How the DC Establishment Tripped Up the Trump Presidency

So there's certainly part of that, but the thing is that wouldn't explain why Trump has been skeptical of the global financial system since like 1978. Right? Like there's that old clip of him on Oprah in like 1980s. Talking about China and trade. Talking about Japan and trade. Yeah. I mean, he's even, I've heard this from a friend, he was citing like one of my friends, Michael Lind, who's like very, you know, like a nationalist on trade policy in the mid-2000s was like, Michael Lind is right about trade. Like he was, he's clearly been thinking about this for a long time and on immigration in particular. I mean, I think that's another one where he's always kind of been there. He's always had the instant. I mean, his real genius was looking at what did the base of the Republican party actually want? They want better trade deals and they want less immigration. And for, you know, decades now, all the professional right has been able to give them is, well, cut your taxes. That's a priority. It'll never actually happen. But you still have to vote for us because we're good on abortion and we're good on gun control. And that wasn't enough for a lot of people. And you can see too, and this is what I meant about making it the cynical choice. When you adjust your position on immigration and on trade, you win all of these Obama Trump voters all throughout the Midwest and you become the president. I mean, and even then, I'm not saying it was enough. There's still a lot more work to be done. I think it needs to realign more to the issues of what I'm talking about. To say that it's all just, it is just, I mean, that's not his driving force. Like if you see the way, having interacted with him and just like how he reacts to certain things, there isn't condensed ideology behind what he is. Otherwise, he wouldn't have run the way he was. He wouldn't have had those positions for such a long time on the core issues that actually matter to why he was elected. And so the real issue, and I think the criticism of valid criticism, is he wasn't able to enact those political instincts into the actual staffing of the White House because in the White House, personnel is policy. And there's a great book called The Years of Lyndon Johnson. It's about the history of LBJ as four volumes and all that. Robert A. Caro, one of the best biographers of all time. And he quotes a guy named Tommy Corcoran, who was FDR's kind of right hand man. He's like, what is a government? Government's not one man. Government is the first hundred man, first thousand. They all have to be united in a common purpose in order to actually get shit done in a bureaucracy. The truth is, and we have to acknowledge this, is that on the right after Trump's election, the RNC and all these professional right wingers, this conservative establishment, they were the thousand. And so that's why you get something like the tax cuts bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It's because a guy like Paul Ryan has been fantasizing about pushing that for such a long time. He didn't agree with Trump on trade. He blatantly disagreed. He didn't agree with Trump on immigration completely. And these guys were masters of being like, oh, Mr. President, you're going to get that, but you've got to pass this tax cut first. Oh, you get what you want in your spending. But you just got to put this in the spending bill first. And they snookered. Basically, they snookered him because Trump is I mean, look, he was a political novice. He didn't actually know about how policy was made in Washington, D.C. It's fucking complicated. It matters a lot who the deputy secretary of commerce is like you and I aren't going to know that person's name. That person's certified certifies like steel tariffs. Yeah, I still think that's letting him off the hook too much, though, because like, I mean, you see in this in this crisis, right? If he may have some instincts, he may have some ideological leanings and you're right. He's been talking about this, some of this stuff, especially on trade for a long time. But when it came down to it, you know, he was the first people he called in the coronavirus crisis for economic response were corporate CEOs, Wall Street executives. Like that's who we went to to get his advice. That's who he trusted. And that's how you end up, you know, floating ideas like we're going to have a capital gains tax cut as a response to crisis or we're going to have a payroll tax cut, which, okay, if you have a range of responses, maybe that's part of it. But when you've got 40 million people aren't on a payroll anymore, that's not going to do a whole heck of a lot of good. So I just don't see that there's any maybe he has the ideology, but it doesn't really matter if you're not willing to push for it if you're not willing. And you see who's organized in the town because immediately once this crisis hit, immediately the first trillion multi trillion dollar bill gets passed very, very quickly with all the goodies for big business, the stuff that was custom written, never got their goodies. There was a massive tax break for real estate developers that they tried to get into the corporate bailout that they had all ready to go. Like those are the forces that are all completely organized, locked and loaded and ready to go in a crisis. And so they basically won. I mean, they rolled everyone. They tied the little bit of paltry small business and worker stuff to the massive corporate piece and held the workers and the small businesses hostage and said, if you vote, don't vote for it, then you're voting against workers. And it was all ready to go like that. And that is what you were overcoming in the town. That sort of bipartisan 9080, 98. They all voted for it. All voted for it. I think when you're talking about Trump and his history of understanding trade and business decisions, I think it's all stuff that benefited him. That's why he was concentrating on them. And I think now you're dealing with him spread so thin because now he has to deal with the environment. He has to deal with international politics. And there's so much and that's why you catch him. And I think what you said, too, that he's he lives off the id. I mean, I think that's very true. He's always in the moment, right? He famously said he just lives off of his instincts. He trusts his instincts, which is great. But he had preparation when he was dealing with those things before when he was talking about those things before he was president. That's why he had a deeper understanding of them because they meant something to him. But now you're dealing with the entire broad spectrum of duties of being the president. And he says shit like inject people with Lysol and sick dogs on protesters. And he's he's saying nutty things. Right. I agree with you. He's the strong man. Right. He's always been the strong man. He's always been the you're fired guy. Right. And he's still playing a type. Yes. So he's that guy now, but he's that guy with global thermonuclear consequences. And so even more to the point on that, which is that when you don't have this is this is another kind of establishment always wins point is that when you don't have very firm beliefs because like trade and immigration are two things with like hundreds of billions of dollars behind the neoliberal trade and immigration policy that we have right now in this country. When you don't have that a very well formed ideology around how it should be like you're saying on the environment or anything else. That is how they win because status quo always continues in DC unless you make the very concerted effort of like no, you are not doing this anymore. And I'm appointing your boss and your boss's boss and your boss's boss's boss's boss in order to make sure that you don't actually do that. That's that's actually what the hardest way to fight back is you actually need a coherent ideology on every single one of these things. But more important, you got to understand how government works. And I think that so many people don't seem to grasp that it's not just like putting a guy in the Oval Office like look, by the time it's reached the Oval Office, it's so fucked right that 10 levels down, they would have made the decision. So that's the power right? Like you got to make sure that you're what you want is being reflected 10 layers down in the bureaucracy. And you look at the way you know, like Russiagate and all this other stuff. And you can just see like how arrogant some of the people within the bureaucracy behave just blatantly, you know, disregarding the will of a president or blatantly just thinking he's illegitimate, trying to delegitimize him. And from that perspective, that's fucking scary because they're not even accountable to the person that we all voted for.