Trump In The White House Absolutely Predicts A Recession-- The Question Is Just How Soon

The Obama administration worked hard to turn the economy around after Trump inherited an economy that would have been a dream for any president. He immediately set out to sabotage it and, unfortunately, his policies are finally kicking in strongly enough to wreck everything that Obama did to right the economy Bush left him-- and us. But before we get into Trump's disastrous policies, one little note: his utter and complete lack of leadership abilities are working hand in hand with bad policy to bring down the economy. Take this insane tweet from yesterday announcing that the Treasury Department had slapped additional sanctions on North Korea and that just hours later Trump was countermanding them. How does something like that even happen? Was there a gnome working at Treasury and doing whatever he wanted to do with no supervision?

Worse yet, Trump announced that he is nominating another entirely unfit ideologue to a position where he will undoubtably harm everything he touches. Trumponomics author Stephen Moore, like Trump, a harsh critic of Trump-appointed Fed chair Jerome Powell, will soon be serving on the Fed. "Moore’s primary area of pseudo-expertise-- he is not an economist-- is fiscal policy," wrote Jonathan Chait. "He is a dedicated advocate of supply-side economics, relentlessly promoting his fanatical hatred of redistribution and belief that lower taxes for the rich can and will unleash wondrous prosperity. Like nearly all supply-siders, he has clung to this dogma in the face of repeated, spectacular failures."

OK, tuck all that away for a moment while we consider two dire reports from Bloomberg News Friday morning, on just after sunrise and one at 11AM. First was the announcement of a curve inversion, an event that usually signals a recession is on the horizon.

The Treasury yield curve inverted for the first time since the last crisis Friday, triggering the first reliable market signal of an impending recession and rate-cutting cycle.

The gap between the three-month and 10-year yields vanished as a surge of buying pushed the latter to a 14-month low of 2.416 percent. Inversion is considered a reliable harbinger of recession in the U.S., within roughly the next 18 months.

Demand for government bonds gained momentum Wednesday, when U.S. central bank policy makers lowered both their growth projections and their interest-rate outlook. The majority of officials now envisages no hikes this year, down from a median call of two at their December meeting. Traders took that dovish shift as their cue to dig into positions for a Fed easing cycle, pricing in a cut by the end of 2020 and a one-in-two chance of a reduction as soon as this year.

“It looks like the global slowdown worries have been confirmed and the market is beginning to price in Fed easing, potential recession down the road,” said Kathy Jones, chief fixed-income strategist at Charles Schwab & Co. “It’s clearly a sign that the market is worried about growth and moving into Treasuries from riskier asset classes.”

Too abstract? How about U.S. Posts Largest-Ever Monthly Budget Deficit in February? Will Trump call a market crash "fake news?" Largest monthly budget deficit ever-- key word "ever"-- seem like a big deal, no? And that duet deficit is obviously a result, at least in part, of falling tax revenues because of the catastrophic GOP tax bill of last year, and increased spending as Trump attempts, entirely unsuccessfully, to buy his way into some kind of popularity.

The budget gap widened to $234 billion in February, compared with a fiscal gap of $215.2 billion a year earlier. That gap surpassed the previous monthly record of $231.7 billion set seven years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

February’s shortfall helped push the deficit for the first five months of the government’s fiscal year to $544.2 billion, up almost 40 percent from the same period the previous year, the Treasury Department said in its monthly budget report Friday. The release was delayed a week by the government shutdown earlier this year.

Receipts dipped less than 1 percent to $1.3 trillion in the October-February period from the previous year, while spending accelerated 9 percent to $1.8 trillion.

The fiscal shortfall is widening following President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax-cuts package that’s weighing on receipts and raising concerns about the national debt load, which topped a record $22 trillion last month.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell reiterated his concern over the government deficit in a press conference Wednesday, saying that the nation’s growing debt pile needs to be addressed. At the same time, there’s a shift among some economists-- led by proponents of Modern Monetary Theory-- on the dangers of a growing deficit, with low inflation and cheap borrowing costs suggesting there’s room for additional spending.

The Treasury data show tax receipts declined for both corporations and individuals in the five-month period, while revenue from customs duties almost doubled, boosted by income from tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

The 2017 tax law slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Corporations have so far this fiscal year paid $59.2 billion, compared to $73.5 billion in 2018, when the tax law was only partially in effect for some corporations. In 2017, however, the year before the law was enacted, corporations had paid $87.4 billion at this point in the year.

Individual income tax receipts dropped slightly from this point last year, but have risen compared to some years before the tax law. Despite the law cutting tax rates for most people, rising wages and lower unemployment have spurred higher tax revenue.

Now think again about Trump's newest appointment to the Fed. "Stephen Moore’s career as an economic analyst has been a decades-long continuous procession of error and hackery. It is not despite but precisely because of these errors that Moore now finds himself in the astonishing position of having been offered a position on the Federal Reserve board by President Trump," was how Chait put it. "[F]or all their extravagant ignorance, Moore’s beliefs on fiscal policy are actually more sophisticated and well-developed than his views on monetary policy. It is the latter that he would be in a position to influence as a Federal Reserve governor... While the internal workings of his mind remain a matter of speculation, I doubt he is consciously venal enough to tailor his thinking explicitly to partisan goals. Rather, Moore has extremely strong partisan instincts and extremely limited analytical skills. The combination results inevitably in the latter giving way to the former. He should not be permitted any position of serious responsibility, in government or anything else."

Normally I Ignore Warnings Of Trump's Reelection-- But Not When Thomas Frank And Alan Grayson Are Doing The Warning

I doubt there’s anyone who reads DWT who would disagree with Thomas Frank’s description of Señor Trumpanzee in his new essay for Harper’s, Four More Years— The Trump reelection nightmare and how we can stop it. The part we all agree with: “He is deeply unpopular, the biggest buffoon any of us has ever seen in the White House. He manages to disgrace the office nearly every single day. He insults our intelligence with his blustering rhetoric. He endorses racial stereotypes and makes common cause with bigots. He has succeeded in offending countless foreign governments. He has no idea what a president is supposed to be or do and (perhaps luckily) he has no clue how to govern. Of the handful of things he has actually managed to achieve, nearly all are toxic.” But here’s where he wades in to contentious waters:

[I]magine his disastrous rule reaffirmed by an enthusiastic public, giving him four more years to insult and offend and enact even more poisonous measures. Reader, it could happen. We know it could happen because it has happened before. Widely despised presidents get themselves reelected all the time. Men who are regarded as incompetent, callow, senile, or racist sail back into office, and are even canonized as heroic figures once they retreat into the postpresidential sunset, clearing brush or painting oil portraits.

…[I]magine him, Dubya-like, vowing vengeance after a terrorist attack on American soil. He picks a fight with some annoying but unrelated nation, the news media rallies around him (he has finally achieved maturity as chief executive, they say), and once victory is certain, Trump lands a jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier in a cleverly tailored flight suit: mission accomplished.

…His election in 2016 was little more than an obscene gesture by an angry public using the candidate as its instrument. While the populace seems to be losing patience with such symbolism-- at least to judge from Trump’s lousy approval ratings-- the man himself shows little inclination to transcend the role that got him elected. How could the nation possibly return him to Washington for a second term?

…[I]magine Donald Trump’s path to reelection. We take for granted (perhaps incorrectly) that he wants to be reelected, that the job amuses or excites him enough that he desires to stay in the White House. We further assume that he is not impeached, that he does not maneuver the country into a disastrous war, that he does not stage (or fall victim to) a military coup, and that he goes about campaigning for reelection by all the standard methods available to an American politician. And that he wins. Again.

For the best idea of how such a scenario might unfold, we need only look back to the late Nineties, when things were good and America was happy with its rascally chief executive, Bill Clinton. Throughout the second term of his presidency, Clinton’s approval ratings hovered near the 60 percent mark, occasionally spiking up toward 70 percent. These nosebleed numbers, remember, occurred after the president was caught in his dalliance with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky and as the House of Representatives was actually in the process of impeaching him. The irony of it all was lost on no one: self-righteous politicians hated Bill Clinton, but the American public loved the jolly horndog in the Oval Office.

…Still, there was something else about the late-Nineties boom, something real, something that accounted for Clinton’s popularity: wages for ordinary workers actually rose during those years. Unemployment was so low for so long during the Clinton era that employers briefly found themselves competing for workers rather than dismissing their entreaties. Indeed, the late Nineties were the only sustained period since the early Seventies when wages for ordinary workers went up in real terms. Hence the flavor of universal prosperity that still seems to envelop the Clinton boom in the public mind.

No, the boom didn’t last. And no, it wasn’t really Clinton’s doing. Joseph Stiglitz, the chairman of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, has described the policy decisions that preceded the roaring economy of the late Nineties as a series of “lucky mistakes.” Clinton’s team, in Stiglitz’s telling, made wrong move after wrong move-- chasing a balanced budget, deregulating banks-- but by chance, things worked out for them. The day after he was elected in 1992, Clinton said he would “focus like a laser beam on this economy,” and lo and behold, he seemed to deliver. The cult of Clinton was born.

That is the prelude to today.

…[A]s everyone knows, Trump cannot rightfully claim credit for the long, slow march back to prosperity after the 2008 recession. He took over only a little more than a year ago, and besides, you don’t get unemployment down by picking fights with NFL players or inveighing against a phantasmal immigrant crime wave.

That Trump has no right to the glory of the current boom doesn’t stop him from grabbing it, however. Declaring that the robust economy had made him “unbeatable” for reelection, Trump mused in December that his slogan for 2020 might be, “How is your 401(k) doing?” As I write this, unemployment is at its lowest level since 2000, and one of its lowest levels ever. People who left the workforce in despair during the recent recession appear to be rejoining it. Consumer confidence is high. The economy is running at what the Wall Street Journal calls its “full potential,” meaning that actual output is slightly higher than theoretical estimates of maximum possible output. Share prices are high, too, even after a jolting market correction in early February.

But stock ownership-- even when it’s done via Trump’s vaunted 401(k)'s-- is hardly the optimal vehicle for putting money into the hands of ordinary people. That would be improved wages, which we saw briefly in the late Nineties and frequently in the years before 1973. These days, however, flat or sinking wages are a standard feature of Western economies: with unions weak and an arsenal of wage-suppression techniques in the hands of management, business booms have for many years been confined to shareholders only.

Here’s where our story takes a curious turn. Trump, for all his ignorance, seems to be aware of this. Wage stagnation, a grievance usually associated with leftish economists and AFL-CIO types, was one of the big talking points for both candidates during the 2016 campaign. It was also the focus of one of Trump’s great boasts. Under his presidency, he pledged, “Prosperity will rise, poverty will recede, and wages will finally begin to grow, and they will grow rapidly.” As with most Trumpian utterances, this was probably just so much bullshit. Empty syllables, vigorously pronounced, signifying nothing. After all, the people who would pay those higher wages would be Trump’s billionaire pals, the same people he’s appointed to his Cabinet and showered with tax cuts. Higher wages would mean companies forgoing big CEO paydays and special dividends for shareholders and all that tycoon-pleasing stuff. And the obvious and direct things that government can do to help working people-- raise the minimum wage or make it easier for workers to join unions-- are off the table with Republicans in charge of Congress.

Trump might get his wage growth anyway. Right now the labor market is so tight that Walmart, a company famous for taking a hard line on employee pay, felt it had to increase its starting wage from $9 an hour to $11. (Republicans immediately took credit for this development, of course.) A story in the New York Times in January pointed out that employers in Wisconsin were so desperate to find workers that they were hiring convicted criminals while they were still in prison. Data showing an uptick in wages was sufficiently convincing to cause a sharp correction in stock prices in February.

What these news items suggest is that given where we are now, it won’t take much to make this economy work for ordinary people. Or appear to work, anyway. Even a small stimulus would do it. Donald Trump quite likely understands this, along with the connection between wage growth and Bill Clinton’s route to presidential popularity. Even with a loutish Republican Congress, there are plenty of things he might do to make this economy into a good one for ordinary working people-- meaning just good enough, for just long enough, to get himself reelected. I suspect that we will soon see proposals of exactly this kind.

The obvious stimulus Trump might propose is his famous trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, of which he made so much on the campaign trail and which he dusted off for his State of the Union speech in January. Let’s assume that the version of the infrastructure plan he proposes is the one that dumps about 80 percent of the financing onto state and local governments and the private sector. This is far from the best way to rebuild a country’s infrastructure, of course, but it would certainly have a positive (if temporary) effect on wages somewhere down the line. Should such a plan be implemented, according to the infrastructure expert Michael Likosky, “We’re going to see a labor shortage, and we’re going to have a higher rate of productivity.” Which guarantees one other thing: “Wages will go up.”

Smaller stimulus efforts might also do the trick. In Nixonland, a celebrated history of the Vietnam era, Rick Perlstein recalls how the Nixon Administration tried to improve the economy for the 1972 political season by boosting federal spending in large but noncontroversial ways. (There was, for example, the “two-year supply of toilet paper bought in one shot by the Defense Department.”)

We might also see smaller, localized infrastructure programs with relatively picayune price tags but outsized political potential. Take the various plans that are currently under way to fix the poisoned water supply of Flint, a city in the critical swing state of Michigan that for decades has been synonymous with the suffering of both the black and the white working class-- hugely important voting blocs. Just imagine the effect, as one leading Democratic politician conjectured to me, were the Trump Administration to increase those efforts in a massive way, causing an army of well-paid pipe fitters to descend on central Michigan.

The president’s team could easily dream up similar mini–New Deal schemes for other deindustrialized locales in the Midwestern states that are now the key to the presidency. Not only would such proposals attract Democratic votes in Congress (hey, bipartisanship!), they would also do much to counter Trump’s racist reputation-- a key consideration for someone who intends to win elections in a country that grows less white every year.

Then there is free trade. Back in 2016, when Candidate Trump visited Flint, he made a caustic remark about the city’s misfortunes: “It used to be that cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. And now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.” Trump blamed this reversal on NAFTA, the original neoliberal economic deal and one of his favorite rhetorical targets on the campaign trail.

Trump seemed vaguely to understand that trade agreements were connected to wage stagnation. (“My trade reforms will raise wages, grow jobs, add trillions in new wealth into our country,” he said in a speech in Ohio in 2016.) He may or may not have understood that whatever the details of such agreements, they often furnish employers with a weapon they can wave at working-class communities: the threat of shipping jobs overseas. Indeed, as the economy has heated up, American companies have been sending jobs offshore at an ever more rapid pace.

What if Trump were to actively discourage that tactic, or strike some largely symbolic blow against it, or merely bad-mouth it? As it happens, NAFTA is being renegotiated, and we may well see Trump use those negotiations to do one or more of these things. The president, always a fan of burning down the village in order to save it, is currently threatening to scuttle the whole agreement: “A lot of people don’t realize how good it would be to terminate NAFTA, because the way you’re going to make the best deal is to terminate NAFTA.” But even if NAFTA is mostly reaffirmed in the end, Trump could use the negotiations to dissuade employers from offshoring jobs-- or he could single out some random company and hit it with substantial fines for doing so. That, too, could change the wage equation. Again: it wouldn’t take much, given a business climate like the present, to have some effect.

…Trump might do nothing at all and still get the wage growth he needs for a second term. His luck could turn out to be even better than Clinton’s. After all, the forces that are causing the economy to run in high gear were set in motion years ago by Barack Obama and Janet Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve. Should matters continue along this course for very much longer, Trump might be able to deliver on his promises. As I was told by Josh Bivens, an economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, “If we stick at this level of unemployment for a couple of years, you will start to see some decent wage growth.”

Of course, the Fed could decide somewhere down the line that wage growth implies inflation and that interest rates must be raised-- which is, incidentally, the desired course of traditional conservatives. But in the short term, that seems unlikely. Yellen, like her predecessors Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, preferred to let the economic locomotive gather speed, and when Trump nominated Jerome Powell to succeed her in November, he pointedly chose a pro-growth Yellenite instead of a conventional inflation hawk.

Some of the potential Trumpery I have just described might have real effects. Other measures would deliver a fleeting sugar high. Still others would have no impact at all, aside from appearances. But any single one of them might just be sufficient to produce the deadly phenomenon we know as Trump’s reelection, while knitting together the new, faux-proletarian Republican Party that Steve Bannon used to fantasize about, the one he dreamed would “govern for a hundred years.”

Before you close this magazine, chuckle cynically, and take a sip of gin, think for a second about the cultural and political delusions a roaring economy and rising wages would surely generate-- just as the tech mania of the late Nineties did, and just as the bull market of the Eighties did. Perhaps Donald Trump, elevated to the presidency in 2016 as an act of protest by what he called the “forgotten men and women of our country,” will actually appear to come through for them. Like Bill Clinton with his laserlike economic focus, Trump will seem to have delivered on what he promised: an economy that finally looks good for his supporters. For once, they will conclude, politics worked.

…Now let’s examine a different scenario. It’s 1974, and inflation is out of control. Gasoline is so expensive that the economy is being injured. The president, who lives to inflame society’s divisions, is obviously a crook, and the denials mouthed by his dwindling band of defenders convince nobody. And so a new generation of Democrats is elected to Congress in enormous numbers.

To bring this scenario up to date, let’s imagine that Robert Mueller or some other investigator is quickly closing in on Trump with heaps of undeniable evidence. The Dow has stopped ascending, and wages have gone nowhere. More factories have rusted out. More newspapers are dead. More small towns have deteriorated, and opioids and meth are cutting even greater swaths across the hinterland. The president has achieved nothing except deregulation for polluters, angry alienation for every ethnic group in the United States, and tax cuts for the rich. No one believes a word Trump says, and the American carnage mounts in great heaps of ruined lives.

Trainwreck by Nancy Ohanian

In such a scenario, every bit as likely as the ones mentioned above, it seems like a cinch: Democrats will easily sweep this preposterous man and his dysfunctional, divisive party into the gutter. Besides, what will Trump promise us in 2020, when nothing has improved for ordinary people? That he still means to “drain the swamp,” after essentially bathing in it for the previous four years? That he’ll need just one more term to revive the faltering coal industry? That he’ll Make America Even Greater Again?

Given such a setup, it might seem like a simple matter for the Democrats to defeat Trump’s Republicans. The enthusiasm is certainly on their side. The liberal rank and file are more energized than they have been for years. Political novices are signing up to run for office across the country. Democrats are well ahead in nearly any poll you care to mention. But still, I give them only a fair-to-middling chance of ultimately defeating him.

Why? Because you go into political combat with the party you have, not the party you wish you had. And the Democratic Party we have today is not particularly well suited to the essential task of beating Donald Trump.

It is true that the Democrats’ fighting instincts have been aroused by the ascendancy of Trump, and this is a healthy thing. Fewer and fewer American liberals worship at the shrine of bipartisanship, as they have done for most of the past few decades. Instead, they are outraged. They are horrified at what has happened. Descriptions of Republican misgovernance that were formerly considered extreme are now taken for granted. That a quality person like Hillary Clinton, who prepared to be president all her life, should be bested by this vulgar, racist ignoramus-- it is unthinkable. It is unacceptable.

I understand this reaction. I have felt it myself. But it has led the Democrats into a trap familiar to anyone with experience of left-wing politics: the party’s own high regard for itself has come to eclipse every other concern. Among the authorized opinion leaders of liberalism, for example, the task of deploring and denouncing the would-be dictator has crowded out the equally important task of assessing where the Democratic Party went wrong. Indeed, the two projects appear to them to be contradictory-- they find it impossible to flagellate Trump one day and examine themselves the next. Of the two, it is introspection that must hit the bricks. And it is uncompromising moral stridor that has come to dominate the opinion pages and the airwaves of the enlightened-- a continuous outpouring of agony and aghastitude at Trump and his works.

This is unfortunate, because what happened in 2016 deserves to be taken seriously. This country of 320 million people was swept by a tidal wave of populist rage. Alongside the ugly eruption of bigotry there swirled perfectly natural concerns about deindustrialization, oligarchy, the power of big banks, bad trade deals, and the long-term abandonment of working-class concerns by the Democrats. I am condensing many strands here, of course, but what is important is that for all its awfulness, there were elements of the 2016 revolt that liberals ought to heed.

But most leading Democrats can’t seem to see any of that. They don’t know what to make of Trump and his supporters, so violently does Trumpism transgress the professional norms to which they are accustomed. It is distasteful to them that they should be required to learn anything from a clown like the current president-- that they should have to change in any way to accommodate his preposterous views. And so they cast about for leaders who might allow them to prevail without doing anything differently: a celebrity who might communicate better, a politician who might turn out the base more effectively. They devour articles about Trump voters who have had a change of heart and now beg forgiveness for their sins. They chide other liberals whom they regard as insufficiently enthusiastic about the Democratic Party. Above all, they dream of a deus ex machina, a super-prosecutor who will bring down justice like fire and reverse the unfortunate results of 2016 without anyone having to change their talking points in the slightest.

The price of going down this path is that it encourages passivity and delusions of righteousness. Their job, Democrats think, is to wait for Trump to be led out of the Oval Office in flex-cuffs while they stand by anathematizing him and his supporters. They don’t need to convince anyone. They need only let their virtue shine bright for all to see.

Now, this is a morally satisfying position, and it might even work. Maybe some prosecutor has really and truly got the goods on this scoundrel. Maybe the outpouring of anti-Trump feeling will suffice to defeat him: being against him may be all that voters require from a candidate in the midterm congressional contests.

On the other hand, in the vast catalogue of social posturing, there are few more repugnant sights than rich people congratulating themselves for being righteous. In particular, it is a terrible way to win back the blue-collar white voters who were responsible, even more than were the Russians, for Trump’s win. For insight into the thinking of this cohort, I turned to Working America, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, which canvasses working-class neighborhoods around the country. Karen Nussbaum, the organization’s executive director, was blunt about it: “If Democrats just want to keep piling on Trump, that will be the way to get Trump reelected.” Resisting the president’s agenda is important, of course, but when Working America canvassers knock on doors, she added, they never point the finger at Trump voters. “We don’t say, ‘Aren’t you sorry you voted for him?’ That’s the last thing you should talk about with them.”

The real concerns of these voters, Nussbaum told me, are such bedrock matters as jobs, wages, schools, Social Security-- the very things Trump made such a loud display of pretending to care about in 2016. The Democrats, of course, did their pretending in the other direction that year. They identified themselves with globalization, with trade agreements, with Silicon Valley, addressing the public as complacent representatives of this triumphant economic order. It was an old line of patter, the philosophy of the Nineties, reiterated mechanically at a time when no one believed it anymore

. Yes, the Democrats also promised to “break barriers” so that the talented could rise regardless of race or gender. The system itself, however, was judged to be in excellent health. As President Obama put it just before the election, “The economic progress we’re making is undeniable.” Or, as Hillary Clinton liked to say, “America never stopped being great.”

It was exactly the wrong message for an enormous part of the population. Stanley Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster who understood the Trump phenomenon better than many others, told me recently that the Democrats’ mistake was “selling progress at a time of growing, record inequality, stark pain, and financial struggle.” Even when the Democrats could see the obvious shortcomings of such an approach, they felt they couldn’t change. “How do I talk about their pain without sounding like I’m criticizing President Obama and his economy?” Hillary Clinton asked Greenberg during the campaign, according to a 2017 essay he wrote for the American Prospect. “I just can’t do that.”

That dilemma persists to this day. How do Democrats change course without sounding like they’re criticizing Obama or the Clintons-- or, by extension, the neoliberal fantasy that has sustained the party since the Nineties? The answer is that they can’t, and so they don’t. They would rather sit back and expect Robert Mueller to rescue them. They would rather count on demographic change to give them a majority somewhere down the road. So they “do nothing and wait for the other side to implode,” observed Bill Curry, a former adviser to President Clinton who has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s strongest internal critics. “That’s been their strategy for most of my adult life. Well, how’s that been working out?”

Curry continued his critique. The party, he said, desperately needs to get over its infatuation with its glorious past: “The mistakes of the Democratic Party are the mistakes of Obama and Clinton. Taking responsibility for those mistakes means holding them accountable. And so many people have such deep, positive feelings for Obama and the Clintons that they can’t bear to have that conversation.” His conclusion was as blunt as what I heard from so many others: “Trump wins by the Democrats not changing.”

This sounds dreadful to me, but I suspect that for a lot of prosperous liberals, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. For them, there’s an alternative to political victory: a utopia of scolding. Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the rightful social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold, and scold. That’s their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some deplorable’s face, forever.

I paint a gloomy picture here, I admit. If the economy zooms, I have conjectured, Donald Trump has a good chance of being reelected. If economic conditions don’t change and Democrats play out their strategy of indignant professional-class self-admiration, they have only a fair chance of chasing him out of office-- after which they will undoubtedly be surprised by some new and even more abrasive iteration of right-wing populism.

What I want to focus on now is how right-wing populism can be defeated more or less permanently. Donald Trump will never seem like a natural or inevitable president to me--  not merely because he is a cad with a cantilevered comb-over but because right-wing populism is itself a freakish historical anomaly. Yes, I know, it has been running strong for decades. By its very nature, however, it is a put-on, a volatile substance, riven with contradictions: it rails against elites while cutting taxes for the rich; it pretends to love the common people while insulting certain people for being a little too common; it worships the workingman while steadily worsening his conditions.

Nor can I reconcile myself to the sort of prosperous, pious liberalism that predominates nowadays, a nice suburban politics that finds it easy to love Google and Goldman but can be downright contemptuous toward the desperate middle class that liberalism was born to serve. To my eye, the passionless technocrats it has repeatedly chosen as its leaders seem as unnatural as Trump himself.

But maybe that’s just me, still dazed by what happened on Election Night in 2016. Nothing in politics seems right anymore. I keep assuming that a society plumbing the depths of inequality ought to be a society turning to the left-- that a populist moment ought to be a Democratic moment-- that the natural agent of public discontent ought to be the more liberal of the two parties. That one fine day we will give the TV set a smack, everything will snap back into focus, and Americans will clearly understand what a mountebank Trump is. That in January 2021, they will eject him from the White House in disgrace-- a Herbert Hoover with a spray-on tan, a scowling mistake we will never make again.

What might Democrats do to bring that about? A while back, I used to write earnest essays exhorting President Obama to do this thing and that during his final years in power. Enforce antitrust! Prosecute financial fraud! Today, however, the party has no national power to demonstrate its solicitude for the crumbling middle class. Republicans have pretty much captured it all.

What is left to liberals today is positioning and public declaration. They must do the obvious, of course: find a way to capitalize on the incredible political blunders Trump has made, pointlessly disparaging almost every possible demographic. “He is pissing people off at such an accelerated rate,” marveled Keith Ellison, the representative from Minnesota who serves these days as the deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee. As ugly as Trump’s ravings may be, they can’t help but mobilize the Democratic base.

Getting those voters out is the tactical challenge. The larger, strategic question has to do with the Democratic Party’s identity. Does it accept the Republicans’ invitation to continue on as it has before, making itself more and more into an expression of professional-class disdain? Friend to the enlightened financier, careful curator of the silicon millennium? Or do the Democrats rediscover their roots as the tribune of blue-collar America? For me, the answer has never been more obvious. For others as well. “Sit with some folks who work for a living” is Ellison’s prescription. “Ask them what they want. And you’ll win.”

In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt set down his vision of American political history, in which two “schools of political belief,” liberals and conservatives, fought endlessly for primacy. Regardless of what it was called at any particular moment, he wrote, the liberal party “believed in the wisdom and efficacy of the will of the great majority of the people, as distinguished from the judgment of a small minority of either education or wealth.”

What Roosevelt did not foresee was a party system in which the divide fell not between the few and the many but between the small minority of education and the small minority of wealth. How could he have known that his great majority would be split in two and offered a choice between enlightened technocrats on the one side and resentful billionaires on the other?

Get that great majority back together, I think, and it would be unstoppable. There is really only one set of successful politics for an age of inequality like this one, and it naturally favors the party of Roosevelt. Trump succeeded by pretending to be the heir of populists past, acting the role of a rough-hewn reformer who detested the powerful and cared about working-class people. Now it is the turn of Democrats to take it back from him. They may have to fire their consultants. They may have to stand up to their donors. They will certainly have to find the courage to change, to dump the ideology of the Nineties, the catechism of tech, bank, and globe that everyone now knows is nothing but an excuse for an out-of-touch elite. But the time has come. History is calling.

I haven’t met any political leaders as determined to impeach Trump as Alan Grayson is. Over the weekend he wrote to his supporters that “There's something happening in this country right now. You must have noticed it. Every day, inequality is soaring. Social Security checks are worth less and less. The minimum wage is stuck at $7.25. America is the only advanced country without paid sick leave and paid vacations. Thirty million of us still can't see a doctor when we are sick. College education is hopelessly expensive. The yoke of discrimination still weighs heavy on so many necks. And the law itself is up for sale to the highest bidder. Someone has to fight back. And that ‘someone’ is me.”

My grandfather survived the Great Depression by going to the dump each day and finding something that he could sell. I worked my way through Harvard by cleaning toilets, and then as a night watchman on the midnight shift. I know what it's like to struggle; very few of today's candidates and elected officials do. That's why I fight so hard to improve the lives of ordinary people.

When I returned to Congress in 2013, many Democrats were dispirited and defeatist. But during the 113th Congress, I wrote more bills than any other Member of the House of Representatives, passed more amendments on the Floor than any other Democrat, and had more of my bills signed into law than any other Member of the House, Democratic or Republican. The amendments I successfully passed through the U.S. House of Representatives have sought to transfer millions of dollars from military operations to medical research, increase bilingual housing counseling by 50%, restore almost half of the proposed cuts to HUD's Housing for the Elderly Program, protect our privacy, and eliminate federal contracts for contractors who have cheated the government.

Salon magazine called me the most effective Member of Congress. Business Insider gave me the title "most productive Member.” And Time magazine dubbed me a stand-out Member in a do-nothing Congress.

What I've shown is very simple: That progressive Democrats can fight-- and win! That's leadership.

What you've shown is that you're ready take back our country from the billionaires and bigots. That's revolutionary. Are you ready to rumble?

But Reince... We Hardly Knew Ye

Yesterday, the Washington Post published what everyone in DC is thinking, namely that "Trump enters week seven of his presidency the same as the six before it: enmeshed in controversy while struggling to make good on his campaign promises. At a time when the White House had sought to ride the momentum from Trump’s speech to Congress and begin advancing its agenda on Capitol Hill, the administration finds itself beset yet again by disorder and suspicion. At the center of the turmoil is an impatient president increasingly frustrated by his administration’s inability to erase the impression that his campaign was engaged with Russia, to stem leaks about both national security matters and internal discord and to implement any signature achievements... That angst over what many in the White House call the 'deep state' is fermenting daily, fueled by rumors and tidbits picked up by Trump allies within the intelligence community and by unconfirmed allegations that have been made by right-wing commentators. The 'deep state' is a phrase popular on the right for describing entrenched networks hostile to Trump." Funny, I always thought the Deep State described entrenched networks hostile to progressives and to anyone fighting against what Trump stands for.



And Bannon and his faction, now clearly dominant in the White House, are making certain all the blame for the chaos and disorder falls on the hapless Reince Priebus, a kind of Insider who's an outsider among the neo-Nazi true-believers surrounding and manipulating Trump. Friday morning's Trump meltdown over Jeff Sessions recusing himself has everyone buzzing that someone's going to be fired. Alex Isenstadt is always a good source for well-sourced Beltway gossip and he wrote yesterday that "With the White House struggling to gain its footing almost two months into Donald Trump's presidency, administration officials are increasingly putting the blame on one person: Reince Priebus."

Isenstadt's sources all blame poor Reince, an ally of the hated Paul Ryan, who White House sources describe disdainfully as "a micro-manager who sprints from one West Wing meeting to another, inserting himself into conversations big and small and leaving many staffers feeling as if he’s trying to block their access to Trump. They vented about his determination to fill the administration with his political allies. And they expressed alarm at what they say are directionless morning staff meetings Priebus oversees that could otherwise be used to rigorously set the day’s agenda and counterbalance the president’s own unpredictability. The finger-pointing further complicates life in an already turmoil-filled West Wing, one that has been hobbled by dueling power centers and unclear lines of command." Trump is said to be unhappy that Priebus tries to keep Putin stooges like Corey Lewandowski away from the White House-- for Trump's own good-- and the so-called president goes out of his way to circumvent his chief of staff and invite the Putin squad in for secret meetings that Priebus doesn't get asked to sit in on.

“There’s a real frustration among many-- including from the president-- that things aren’t going as smoothly as one had hoped,” said one senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “Reince, fairly or not, is likely to take the blame and take the fault for that.”

"It’s sheer incompetence,” said another White House official. “There’s a lack of management, and a lack of strategy."

The White House vigorously disputed the notion that Priebus is losing the confidence of senior West Wing staff. Senior officials say the president respects the chief of staff for his deep relationships on Capitol Hill, and that no staff shakeup is expected in the immediate future.

...It is unfair to finger Priebus alone for the administration’s missteps. Much of the fault can be assigned to the president himself-- a notoriously unpredictable figure who relishes drama. Priebus himself has been caught off guard by a number of controversies-- the latest on Saturday, when he awoke to a series of Trump tweets, some of which accused former President Barack Obama, without evidence, of wiretapping Trump Tower phone lines.

The staff scrambled throughout the day to craft a statement that didn’t anger the president but also didn’t create any further headaches. Priebus has frequently lamented that he can’t control the president’s comments and spends much of his time in damage-control mode.

And despite the scrutiny focused on him, Priebus has won credit inside the White House for helping to engineer the rollout of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and playing a central role in overseeing Trump’s well-received congressional address last week.

The focus on Priebus comes at a time of growing distress for the president, who has taken to asking Cabinet members and White House officials for their thoughts on how his chief of staff is performing. Priebus did not accompany Trump on a trip this weekend to Florida, an absence that left many wondering whether Trump, who complained loudly to top aides during a tense Oval Office meeting on Friday over how things in his White House were going, had put his chief of staff in the doghouse.

Some contended that, in such a free-wheeling atmosphere, Priebus has struggled to provide structure. Several aides expressed unhappiness with the daily 8 a.m. senior staff meeting that he runs out of his office. With three flat-screen TVs usually on, the agenda is sometimes driven by that day’s news programs. The gatherings, which often last only 15 to 20 minutes, are typically organized round-robin style, with department heads giving 30-second updates on whatever it is they’re working on.

If an item someone mentions is important, it will result in a later sidebar conversation among a smaller team of top officials. If it isn’t, it’s often forgotten.

Some staffers roll their eyes as Priebus reiterates the need for them not to leak to the press, or as he stresses that if they want to talk to the president they need to go through him or one of his lieutenants, Katie Walsh.

“No one says anything of relevance,” said one senior staffer. “People are more than happy to schedule a breakfast and send their deputy now.”

Others complain about Priebus’ West Wing management, which they argue has become suffocating. They point to his habit of sprinting into meetings-- “He literally runs,” said one senior administration official-- which has led top aides to believe that he is trying to edge his way into their conversations or monitor their discussions with the president.

...There is a growing sense, too, that Priebus is trying to stack the administration with people who are loyal to him-- many of them establishment Republicans he grew friendly with during his Republican National Committee chairmanship-- while trying to keep out others. Multiple staffers say there is lingering resentment over the hire of communications director Michael Dubke, an ally of a Priebus lieutenant and press secretary Sean Spicer.

...There has also been White House conflict with Cabinet members such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has vented to friends that Priebus has blocked his choice for deputy secretary, Goldman Sachs managing director Jim Donovan, according to one person familiar with the talks. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, meanwhile, has complained that the chief of staff is picking who will get plum ambassador posts without always consulting others, said another person, who is familiar with that situation.

“There’s a lot of distrust,” this person said of the Tillerson-Priebus relationship. “It’s natural that there will be frustration there.”

To some, Priebus’ determination to always be at Trump’s side-- not to mention his desire to place loyalists in the White House-- underscores his desire for greater control. He has competed for influence along with several other senior aides, including Bannon, Kushner, counselor Kellyanne Conway and economic adviser Gary Cohn.

...This past weekend, though, as Trump arrived in Florida without Priebus at his side, those close to the chief of staff were deluged with questions about why he was back in Washington. And at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Palm Beach, where the president spoke on Friday evening, there was surprise that Priebus, a former party chairman who remains close to many of the party’s benefactors, hadn’t made an appearance.

As the weekend came to a close, White House officials tried to clear the air. They denied reports that Priebus, after Trump’s Friday flare-up, had been told by the president he couldn’t make the trip, claiming that there had been a “mutual decision” he would stay in Washington. He had initially planned to travel to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and return on a commercial aircraft Saturday for a family engagement. (Bannon flew down Saturday and dined with a number of Trump aides and Cabinet officials.)

The president, they added, was glad that the chief of staff had stayed behind to work. Priebus is helping to oversee a jam-packed schedule that will dominate the administration’s agenda for the week ahead, including the expected release of a new immigration travel ban and a draft health care bill.

Those close to the president say any senior shake-up would be far in the future. But Trump is notoriously mercurial, and he ordered multiple personnel changes on his presidential campaign when things weren’t going right.

If White House employees begin to head for the exits, one aide suggested, a change could come sooner than expected. “I think the president is starting to figure it out,” this person said, “slowly but surely.”

The Type Of Democrats We Need... And The Type We Don't

Yesterday the Maine Beacon reported that 8 Democrats-- 2 in the state Senate and 6 in the House-- signed on to Paul LePage's plan to roll back a just-passed minimum wage increase. And by "signed on," I mean co-sponsoring a bill that would target restaurant workers. What LePage, his GOP allies and those 8 Democrats want to do is overturn the voter-approved ballot measure, which won in November 417,132 (55.5%) to 334,774 (44.5%). How big a deal are those numbers? Hillary won the state with 357,735, beating Trump's 335,593. Measure 4-- the minimum wage increase-- beat both candidates substantially and beat the winning marijuana legalization measure to boot! These are the Democratic co-sponsos of the anti-worker GOP bill:

• Sen. Bill Diamond (Cumberland County)
• Sen. Jim Dill (Penobscot County)
• Rep. Robert Alley (Beals)
• Rep. Martin Grohman (Biddeford)
• Rep. Brian Hubbell (Bar Harbor)
• Rep. Louis Luchini (Ellsworth)
• Rep. Anne-Marie Mastraccio (Sanford)
• Rep. Catherine Nadeau (Winslow)

Amy Halsted, campaign manager for Mainers for Fair Wages, the coalition that supported the minimum wage referendum, explained that "The median hourly wage for a waiter or waitress in Maine is just $9.06, including tips. They are twice as likely to live in poverty and three times as likely to access food stamps to feed their families. These legislators need to hear from us right now about not betraying the will of the voters and not cutting the minimum wage. No legislator should support cutting the minimum wage, but for Democrats in particular to try to betray the voters and attempt to cut the subminimum tipped wage after leaders like President Obama, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and women’s and workers’ rights groups have worked so hard to increase it is absolutely unacceptable."

As you've probably guessed by now, my reason for reporting this isn't specifically because of Maine or even this (worthy) issue. It's because of Democrats. If you want to oppose the minimum wage and the right of the voters to raise it, why not just switch parties and become a Republican?

The GOP isn't fooling around. They have a national agenda-- a highly toxic one, that will role back all the progress made since FDR was president. As Trump's proto-fascist chief advisor, Steve Bannon, admitted boasted, "That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that’s why the regulatory thing is so important."

Yesterday, for example, the House voted on the so-called SCRUB Act to put together a new agency to find regulations to repeal, primarily science-based public health and safety protections. It passed 240-185. Republican Walter Jones was the only Republican to vote against it. These 11 Democrats, primarily very right-wing Blue Dogs, crossed the aisle to vote with the GOP:

• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Jacky Rosen (NV)
• Bobby Rush (IL)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Kirsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Tom Suozzi (NY)

Another example: the EPA. When he chose Scott Pruitt to head the agency, there could have been no doubt what his intentions were. I was dismayed on February 17 when the Senate voted to confirm Pruitt even before reading the Big Oil documents he was hiding that a court had just ordered released. Two Democrats-- both up for reelection in 2018-- voted with the GOP: Heidi Heitkamp (ND) and Joe Manchin (WV), the two Dems who cross the aisle most frequently, looking to please home-state Trumpists and brazenly thumbing their noses at their own base.

Did it surprise anyone when Trump's budget included ripping nearly a quarter of the EPA budget out from under them-- and it wasn't to lower Scott Pruitt's salary. If Congress approves it, that will mean $8.1 billion that would have been used to keep water and air from being polluted (by people very much like those in Trump's cabinet-from-hell), will instead be used to... build a wall along the southern border? Finance another tax break for multimillionaires and billionaires? Increase military spending even even more ridiculously than it already is? Look at this comparison? It's already completely repulsive. Trump wants to make far more so.

Trump has released Pruitt from any kind of pre-confirmation leash he was on to start aggressively rolling back regulations that in any way touch on the climate change programs Obama had begun. Tuesday, Trumpanzee signed an executive order that will lead directly to plenty of dirty water.

Raúl Grijalva is the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee and just before Trump gave his speech Tuesday night, he noted that "If this budget is enacted the way he wants it, he’s effectively dealt a very significant death blow to the EPA." And there are even some conservative Republicans who fear that Trump and Pruitt are too extreme. People in Idaho may be extremely conservative-- Trump won the state 409,055 (59.2) to 189,765 (27.5%)-- but they also appreciate a clean robust environment. Far right Republican Mike Simpson has been in Congress since 1999. Yesterday he gulped when he saw Trump's numbers. "If they’re trying to get rid of the regulatory regime and a few things like that, you could probably make some cuts... I don’t know if they can be as big as what they’re talking about."

R.L. Miller, head of ClimateHawksVote cut right to the chase: "America is going to run an uncontrolled experiment: will a mixture of 76% clean air and water, and 24% dirty air and water, poison the body politic?"

A little addendum on Cory Booker. Remember back in January when he voted with the Republicans against Bernie Sanders' attempt to cut the price of pharmaceuticals by allowing drug importation from Canada, something almost 80% of Americans support? The fury unleashed in Booker's direction seem to have yielded some instant results. He's now very publicly supporting Sanders' bill.