One Month Down, So Many More to Go

So, we've now had one month of President-Elect Trump and, at this point, I think it's fair to say that his Presidency will be as awful as most of us expected it to be.

Exhibit A is his cabinet picks, which, so far, are one bag of awful after another. His picks for Secretaries of Education, Labor, and the head of the EPA are all people who spent their careers being actively hostile to the mission of the agencies they will now be leading.   Betsy DeVos is a billionaire Republican donor who has literally spent decades and millions of dollars trying to destroy public education, Scott Pruitt made his name in the environmental game by repeatedly suing the EPA over its environmental regulations and is a full fledged climate-change denier, his latest pick, Andrew Puzder is the CEO of CKE, the company that owns Carl's Jr., has been repeatedly named in class action lawsuits over failure to pay overtime to restaurant managers.  And then there's Steven Mnuchin as the Treasury pick.  Mnuchin is an ex-Goldman Sachs executive who wanted to pad his Bond-villian resume, so he got into the foreclosure industry where he once foreclose on a 90-year-old woman over 27 cents.  It almost seems a shame that he doesnt have a mustache to twirl.

Remember how Trump was going to drain the Washington swamp of all the donors and politically connected CEOS that got top cabinet picks?  Me neither.

Trump also has taken the opportunity to start flinging his weight around on the foreign policy front, too.  I do think controversy over the phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is largely overblown, mostly because I don't think there's anything real behind it.  The Washington Post reports that the call had been in the works for some time, and initially, I thought the call was another one of those situations where Trump does something while being completely ignorant of its consequences.

But when he named Iowa governor Terry Branstad as the Chinese ambassador, I changed my mind a bit.  Branstad has known Chinese President Xi Jinping since 1985, so in that sense, he knows the lay of the land and how to best approach Jinping.  In a larger context, I think this another example of Trump talking out of both sides of his mouth and getting away with it.  On the one side, he gets the China hardliners nice and stiff by thumbing his nose at a decades long policy specifically designed not to ruffle any Chinese feathers.  Then, out the other side, he nominates a man with a deeply established relationship to the same Chinese government he's supposedly dead set on snubbing, so I wouldn't expect any follow through on Trump's blowhard attitudes towards China anytime soon.  Remember, Trump is and always has been about the projection, not the actual substance.

This carries over to Trump's main claim to domestic affairs, too.  Trump is parading the Carrier plant deal as real, concrete evidence that he can save jobs on a mass scale.  Trouble is, dig into the details a bit, and he really didn't save much at all.  For one thing, he didn't save 1,100 jobs- that number is closer to 800.  For another, Carrier's parent company is still going to fire 1,300 people in Indiana.  Oh, also, Carrier is going to invest $16 million to automate the plant in question so it can fire more people down the road.  And, as the cherry-on-top, Carrier is going to get a $7 million tax break, courtesy of the good people of Indiana that they're so busy firing.  Truly, how have we managed without such an obvious economic genius to guide us?


Again, though, the pomp matters more than the circumstance here.  Because even though it's a rather hollow "victory" we're talking about, it's still a sideshow that gives people who have largely been abandoned the top billing they desperately crave.  And hey, it's working out for him, polling wise, so why should he change anything?

It's not really Trump's fault that the American people, by and large, only have time to browse news headlines and not get into the gory details which just makes it easier to pull the wool over their eyes until it all ends in tears.  A con man is nothing without his marks, after all.  So Trump will continue to bask in the glory of his propaganda moves while the world continues to rot behind him and he'll get cheered for it all the through. At least we'll get the schadenfreude of Trumpgrets.