufficiently confrontational toward Russia and its allies.  On the not-so-bright side, that means Republicans' biggest problem with Trump is that he isn't starting enough wars.  A lot of Democrats agree.  Such is the Blob.  Sigh!

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*That applies especially to Lindsey Graham, who has gone from one of Trump's fiercest critics to one of his leading defenders.

Some Very Unoriginal Comments on the Fed and Conservatives

I don't have anything very original to add on the subject of the Fed, but let me echo others.

Throughout the Obama Presidency, right wingers, Trump included, denounced Federal Reserve for its monetary expansion, which they claimed was solely intended to boost Obama's fortunes, and urged tightening.  Despite a depressed economy, they were certain that the Fed must tighten immediately or there would be out of control inflation.  They held up as their role model Paul Volcker, who tightened in 1981 to break an inflationary spiral (as high as 14%).  The applauded him for inducing a severe recession, bankrupting farmers, and sparking an economic crisis in Latin America.  That was the kind of Federal Reserve we needed!  Or else they applauded the 1920 Fed that slammed on the brakes when prices began to rise after price controls were lifted and induced a steeper decline and worse deflation (though shorter lived) than in any single year 1929-1932.  Why wouldn't the Fed today do that?  They seemed to take an outright prurient delight in the pain the Fed was inflicting and asked why the Fed was too chicken to do it now.

During his campaign for President, Trump argued that if the stock market was rising, it was a bubble, and that we were experiencing a false prosperity, buoyed up by artificially low interest rates and headed for disaster.  His campaign was characterized by near-apocalyptic warnings about the disaster that lay ahead when the whole house of cards came crashing down.

Of course, the minute Trump was elected, things changed altogether.  You know that bubble in the stock market?  It immediately filled in and all future gains became real.  And the false prosperity from artificially low interest rates?  When as soon as he was elected it became real.  He was even cynical enough to comment that he considered official unemployment figures fake so long as Obama was President and real for him.

And I was notably cynical about what to expect from Republicans on the subject of interest rates and tight money:

Once Trump is inaugurated, Republicans will regard tight money as a universal and timeless imperative that must be continued in good times and bad, in all economic circumstances. To propose any deviation from this moral imperative would show a lack of principle. No amount of human suffering can ever justify deviation from this universal and timeless imperative and, indeed, the more pain the Fed inflicts with tight money the better, since it will mean a richer reward down the road. So money must always be kept tight, without exceptions -- unless a Republican is in the White House and tightening might hurt his political fortunes, in which case we must be reasonable.

And sure enough, the economy is showing possible signs of softening, the stock market has fallen, and Republicans in general and Trump in particular are calling on the Fed to lower rates.  And an excellent case can be made that they are right.  It's just hard to have any interpretation but a cynical one in light of what they have said in the past.

Trump, I should add, is understandable.  He has no concept of the public good aside from his personal fortunes anyhow.  And looking at developments in the Russia investigation, he must be wondering if he will be indicted as soon as he leaves the White House.  So re-election has gained an imperative for him that it lacks for other incumbents.  (And what about when his second term expires?  I doubt very much that he thinks that far ahead).

But what excuse do the others have?

Trump in a Not-Even-a-Crisis

One of the biggest reasons I dreaded having Donald Trump as President (and one that liberals and conservatives should dread equally) was the thought of him in a crisis.  It was obvious that the best way to deal with Trump in a crisis would be to handcuff him, stuff something in his mouth, and lock him in the closet until it blew over.

And just to be clear, the latest stock market slide is NOT a crisis.  September 2008 was a crisis -- Fannie and Freddie nationalized, Lehman Brothers failing, Merrill Lynch surviving only by merger, AIG being nationalized, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs becoming bank holding companies to survive, and Washington Mutual Bank failing all in one month -- now that was a crisis!  And naturally the stock tanked, but falling stocks were a symptom, rather than a cause, of the crisis.

What we are seeing now is nothing like that.  It is, at worst, some softening of the economy, a reminder that the business cycle is still with us.  And, if we are lucky, it might just turn  out to be a needless panic.  A normal President would either keep quiet or  give some vague platitude that so long as all is well on Main Street, Wall Street will calm down.

And yes, I will admit it is unsettling to watch the stock market fall by triple digits day after day after day.  To see the stock market fall by 500 points in one day is familiar enough.  But it is usually followed by 200-300 point rebound the next day.  Even a general slide usually has interruptions.  So to see it fall by triple digits day after day with no relief is genuinely disturbing.

But there is nothing in the overall economy, nothing at all, to justify such a drop.  If our Tweeter-in-Chief would just SHUT UP, I'm sure the market would settle down and figure out that its freakout was unnecessary. 

A crisis is, to a considerable extent, a choice.  Presidents can decide, to a considerably extent, whether to respond to a development, like missiles in Cuba, or not.  Some leaders create foreign crises on purpose to boost their sagging domestic popularity.  But creating an economic crisis is generally not recommended.

And, just for the record, I don't think you can tweet your way into a crisis.  If all is well on Main Street, then I really do expect Wall Street to figure it out sooner or later and calm down.  I expect the slide to stop soon and a recovery to begin.  It will probably take some time to get back to the old high.  Stocks were becoming irrationally exuberant and needed some sobering up.  We may slip into a recession, but there is no reason to believe it will be a bad one.  So I fully expect the slide to stop soon, despite Trump's best efforts.  But it would have stopped a lot sooner without them.

UPDATE:  And right on cue, our President and Secretary of the Treasury shut up for one day and, sure enough, the stock market promptly recovers.

Americans are Unduly Afraid of Stock Market Crashes

At least we got a tax cut

Americans have an inordinate fear of stock market crashes, sort of like Germans' inordinate fear of inflation, and for much the same reason.  Just as the great inflation is a powerful German folk-memory, the 1929 crash leading to the Great Depression is a folk-memory with us.
The Germans need to get over it and so do we.  German inflation aversion played a major part in Europe's persistent economic crisis, as Germans refused to accept a little more inflation, instead pulling everyone else down.  As for our fear of stock market crashes -- well, Trump and Mnuchin are exhibits 1 and 2.

The stock market crash of 1929 was a financial crisis.  All financial crises are the same underneath -- the are the result of excessive leverage, i.e., debt-to-equity ratio.  As prices of collateral become inflated, debt builds up that seems well secured until collateral prices fall back to reasonable rates.  Then suddenly a lot of debt that seemed well secured turns out not to be at all.  Lenders are stuck with a lot of bad debt. Borrowers are stuck with a lot of unpayable debt.  And investors find that their investments are suddenly worth only a fraction of their former value -- with disastrous results for their budgets.  The stock market crash of 1929 was such a financial crisis.  The economy was heading for recession even without the financial crisis, but financial crises make recessions worse, and greatly slow recovery.

But guess what.  We responded to the 1929 stock market crash by instituting the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), barring commercial banks from issuing securities, insuring deposits, and other measures to prevent a repeat.  And it worked.  Since then we have had recessions and stock market crashes, but never again have we allowed a stock market crash to bring down the economy in the way that it did in 1929.

Our worst single day loss on the stock market in percentage terms (the best measure) was not in 1929 at all, but in 1987. On that day stocks fell by 22.6% -- nearly as much as the combined losses of the worst two days in 1929.  For anyone who has never heard of the 1987 crash, that's OK.  The various buffers put in place since 1929 worked.  The Fed lowered interest rates and the economy never so much as missed a beat.  (The stock market, seeing the real economy chugging along without it, got up, brushed the dust off, and resumed rising).

In 2008 we experienced our worst financial crisis since 1929 and, unsurprisingly, stocks dropped and the economy fell into its worst downturn since the 1930's.  But falling stocks were merely a symptom, not a cause, of the downturn.  The overpriced collateral that led to the crisis was real estate.  And, it should be noted, we instituted reforms following that crash to prevent banks from overextending themselves that appear to be working.

The one time since 1929 that a falling stock market really did damage the real economy was in 2000.  As the neighboring graph shows, the 2000 stock bubble (expressed in terms of price-to-earnings ratio) was immense -- great enough to dwarf the 1929 bubble.  Yet the downturn was mild (if persistent).

So really, folks, our economy has learned to weather stock market crashes.  To the extent that they are a symptom of underlying problems in the real economy, stock market crashes can be worrisome.  But we have insulated ourselves from stock market crashes to the extent that the worst one-day drop ever had no effect at all on the real economy and even a bubble as massive as the one that burst in 2000 caused only modest damage. 

So please, guys, a little worry is reasonable.  A total freakout is completely uncalled for.

A Sign that Twitter is Eating My Brain

Me, when Steve Mnuchin was appointed Secretary of the Treasurer.  "Oh, good.  He worked Goldman Sachs.  He understands how  money works.  (Unlike Goldman Sachs alum Steve Bannon) He won't blow up the world financial system just for thrills and giggles."

Me, when Steve Mnuchin's scandals started coming out.  "OK, so he's a repulsively corrupt cartoon plutocrat.  But at least he won't blow up the world financial system just for thrills and giggles."

Me today.  "Actually, Steve Mnuchin just might blow up the world financial system by pure incompetence."

Thoughts on George HW Bush

There have been enough eulogies of Bush Senior that there is not much left for me to add, but let me put in a few comments shaped by the others. 

Bush Senior has been compared to Eisenhower, both in the sense of being a moderate Republican and in that he was an eminently competent but never really got the chance to shine because he presided over good times.  But there is also a sense that, as with Eisenhower, Bush, Sr. deserved more credit for the good times than he got.

Eisenhower got us out of the war in Korea and resisted pressure to join the war in Vietnam, so he deserves credit for presiding over peace.

Bush, Sr. came into office just about a third of the nation's savings and loans were failing, the country had experienced two old-style bank runs, and people began to fear about the health of ordinary commercial banks.  The crisis was overrunning our ordinary ability to close banks and cover deposits.  The Bush Administration cleaned up the mess, prosecuted offenders, restored confidence in the financial system, and avoided serious economic fallout.*

He also undertook the last significant environmental initiative by a Republican -- measures to curb acid rain.  Sulfur emissions were acidifying rain and causing subtle but real environmental damage. As with global warming now, the relevant industries insisted that acid rain wasn't happening, that if it was happening it wasn't man-made, and that if it was man-made, it was beneficial, and besides, it couldn't happen because it was against their principles.  Bush, Sr. was ultimately convinced that acid rain was real but rejected direct regulations to curb sulfur emissions in favor of a cap and trade system that limited total emissions and allowed companies to decide how to limit emissions and permitted trading of "pollution units."  Once companies made cutting sulfur emissions a priority, it proved to be cheaper and easier than anyone had hoped, and an environmental crisis was averted.

But it was in foreign policy that Bush, Sr. most distinguished himself. 

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush, Sr. assembled a broad international coalition to drive the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, a war that (once again) proved much quicker and easier than anyone had hoped.  He then decided not to go all the way and remove Saddam from power.  I have seen some eulogies that saw this as his critical mistake, one that paved the way for his son's disastrous Iraqi invasion.  I disagree.  The disaster of the Iraq War proves just the opposite, that we should salute the senior Bush's wisdom in deciding not to go all the way.  Yet HW did make a serious mistake at the end of the war.  Instead of recognizing that Saddam was sufficiently weakened by his defeat not to be a menace, he committed himself to a policy of regime change, saying that Saddam was an intolerable menace no matter how much he was weakened.  It was that, and not the decision to leave Saddam in power, that paved the way for the future war.  This is not to deny that even a weakened Saddam would have been an adversary and a bad guy.  But we have lived with adversaries in power before and can do so in the future as well.

Bush Senior's greatest triumph was in his management of the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism.  It has been commented that his skilled management of the fall of Communism made both his predecessor and his successor look better than they otherwise would have.  The meaning of this is clear for Clinton.  He benefited from a peaceful and secure time after the fall of Communism.  How can Bush, Sr. retroactively make his predecessor look better?  One can debate how much credit Ronald Reagan deserves for bringing down the Soviet Union and Communism.  But assuming he deserves full credit, it would look like an empty accomplishment if Eastern Europe had imploded into war and chaos.  That the end of the Cold War was followed, instead, by Eastern Europe democratizing and joining NATO makes the victory well worth winning.

And now to more controversial matters.  Many Democrats never forgave HW for the nastiness of the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis.  Many Republicans say that HW should have won in 1992 and that the polarization that followed is the result of Democrats playing dirty and winning.

What does it mean to say that Bush, Sr. "should" have won?  If it means that he would have made a better President, that is normal and perfectly acceptable partisan politics.  It may or may not be true. 

Certainly it seems fair to say that our problems with Russia today are the result of our failure to integrate Russia into the post-Cold War order.  That, in turn, is the result of the failure of the Washington Consensus, backed by Bill Clinton, on restructuring the Russian economy.  The Washington Consensus approach to ex-Communist countries was the assumption of the more pain, the more gain -- that we should shut down as much of the Russian economy as possible as quickly as possible and trust that something better would take its place.  The end of Communism was triumph for the US, a revival of hope for Eastern Europe -- and a disaster for the former Soviet Union.  Only by understanding just how great that disaster was can we understand why Vladimir Putin is the man he is and why he is so hostile to us. 

Bill Clinton supported the Washington Consensus that inflicted this disaster.  Two questions pose themselves.  One is, would Bush, Sr. have done otherwise.  Presumably he had some sort of plans and the people who worked with him in managing the transition know what they were.  So I am open to persuasion one way or the other whether Bush, Sr. would have acted otherwise.  The other question is whether Soviet society was so rotten that nothing good could possibly have emerged no matter how the fall of Communism was handled.  And that, I believe, is one of those counterfactuals that can never be answered.

And then there is the claim by some Bush, Sr. supporters that the ever-escalating polarization we have seen since 1992 is an understandable reaction by Republicans to the trauma of their defeat in 1992.  I concede that the ever-escalating polarization that troubles our country did become visible with the Clinton win in 1992.  And I am slightly more sympathetic than before of Republicans' claim that the loss was unfair and/or traumatic.  After winning the Gulf War, Bush, Sr. did, indeed, look invincible for the next election.  To see his overwhelming lead melt away in so short a time, all because of a minor recession must have been quite shocking.  And Democrats really had controlled Congress longer than was healthy for one party.  Republicans may has felt they had a stable equilibrium with Democrats controlling Congress and Republicans the Presidency.  To lose the Presidency as well carried the specter or being shut out of power altogether.

 But it doesn't quite hold.  The Reagan Administration began with a severe recession -- a painful but necessary measure to break the inflationary spiral that had reached 14%.  Once the inflationary spiral was broken, the Fed let up on the breaks and the economy bounced back.  There was an implied contract there -- endure the severe recession and double digit inflation will be gone permanently.  But many Americans saw another contract -- endure the severe recession and there will never be another.  When it turned out that the business cycle was still with us, many people felt that a promise was broken.  As for being locked out of Congress, in those less polarized times the Congressional minority was by no means as powerless as it is now and could expect to have its wishes taken into account.

Some Republicans seem to complain that it was particularly unfair to deny Bush, Sr. a second term, particularly given that he had been so successful in his first.  The implication here is that if only the Democrats had shown the decency to wait until 1996 to win, Republicans would not have felt the need to freak out. 

Look, to state the obvious, losing elections is partisan politics as usual.  Yes, granted, since the New Deal two term Presidencies have been the rule and one term the exception and usually the result of a particularly bad performance (see Jimmy Carter).  But that is just a generalization.  There is no particular norm that says in incumbent President must be reelected unless he has done something specifically wrong, otherwise we would not have serious reelection bids. 

Besides, if we are going to argue that defeating a successful incumbent President violates a norm, then it should be pointed out that the general rule since the end of WWII has been eight years of one party in power followed by eight years of the other.  If the Democrats violated a norm by winning in 1992 and should have waited until 1996, then Republicans violated a norm by winning a third consecutive Presidential term in 1988 -- the only time one party has won three consecutive Presidencies since WWII. 

And that is when we come to the unpleasant side of Bush, Sr.  At the outset of the 1988 election, it looked as though the country would, indeed, revert to the mean and switch parties after two terms.  This led to a complete freakout on the Republican side and all those lowdown, nasty ads that ultimately defeated Dukakis.  It showed an ugliness in the Republicans that hadn't been seen since Nixon's day.  It suggested that they wanted to replace the old norm -- each party holds power for two terms and then the other takes over -- with a new one -- only Republicans get to be President.  And if that is so, then it would follow that Republicans would not accept a Democratic victory in 1996 any more than they did in 1992.  Indeed, the longer Republicans held the Presidency, the more they would see it as a birthright and any Democrat as illegitimate. 

Certainly there was no sign of any of this in the way Bush, Sr. governed.  But there were other signs during the Bush, Sr. Presidency of the polarization that would follow.  Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes, and Rush Limbaugh, three major drivers of the polarization, were on their way up.  We cannot know how well Dukakis would have handled the savings and loan crisis, acid rain, the fall of Communism, or the invasion of Kuwait.  Certainly he would be hard-pressed to do as well as Bush, Sr. did.  But the argument that Bush, Sr.'s defeat in 1992 was so outside the norm and so traumatic as to lead to all the polarization we have seen since is simply not convincing.  The seeds of polarization were there.  If the Democrats had won in 1988, it would have started four years earlier.  If they had won in 1996, it would have started four years later.  The underlying problem -- a party unwilling to accept defeat as legitimate -- remains regardless of the names at the top.

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*There was a mild recession in 1991 which cost Bush, Sr. the election, but it is by no means clear that it was related to the savings and loans.

Another Way of Putting It

So, to follow up on my last post, I concluded by saying:

Disagreements about policy are normal and will always be with us. But there ought to be areas that liberals and conservatives agree on, as well as disagree. The things I have cited above go to our whole system of government, law, and loyalty. And when they stop being priority, we have a very serious problem.

This article puts it much better that I could and offers a framework of understanding.  It offers the concepts of "common political knowledge" and "contested political knowledge."  "Common political knowledge" are that things that everyone agrees on.  "Contested political knowledge" are areas of disagreement.  The authors argue that every political system has both common and contested political knowledge.  No system can survive if everything is in dispute, nor can any system ever clamp down hard enough to erase all disagreement.  Rather, the stability of the system depends on what is common and what is contested knowledge.

As examples of "common political knowledge" in a democracy, the authors offer "how elections work: how districts are created and defined, how candidates are chosen, and that their votes count—even if only roughly and imperfectly."  "Contested political knowledge" means the policy disputes that drives elections and legislative debates, "how much of a role the government should play in the economy, what the tax rules should be, what sorts of regulations are beneficial and what sorts are harmful, and so on."  They go on to suggest that "common political knowledge" in a democracy is not just the basic framework of elections and government and the legitimacy of majority rule, but also common knowledge about who the political actors are, what the individuals and parties stand for, and the like.

The authors contrast this with autocracy, in which it is very much contested political knowledge who the adversaries of the government are, where they are, and how they can be contacted.  Turning this into common political knowledge is destabilizing to autocracies.  Democracy, by contrast, is undermined by turning common political knowledge -- such as the legitimacy of elections, the accuracy of the census, or the difference between real and fake news.

Which is another way of explaining the dangers that Donald Trump poses to democracy, why in a healthy system liberals and conservatives would agree that the danger transcends mere policy disputes, and why it is so alarming that many conservatives do not see it that way.

Simply put, we are seeing what is "common political knowledge" and what is "contested political knowledge" shift.  Traditionally we have had certain areas of consensus, i.e., "common political knowledge" between liberals and conservatives.  These areas have included:

• The losers of an election should concede to the winners
• The winners should respect the rights of the losers to contest the next election
• Changing the relations between difference branches of government is permitted, but a big deal not to be done lightly
• You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts
• It is not legitimate to use one's office for personal enrichment
• Competence matters
• Foreign meddling in our domestic politics is deeply alarming

Within such a framework, there is ample room for policy debates.  

But right now we are seeking "common political knowledge" become contested and demands for contested political knowledge to become common.

To a hardcore economic royalist, there is no room for debate over "how much of a role the government should play in the economy, what the tax rules should be, what sorts of regulations are beneficial and what sorts are harmful, and so on."  The proper answer is, there is no legitimate role for government in the economy, there should be no redistributive taxes, and no economic regulations.  How best to achieve these goals is open for dispute -- including whether to respect democratic elections if the winner wants to extend the role of government in the economy.  And growing numbers of Republicans appear to believe that large sections of the population are not "authentic real Americans" and that their vote therefore does not count.*

And so Republicans at the national level split between the ones who are willing to support a President who neither knows nor cares anything about governing, with innumerable conflicts of interest and a career based on fraud, who sees the Justice Department as his private goon squad, and who has alarming ties to a hostile foreign power because he shares their economic royalist policies or their white rural identity -- and ones who are not.  Or, put differently, some see basic democratic norms as "contested political knowledge" and the success of their policies or dominance of their group as properly considered "common political knowledge."  Others see preserving the basic democratic framework as important enough to accept losing at least some of the time.**

These are the stakes.  There is no other way to put it.

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*And, incidentally, I do not think our side is entirely blameless.  We have tried to move same sex marriage and transgender rights from "contested" to "common" knowledge when they are deeply contested.  I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with advocating for such views, merely  that we should accept that such views are controversial and that people of good will may disagree.

**And we are seeing the same thing played out at the state level in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where Republicans dismiss their defeat as illegitimate and respond by rigging the system.

Reasons for Conservative to Oppose Trump Even If He is an Economic Royalist

I want to revisit my past post on why some conservatives have warmed up to Trump and others have not.

This column explains why some Never Trumpers opposing him during the primaries and have changed their minds.  They feared that Trump was not an economic royalist.  It turned out that he was.  All reason to oppose him vanished.

In my personal opinion, fear that Trump was not an economic royalist is the silliest possible reason to oppose him.  Of course Trump is an economic royalist.  What else would he be?  No other ideology could possibly justify Trump, or allow him to pursue the career he has followed.  Of course he wants to remove all constraints on profit-making.  His whole life and being has been about worship of the almighty dollar.

But there are other eminently reasonable reasons for conservatives to oppose Trump, either before the election or now, even if he is an economic royalist.

Conservatives might fear Trump is not a social conservative.  (He isn't, but is willing to play one on TV for political advantage).

Or they might have feared that he would appoint someone like Judge Jeanine to the Supreme Court.  That particular fear did not pan out.  Trump has been completely orthodox in his judicial picks, but it was reasonable to fear that he might not.

Or they might have taken is talk about non-interventionism seriously.

Those were reasons to oppose Trump in the primaries, fears that he might not be a good Republican even if he was an economic royalist.  But there are other reasons conservatives might oppose Trump even after he won the nomination, and even to this day.

There are the reasons I gave before:

• That  he knew absolutely nothing about government or policy and showed no interest in learning.
• That he saw facts and evidence as things he could make up as he pleased, on the fly.
• That he had the attention span and impulse control of a small child.
• That his entire career was built on fraud.
• That he seemed to have no concept of the rule of law, or of the public good aside from his own personal interests
• That he appeared to think that if he won the federal government would be his own private property.
• That  he was blatantly appealing to hate and celebrating base impulses as "authenticity."
• His threats to use libel and anti-trust laws to silence his critics
• His encouragement of violence at his rallies.
• The prospect of such a man having his finger on the nuclear button.

And I can add other reasons that have come up since the election for conservatives to oppose Trump:

• His sons running his business empire while he runs the country.
• His appointment of his daughter and son-in-law to important positions of power that they showed no qualification for.
• The possibility that his foreign investments might create conflicts of interest.
• His apparent belief that the Justice Department is a tool to protect his allies and harass his opponents.
• The flagrant corruption of many of his nominees.
• His positive delight in alienating democracies and befriending dictators.
• The complete amorality of his foreign policy.
• His unwillingness to do any of the work involved in being a President.
• His disregard of the information resources available in favor of what he sees on TV.
• His lax approach to security.
• The whole disturbing Russia business.

Wait a minute, some conservatives may say.  Those the reasons that liberals oppose Trump.  Why should conservatives agree.

And I agree.  Those are reasons liberals oppose Trump.  They are also good reasons for conservatives to oppose him.  Liberals have other reasons to oppose Trump as well that conservatives do not share.  For instance:

• He is deconstructing the administrative state (as Steve Bannon puts it), otherwise known as wrecking the regulatory agencies by corruption and incompetence.
• His health plan, if it had gone through, could have stripped some 20 million people of their health insurance.
• He is still working at undermining Obamacare and stripping as many people of insurance as he can.
• His tax cuts are absurdly skewed to the top.
• His tax cuts threaten to precipitate a fiscal crisis and undermine Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
• He is stacking the federal bench with economc royalist judges.
• He wants to deport Dreamers and deny refuge to asylum seekers.
• He scapegoats immigrants and treats them with pointless cruelty.

But I get that to conservatives these (except perhaps that last) are reasons to support Trump.  They are policy matters.  Disagreements about policy are normal and will always be with us.  But there ought to be areas that liberals and conservatives agree on, as well as disagree.  The things I have cited above go to our whole system of government, law, and loyalty.  And when they stop being priority, we have a very serious problem.