The White House is beginning to look a little like George W. Bush’s occupancy, minus Bush’s fundamental decency plus porn stars plus staffers suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The latest assault on sanity was the appointment of one of Cambridge Analytica’s best customers, John Bolton, to be the President’s National Security Advisor. Cambridge Analytica, as you may recall, is the company that mined your Facebook account and sold the information to anyone with five cents and a mean streak.
The resemblance between the Bush Administration and the Trump Administration is two-fold. First, is the ascendance of foreign policy hardliners who have no reluctance to threaten war, or to actually go to war. What’s different is that Bush relied on military advisors who knew something about war and had been in a fight or two. Hawks in the Trump Administration are kiss-up and kick-down guys whose only military experience is playing dress-up at boarding school. Our kids will do the fighting while they play golf and make money from investments in the war machine.
Second, you may recall Bush sending everybody a $300 tax rebate check back in 2008 to stimulate the economy. That worked so well the Federal deficit grew by $500 billion dollars, the dollar weakened, and the stock market tanked. The Trump Administration’s tax “reform” bill adds $833 billion dollars (and counting) to the deficit and investors in even babysitter stocks like 3M and John Deere are getting hammered. Sure, some Tyson and Walmart employees got a onetime employer paid bonus to stimulate “the economy,” but unless you process chickens for a living or corral shopping carts, any tax “bonus” you receive will be more than eaten up by higher communications costs due to the end of net neutrality, and or to portfolio losses.
Republican administrations almost always mismanage the economy, but even George Bush knew that trade tariffs never work; in a global economy they are pure fantasy. Sadly, we’ve insulted and bullied traditional allies, like Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Australia and Argentina, and given them every incentive to seek stronger ties to China… who will be delighted to buy their friendlier hogs, cattle, soybeans, and other commodities.