On a precipice
The Times’s editorial summary of what we face:
So who is the man who will be the 45th president?
After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain. We don’t know how Mr. Trump would carry out basic functions of the executive. We don’t know what financial conflicts he might have, since he never released his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of tradition in both parties. We don’t know if he has the capacity to focus on any issue and arrive at a rational conclusion. We don’t know if he has any idea what it means to control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
Here is what we do know: We know Mr. Trump is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history. We know that by words and actions, he has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people. We know he has threatened to prosecute and jail his political opponents, and he has said he would curtail the freedom of the press. We know he lies without compunction.
He has said he intends to cut taxes for the wealthy and to withdraw the health care protection of the Affordable Care Act from tens of millions of Americans. He has insulted women and threatened Muslims and immigrants, and he has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites. Given the importance of the alt-right to Mr. Trump’s rise, it is perhaps time to drop the “alt.” David Duke celebrated Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday night, tweeting, “It’s time to TAKE AMERICA BACK!!!”
The Ku Klux Klan endorsed him, don’t forget. White racists are all for him.
When Mr. Trump has looked beyond our borders, he has said that he would tear up the agreement to prevent Iran from building nuclear arms and that he would do away with the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has said that he would repudiate last December’s Paris agreement on climate change, thereby abandoning America’s leadership role in addressing the biggest long-term threat to humanity. He has also threatened to abandon NATO allies and start a trade war with China.
We know that, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, Mr. Trump would be able to restore a right-wing majority by filling the Supreme Court seat that Republican senators have held hostage for nine months.
Republicans will soon control every branch of the federal government, in addition to a majority of governorships and statehouses. There is no obvious check on Mr. Trump’s vengeful impulses. Other Republican leaders, including his running mate, Mike Pence, have largely made excuses for his most extreme behavior.
By challenging every norm of American politics, Mr. Trump upended first the Republican Party and now the Democratic Party, which attempted a Clinton restoration at a moment when the nation was impatient to escape the status quo. Misogyny and racism played their part in his rise, but so did a fierce and even heedless desire for change.
That change has now placed the United States on a precipice.
There is no such domain as ‘economics’. There is only political economy.
A physicist explained it to me once in these terms: It is like pushing a spinning gyroscope. You push it north, and it moves east. Push it east, and it moves south.
Well, Trump is not the first politician to promise a whole lot of things without a clue as to how they might be delivered. And stand by for the fossil carbon gang to be given the run of whatever Washington bureau takes their fancy.
Most important, he apparently thinks that one-sided trade wars are possible, and can be fought in America’s favour. And that while he takes action against imports into America, foreign exporters will not be able to do anything nasty in response.
The share markets are presently rating his chances in their own distinct way.
He’s getting a fantastic team together, too. Sarah Palin is going to be your equivalent of Environment Minister, Newt Gingrich is going to be Secretary of State, Ben Carson will be in charge of education. I am beyond horrified now.