More Trumped Up Chaos - Jeremy Agar In the previous Watchdog I looked in some detail at the role of the Koch brothers in subverting democracy (see my review of “Dark Money” in Watchdog 144, May 2017, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/44/10.html). Multi-billionaire owners of coal and gas interests, the Kochs have led the assault against any US impetus towards combatting climate change. Trumpcare Their other big worry is that other Americans will get affordable access to health care, potentially reducing the mega-profits of their mates in Big Insurance and Big Pharma. The Kochs are at their tricks again, now that the Senate is looking at Trumpcare. A Koch front called Americans For Prosperity sees the planned Republican rollback of “Obamacare” as “immoral” because it doesn’t gut it completely. That’s the word from a three-day Koch retreat where invitees had to pay at least $US100,000 for the privilege of being able to join the brothers in planning how Americans For Prosperity should spend $US400,000,000 to elect a Congress that they like in 2018. Trumpcare would erase insurance from many millions of people and cut Medicaid, but to the Kochs the cuts won’t be deep enough. In the Senate, this view is expressed by a few of the more extreme Republican extremists, like Rand Paul, a libertarian ideologist who wants the State out of everything except national defence. He’ll vote against any public investment in healthcare. On the other hand, there’s doubt from colleagues who have the more pragmatic concern of getting re-elected in 2018. At the time of writing it looks unlikely that this version of Trumpcare will win in the Senate as the few conflicted Republicans will be joined in opposition by all the Democrats. Trump himself has remarked that the Bill that first made it through the House of Representatives was “mean”. He said he didn’t like the way poorer and middle America would lose insurance coverage. But that is what the proposals from the Senate are all about. Trump is dissing his own Bill, which exists in order to prevent precisely what he claims to want. The Senators know that the gutting will be deeply unpopular with the constituents back home, so they were wanting to get it out of the way before they returned to their electorates for the summer break. The Koch brothers have also said that they know their purposes are hated. That’s why they have to spend all that cash to bribe politicians. “The Base” Shoots Itself In The Foot It’s been pointed out that the demographic that most stands to lose coverage largely coincides with the demographic that voted Trump. It might once have seemed unlikely, even in the age of the selfie, that the “base” would vote to have the right to get sick or die so that billionaires can make mega-billions more, but, unlike Charles and David Koch, the “base” doesn’t vote for its self-interest. As the Senators hashed up their proposal they excluded Democrats from their deliberations, while journalists and commentators universally declared they didn’t know what the Bill contained. So mad is the mood that one Republican sympathiser said it didn’t matter what was in the Bill. Trump hadn’t got anywhere much with his wall or his travel ban (before the Supreme Court rode to his rescue) so they “had to do something. Anything is better than nothing”. The absurdity doesn’t stop there. It’s become clear that Trump’s one consistency – his daily practice of alienating anyone and everyone who isn’t likely to be in his “base” – is his one big idea as to how to run a country. As I write, it’s said that around 38% of the population “approves” of Trump. It’s a disturbingly high number and, Trump calculates, it might just be enough to get him re-elected in 2020. The “base” has picked the captain of their team and they’re going to stay with him. The more the “liberals” and the “losers” dislike their man, the more they’ll cheer him on. Trump wants to provoke ignorance and disunity. So, it is that, faced with a reporter’s question, the Trump surrogates blame Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Clinton epitomises the patronising “politically correct”, the urban “elites” forever telling other people what to think and what to do. That’s why they wanted to lock her up. And Obama? What’s wrong with him? Well, let’s give that one a nod and a wink. Is your insurance premium going up? It’s Clinton’s fault. Is that heat wave uncomfortable? That was Obama’s doing. It’s absurd and it’s the only thing to say. Logical, coherent discourse would discredit the Trumpians for ever. When “the base” find that they’ve lost the modest gains of the Obama’s Affordable Care Act, that’ll be Obama’s greatest fault yet. Trump looks for the opportunity to insult conventional allies, most of whom remind him of the Clinton/Obama type. He wanted the world to know he doesn’t care for Malcolm Turnbull or Angela Merkel or the mourning Mayor of London, but he would be “honoured” to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Other kindred souls are the King of Saudi Arabia, the autocrats in Turkey and the Philippines – and of course the crook Vladimir Putin. It’s weirdly undignified. Autocracy & Exceptionalism The quality Trump admires is the Big Man autocracy, the unrestrained alpha males, and he’s been trying to emulate them by undermining restraints on such behaviour that are expressed in the US through the Constitution and the rule of law. Trump has been attacking the institutions that guarantee a certain civility – except for the Supreme Court, which he needs to enlist as an ally in the cause of reaction. This tendency has been a factor in the Trumpian disdain for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), previously the one sacred aspect of all US Administrations. He sees NATO as a rival to his unchecked ambition, a possible wimpy restraint. But despite the dismay that his remarks on the subject provoked in polite Washington, Trump’s “America First” stance is consistent with a long tradition in the US of standing aloof from, for instance, international courts of law. All US leaders profess a belief in “American Exceptionalism”, a doctrine that means what the phrase implies: America doesn’t need to play by the rules that bind everyone else. America is uniquely powerful and uniquely virtuous. They all – Trump, Clinton, Obama - really do believe this. Trump’s apparent foreign and war policy is tangled in a comparable contradiction. He started with the attitude that he wouldn’t do “nation building” and get involved in messes like Afghanistan and Iraq. This was probably motivated in part by the wish to distinguish himself from Obama and Clinton. Their on-again-off-again wars were too feeble. They made America a laughing stock. If Trump goes to war, it will be with all guns blazing. Staying away from the messy foreigners is a strain in US history consistent with American Exceptionalism, and when World War 2 broke out, the doctrine of “isolationism” was a handy pretext for pro-Nazi senators to campaign for American neutrality. Trump might well not know of this background but he shares the instincts of the isolationists. He sees his inconsistencies as keeping his options open and the rest of the world guessing. Look at me, me, me, me. Have I got a deal for you? Trust me. But would anyone who has paid the remotest attention to the news from Trumpland expect him to maintain a disciplined and nuanced approach to the Middle East or North Korea – or anywhere? He might say he wants no more foreign wars but in a moment a tweet or an alternative fact might trigger his missiles. The one sure thing is that the White House’s relations with friend and foe will be erratic. Declaring War On The Planet The strongest Trump obsession might be his declaration of war on the planet itself. When he withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, the President was obeying the demands of the coal industry and the Koch brothers, but he was also mindful of the “base”, some of whom are miners in the states that gave him his election win. But with Trump the petty and the personal is never far away and he might have rejected the evidence of science even without the brothers to egg him on. What better way for America to stand apart from every other country than this contempt for civilised norms? For Trump coal miners are good old boys, the antithesis of the urban “liberal elites”. Coal jobs are, in fact, disappearing as production becomes automated and entrepreneurs begin to see that clean energy is already providing more work at a lower cost than is coal. Trump says he is championing miners but a responsible leader would see that they need retraining for alternative work. He’s doing them no favours but, before they’re abandoned into permanent unemployment, miners might, in the short term, give him enough votes to get re-elected. There is one Trumpian theme that ostensibly makes sense. He says he wants a massive – and long overdue - increase in spending on infrastructure. But, as always, the motives for the policy will be opaque. Expect a huge transfer of wealth and tax resources from the public to corporate interests. Profit extraction will always outrank social need. A conventional President might have started his term with infrastructure, a theme with the potential to be unifying and positive. It could have bought him a measure of good will. But that, as we’ve seen, is not where he wants to go. He wants to be divisive; he can’t rein in his impulsive and petulant ego. If the crisis isn’t military or social it could be financial. Trump wants to transfer yet more wealth to the billionaires, to whom he’s promising a tax cut, always and falsely justified on the grounds it will spur growth. His assault on the people’s health is motivated as much by this as it is by the wish to lavish favour on Big Pharma. If it becomes law, Trumpcare will snatch over $US300,000,000,000 from the public realm. Then – inevitably - there’s the military, who are to get a huge spendup. And the wall… The only possible result will be a steep rise in the federal deficit as Washington weeps crocodile tears that, sorry, we’ve run out of money. Nothing can be done. Among those most severely impacted will be “the base”. Non-Members:
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