A way to leave other people holding the bag
Back at the beginning of the month Paul Krugman pointed out at the Times the way scamming works for Trump. There was the issue of his tax returns for instance – he got away with simply not releasing them, and lying that it was because he was being audited.
[A]t this point it’s apparent that Mr. Trump believed, correctly, that he could violate all the norms, stonewall on even the most basic disclosure, and pay no political price.
Indeed, it’s clear that Hillary Clinton was in effect punished for her financial transparency, while Mr. Trump was rewarded for his practice of revealing nothing about how he makes money.
Which shouldn’t be how any of this works – and yet it did.
Therefore they will just go on refusing to be transparent, and probably get away with it.
Take, for example, the budget process. Normally, an incoming administration issues a fiscal plan conveying its priorities soon after taking office. But as the budget expert Stan Collender notes, there are strong indications that the Trump administration will ignore this precedent (and, possibly, the law) and simply refuse to offer any explanation of how its proposals are supposed to add up. All we’ll get, probably, are assurances that it’s going to be great, believe me.
We can guess that, Krugman says, because we can already see that it’s what they’re doing about the health insurance scam.
Obamacare has worked. It’s not perfect, by a long shot, but the number of uninsured Americans has plummeted to its lowest level in history. And Americans newly insured thanks to Obamacare are highly satisfied with their coverage.
So what can the G.O.P. offer as an alternative? We know what Republicans want: a free-for-all in which insurance companies can discriminate as they like, with minimal regulation and drastic cuts in government aid.
They want what there was before: basically a fuck you to people who didn’t get insurance through their jobs – coupled with complete freedom for employers not to provide insurance to their workers. Indeed, and to the surprise of no one, health insurance was one of the benefits Trump was refusing to provide workers at his Las Vegas casino until he hurriedly settled with the union a couple of week ago. Republicans want Nothing: a “whatever” system where the fortunate get coverage and the rest get Nothing.
Their plan is to delay doing anything until after 2018 (but then why not delay until after the next election, and the one after that, and so on? I don’t know), and figure out a way to blame the Democrats when they do repeal it.
It’s all very Trumpian, if you think about it. An honest memoir of the president-elect’s business career would be titled “The art of the scam.” After all, his hallmark has been turning a profit on failed business projects, because he finds a way to leave other people holding the bag.
In this case, the effort to replace Obamacare will clearly fail miserably in terms of serving the American people, perhaps especially the white working-class voters who backed Mr. Trump. But it could nonetheless be a political success if the public can be convinced to blame the wrong people.
And after seeing what just happened, we know that the public probably can be convinced of that, because it can be convinced of anything. (Enough of the public, that is. Not the whole public. Not even the majority…) As Krugman says –
You might think that this would be impossible, given the obviousness of the ploy. But given what we’ve seen so far, you have to take seriously the possibility that they’ll get away with it.
Especially when they have so much of the opinion-offering class helping them, with all this bullshit about the angry white working class, as if Mr No I’m Not Going To Provide Health Insurance Trump were the buddy of the working class. Oh never mind all that, they murmur, anxiously pushing it behind a door. Just read that brilliant J D Vance fella and repent your elitist ways.
Scam scam scam.
You have to remember that the republican platform basically boils down to “You’re on your own” (but we’ll still take what you’ve got) which is why it’s weird that there are so many idi– er poor and otherwise economically strapped folks are republican or at least vote that way.
Somewhat related:
http://davidbrin.blogspot.ca/2014/06/so-do-outcomes-matter-more-than-rhetoric.html
Brin here shows that for the last few decades it has always been the Democrats that have been fiscally responsible while the Republicans have made the debt higher. Somehow the rhetoric has been to blame the Democrats for those problems
I remain impressed by the feats of rhetoric and deception by which regular old Americans can be made so angry about Obamacare. “More people covered? No more denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions? I won’t stand for it!”
Then again, maybe all they had to say was, “Doesn’t this president seem a little… darker than a president should look?” After all, Romneycare didn’t disqualify white Mitt or brand him as the angel of the apocalypse.
Re ‘… the feats of rhetoric and deception by which regular old Americans can be made so angry about Obamacare. “More people covered? No more denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions? I won’t stand for it!”’
Indeed.
There _is_ some pretty impressive obfuscation in the overall effort, in that specific case. But while I’ll second your ‘impressed’, I’d qualify: it’s impressive it works. But some of it… I dunno I even think it’s that _hard_ exactly. So nothing impressive, really, about being able to do it.
A part I figure for distressingly easy, and a central mechanism used for much of this–Obamacare only one exhibit–is just convincing them people _outside_ those they consider their tribe would benefit. And they’ll decide: this simply won’t do. They’ll get positively mobilised, and directly against their own interest. It’s divide and conquer, old as the hills, and just as reliable. You can get people to sign off on any horror, any idiocy, however finally injurious to themselves, by keeping their attention on the suffering it visits on those they hate. They’ll focus on that, their own vulnerability, their own order on the list of those to be ground under in much the same fashion forgotten for as long as they are offered a seat in the audience for the humiliation of others.
Oh, and bear in mind, speaking of, as it does come up in such discussions: Niemöller’s famous regret is just that: a _regret_. Past tense. From a very flawed man, who participated enthusiastically under exactly that dynamic, and only saw this far, far, far too late to do anyone any damned good. As so many, many, many do. _That’s_ the sense in which people should reflect on it. There’s some muttering around–and muttering I find a mite darkly amusing–over what sort of exemplar the man actually is, given all else he said and did…
I find it amusing because: that’s exactly the damned _point_ of what he’s best known for saying. He’s _not_ a good example, and he’s not even saying so. He’s a bad one. He’s saying, yeah, that stuff I did? Don’t do that.
And me, I figure we can take it from him.
#3
The word you are looking for is tribalism.
@zubanel, that’s because, as the saying goes, “the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Sure, those policies might inconvenience them now, but as soon as they realise the American dream and get rich (any day now, surely), they’ll have theirs, and the only people who are fucked will be the ones who deserve it anyway…
The ‘angry white working class’ seems to be a myth, another ‘how did we fail the poor widdle dears’ fantasy of the self-hating, regressive, left.
Does the U.S. have a ‘working class’ at all? Or just a marginalized Industrial Reserve Army of terrified drones, dreaming of lottery wins and lawsuits magically lifting them into security.
I really doubt that an actual American working class could be stupid enough to fall for Trump. What we have is an angry, disinformed, stupid, racist, religion-addled subculture, large enough to crank out 60 million votes for this buffoon. A man who makes Huey Long look like a Great Statesman.
Nonsense, it’s not a “left” thing at all. On the contrary.