Tonight on CBS's 60 Minutes, Americans will be transfixed by the porn star's story of her affair with Donald Trump. This follows the attention paid last week to the erstwhile Playboy Playmate's story on CNN of her affair with His Hairness, and Trump's branding of both women as liars. It also follows months during which we have been bombarded by obnoxious tweets, daily speculation on who's up or down in our musical chairs White House, and the endless chaos that is this child-President.
Under these circumstances, it is easy to forget another more important reality.
So, for all of you who have, and most especially for those of you who want to . . .
Here's an important wake-up call.
Trump is a liar, a cheat, a con man and a bully. But he is also a right winger. And despite being all of the former, he is having some success at the latter. Put differently, the office hasn't altered his character. But it has altered his promised policies.
Begin by recalling that Trump did not run for the Presidency as a right winger.
In fact, to the contrary, he took on and rejected some of the outworn shibboleths of the far right.
Trump was vociferously against the war in Iraq during the campaign. And, unlike his fellow-candidates, he was outspoken in criticizing the Bush/Cheney weapons of mass destruction-led march into that quagmire. On Medicare and Social Security, he was alone among those in the GOP field in claiming that benefits would not be cut on his watch, and on health care, he promised something better than Obamacare -- affordable insurance coverage for all without Obama's mandate or taxes. To that he added the promise not to cut Medicaid and tax reform that would not benefit the super-rich.
A year and two months in, all has changed.
The tax cut put billions in the pockets of corporations and Wall Street, with nominal reductions for individuals that will expire in ten years and the elimination of deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes that will fall with particular heaviness on large blue-state cities and suburbs. My taxes in Putnam County, New York are going up, as are those for any who live in or near Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago or Boston.
The tax bill also repealed the individual mandate, which will likely be fatal to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA's solvency was three legged -- the elimination of insurance exclusions based on pre-exisiting conditions, mandatory participation in the insurance market to expand the number of premium payers, and state-based exchanges and subsidies for those who could not otherwise find insurance. The first and third of these legs remain, but the second has been gutted, with the likely result that companies will not get the needed expansion in premium paying policy-holders necessary for them to avoid unaffordable price hikes.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are now talking about "entitlement reform." For them, that means cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. As the deficit rises thanks to shrinking revenue, we can expect that chorus to swell.
All of this occurred in 2017 during the first year of the Trump Administration.
And now, on foreign policy, Trump has moved in lock-step.
The big news last week was the firing of Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster as Trump's National Security Advisor (NSA) and the appointment of former Ambassador John Bolton to that post.
Bolton is an unrepentent hawk who never met a war he was unwilling to send others to fight (he himself avoided the Vietnam War via a stint in the National Guard). He defends the Iraq War to this day. At the time, he was a full-throated proponent of the claim -- since refuted -- that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
On North Korea, Bolton has come out in favor of the President having a right to strike preemptively. His theory is that Kim Jong-Un's possession of nuclear weapons is itself an imminent threat and thus eliminates any legal need to go to Congress before striking militarily. Bolton takes over at NSA at a time when the State Department has been gutted of under-secretaries and seasoned diplomats with deep experience in regional issues. And in the wake of that gutting, another war hawk -- the current director of the CIA -- will replace Rex Tillerson as Sectretary of State, and Gina Haspel will take over at the CIA. Haspel ran a secret CIA prison in Thailand after 9/11, and detainees in that prison were waterboarded.
In the Bush II Adminstration, Vice President Dick Cheney was the author of the 1% doctrine. Under it, a 1% chance of nuclear or biological war warrants a full-on military response -- along with enhanced interrogation techniqes, i.e., torture -- on the grounds that the harm itself would be utterly catatrophic even if the likelihood was remote. The caution of real soldiers like Colin Powell is either ignored or greatly minimized. Back in W's Administration, while Cheney had Bush's ear, Powell was sent out to tout the flawed WMD story.
Bolton, Pompeo and Haspel are Cheney cubed.
Expect Defense Secretary Mattis -- who like Powell understands that wars have unintended consequences -- to be sidelined along the way.
To sum up . . .
We now have a domestic policy, the principal feature of which is a tax cut that guts revenues in order to set up an assault on our already weakened safety net, and a foreign policy, the principal feature of which is likely to be a shoot-first-ask-questions-later resort to guns and the death of diplomacy.
In the Nixon Administration, conservatives bemoaned the fact that, as President, Nixon would regularly fake right and go left. He was after all the author of liberal gems that included the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The former helped clean up our polluted air and water and the latter made workplaces safer.
In the Trump era, however, the opposite has occurred.
On the campaign, Trump faked left.
In the White House, he has gone right.
Trump even does this on issues where he has been right wing all along. On immigration, he wants a wall. To try to get it, he overturned DACA, Obama's executive order allowing childhood arrivals to avoid deportation essentially on the grounds that they were innocent victims of someone else's illegal conduct. The idea was to bribe Democrats into funding the wall in exchange for legislation protecting childhood arrivals. Trump even claimed to favor DACA recipients and told the nation he would sign a legislative DACA if Congress passed it. The Democrats then blinked; Sen. Schumer okayed a wall for DACA exchange. Trump then did nothing to get his party to pass a bill.
The same has occurred on guns. In the wake of the Parkland massacre, Trump faked left in a televised round table, telling the assembled bi-partisan Congressional delegation that the law should "take the guns first, go through due process second." He also told GOP Senators at that meeting that they were afraid of the NRA but he, Trump, wasn't. The next day, the NRA visited the Oval Office and there was no further talk of taking guns off the street. Instead, Trump now wants to "harden the targets" that are our middle and high schools and arm teachers. The vast majority of teachers, however, do not want to be armed, and the kids want to go to schools, not prisons.
Ditto on tariffs. Trump's original proposal was music to the ears of those old economy workers in Ohio and western Pennsylvania but it was anathema to conservative economists. The result is that Trump's initial announcement was followed by implementation that literally eliminated its impact. In the end, the vast majority of imported steel will not be tariffed. The duties will fall principally on China.
Trump has the lowest approval ratings since Nixon. He also has Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller breathing down his neck. He routinely threatens to rid himself of that prosecutor, labelling the investigation a "witch hunt" and encouraging his seconds in Congress and on his legal team to "work the refs" by calling for an immediate end to the investigation. In all this, he is channeling Nixon, the author of the famous Saturday Night Massacre during Watergate.
And in faking left and going right on policy . . .
He is channeling Nixon's jujitsu on that front as well.
He's just doing it in a different order.
Why?
Part of the reason is that Trump is dishonest and does not care much about policy in any case.
The other, however, is that he is buying impeachment insurance.
So long as there is either a majority of GOP members in the House or less than sixty-six Democrats in the Senate, he will not be impeached and convicted, no matter how terrible the outcome in the pending sexual harassment suit against him or how unseemly -- or graphic -- the porn star's story turns out to be.
Faking left helps him with those old economy working class white men who want tariffs and affordable health care.
But going right gives him a House and Senate that, he thinks, avoids impeachment and removal.
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