What's Worse-- Biden's Sincere Belief In Austerity Or Trump's Belief In Nothing But Personal Corruption?

Trump's a monster, no doubt about it. He's a grifter who has not an ounce of patriotism nor the will towards public service in his bloated orange body or his misshapen shriveled soul. That said, unlike Joe Biden, Trump is not driven-- the way his party is-- to destroy Social Security and Medicare. And it isn't just the Republican Party that is eager to destroy the social safety net; it is also the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, faction of the party that has largely rallied behind Biden, one of the worst pro-Austerity warriors in our lifetimes, worse on that count than Trump, who doesn't care enough about it to want to stir up the ultimate hornets nest.

Over the weekend, Washington Post reporters Jeff Stein and Erica Werner looked at how Trump's proposed budget "is expected to lay bare how much he has adjusted to the political and practical limits of Washington, with some of his biggest campaign promises from 2016 cast aside and replaced with more limited policy ambitions. On immigration, health care, infrastructure and the deficit, the final budget pitch of Trump’s first term will look much different from the campaign platform he offered four years ago."

Those advising Trump are as eager to cut Social Security and Medicare as Biden and his faction are. If Trump was interested in issues beyond his own prospects of emptying the treasury into his own pockets, he might be as bad, or even worse, than Biden on the social safety net. So far, though, he has only let the Austerity hawks chip away around the edges. His campaign promises to protect Medicaid from cuts, wrote Stein and Werner have "been repeatedly ignored, as he has sought to slash some $800 billion over a decade from the health program for low-income Americans. The latest evidence of this came on Saturday, when he wrote on Twitter that the budget proposal 'will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare.' He made no mention of protecting Medicaid, even though he had vowed to guard it during his first presidential campaign. He is also seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act through the courts despite pledging to safeguard one of its key tenets: insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions."

Biden, who has advocated deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for his entire career, would be much less likely to beat around the bush. Trump is reticent because of the political blowback. Biden would ignore the blowback and see himself as the ultimate political martyr who only has one term anyway. He sees Austerity as an ultimate good. Trump only sees graft and corruption as ultimate goods.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed to deliver a major infrastructure plan, but there has been virtually no progress on this issue.

And the president’s promise to eliminate the government’s roughly $20 trillion debt within eight years has also gone unfulfilled. Instead, Trump has added almost $3 trillion to the debt in three years, and that number is only expected to balloon, according to nonpartisan estimates. Proposals to cut domestic programs have evaporated in massive year-end budget deals with Congress that have actually raised spending limits.

Trump’s first budget proposal relied on questionable math when it sought to eliminate the budget deficit after 10 years, but even that goal has slipped out of reach.

Trump has scored a string of victories in recent months, including securing a bipartisan revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement and being acquitted by Republicans in the Senate on impeachment charges. He signed a partial trade deal with China and marshaled through a massive tax-cut package in 2017.

But Monday’s budget proposal will demonstrate that a number of the president’s loftiest campaign promises from four years ago have largely been abandoned, because of political realities as well as simple budget math.

“I have no idea how he can live up to his campaign promises to reduce the deficit, not address entitlement programs, and at the same time cut taxes,” said Bill Hoagland, a Republican who served as staff director for the Senate Budget Committee. “I have not figured out how to square this circle, and neither have they.”

...[E]ven more so than under prior administrations, Trump’s budget proposals have been largely rejected by lawmakers who’ve agreed on a bipartisan basis to restore and even increase spending for agencies and programs that the administration has tried to cut, including health and education programs and foreign aid.

Trump in the past few years has sought to backpedal on some of the proposed budget cuts, facing blowback after seeking to cut funding in states central to his reelection campaign, such as Michigan.

That has led to some dejection among career officials at agencies and within the White House Office of Management and Budget, who are forced to devote enormous time and attention to developing a budget document they know Congress will largely reject, according to several people with knowledge of internal administration dynamics who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them.

In prior years, Trump’s budgets have reflected the irreconcilable contradictions of his campaign promises in part by relying on overly rosy economic forecasts and glossing over how he would achieve big cuts.

In 2017, Trump’s budget predicted that economic growth would surge to an annual rate of 3 percent by 2021 and stay at that healthy rate indefinitely. This goal has proved elusive. The economy grew 2.9 percent in 2018 but slowed to 2.3 percent in 2019, and is projected to slow even more this year. Relying on rosy economic estimates in the budget plans allows the White House to assume that prospering families and companies will generate high levels of tax revenue as a way to offset the widening deficit. Instead, the deficit estimates have proved faulty.

Trump’s budgets have also proposed enormous cuts to domestic spending programs as a way to try to bring the deficit down. But nondefense domestic spending, aside from what are considered mandatory programs, makes up just a sliver of the overall $4.6 trillion federal budget. Mandatory programs, including the domestic programs Medicare and Social Security, make up more than 60 percent of federal spending. And since Trump has promised repeatedly to wall off Medicare and Social Security from cuts, while also increasing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security budgets, he has fewer agencies available for cuts if he wants to seek reductions.

Rep. Charles J. “Chuck” Fleischmann (R-TN), a member of the Appropriations Committee, said the deficit cannot be addressed until Congress and the administration take on entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. But he noted that Trump has promised to protect those programs, “and I will certainly respect that.”

“So I think right now, this year, is probably not the year to deal with the mandatory side of the equation,” Fleischmann said. “But perhaps that’s something that President Trump will look at with the Congress in his second term.”

Ironically, Fleischmann's bloodthirsty instincts would undoubtably better-served by a Biden (or, likely, a Bloomberg) administration that would go right in for the kill. "Although," wrote Stein and Werner, "Trump has talked publicly about wanting to cut spending, he has also signaled an indifference toward the federal budget... [and] rarely speaks of it. Leaked audio from a dinner the president attended in January with donors at Mar-a-Lago, his private resort in Florida, captured the president brushing aside those who are critical of rising defense and federal spending as part of the growing national debt. 'Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country,' the president said."





Biden and the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Blue Dogs, New Dems, so-called "Problem Solvers"-- care. Which is why the 2020 primary is the ultimate crossroads for the Democratic Party. Bernie wants to lead a party that embraces the philosophy of governance espoused by FDR. The B-Team embrace, albeit never openly, Rockefeller, Eisenhower and Nixon Republicanism.

Advent Of The Trump Recession

It seems like every few days I've been writing a post about another broken Trumpanzee campaign promise. This fits right in-- and in a big way since whatever support Trump had from non-racists, this is right at the heart of it. Don Lee reported for the L.A. Times that despite Trump's vow to boost industry, the manufacturing sector is officially in recession. As Lee points out, during Trump’s first two years in office, "his standing with many voters was buoyed by a surge in manufacturing that helped create millions of new jobs and undergirded the whole U.S. economy." That sure seems to have ended quickly. Maybe the recession there isn't as heavy as the one in the farm belt but it is just as contagious.

[M]anufacturing has plunged into recession and is threatening to pull down other sectors, perhaps hitting hardest on supporters in those states that helped put Trump in office.

Impeachment may be dominating the news, but the less-noticed industrial slump ultimately could pose a greater threat to Trump’s reelection.

As measured by the Federal Reserve, manufacturing output shrank over two straight quarters this year. That’s the common definition of recession.

A separate, widely followed index drawn from purchasing managers showed September’s contraction in manufacturing was the steepest since June 2009, with production, inventories and new orders all falling.

And after adding nearly half a million jobs in the prior two years, which Trump frequently stressed in hard-hat rallies throughout the Midwest, manufacturing employment has stalled.

Instead of healthy job growth, layoff announcements have spiked this year, especially in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Friday’s jobs report for September showed a slight drop in total factory jobs.

Manufacturing today accounts for only about 10% of economic activity, and so far, the overall economy and employment in the U.S. are still growing. But the pace has slowed considerably this year. The faltering industrial sector has started to crimp businesses in the transportation and warehousing sectors. And there are growing worries of spillover effects in the larger services sector and broader economy.

Even if the nation can avoid a recession next year, a manufacturing downturn could prove to be politically damaging for Trump, who rode to the White House on enthusiastic support from blue-collar workers in key states and on his promise to revive America’s coal, steel and other industries.

Although manufacturing comprises a far smaller portion of the whole U.S. economy than it once did, it remains very important in a handful of swing states that Trump narrowly won in 2016-- including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Today, Trump is badly underwater in those states and across the Midwest. According to the most recent Morning Consult Tracking Trump polling, Trump's favorability vs unfavorability is absolutely dismal-- and probably fatal.

• Pennsylvania- minus 8 points
• Ohio- minus 5 points
• Michigan- minus 10 points
• Indiana- plus 2 points
• Wisconsin- minus 11 points
• Illinois- minus 22 points
• Minnesota- minus 11 points
• Iowa- minus 14 points

Going back to Lee, he wrote that "In the months before the 2016 election, it didn’t help Hillary Clinton’s prospects that manufacturing was on the skids and factory jobs were shrinking, thanks to a drop-off in energy-related investments, a strong dollar and lackluster demand for American goods in emerging economies. Some of those same factors are again weighing against American industry. But analysts and business leaders say the single biggest restraint on manufacturing this year has been of Trump’s own making: excessive use of tariffs and his trade wars with China and other countries. Of utmost concern has been Trump’s confrontation with China, the world’s second-largest economy. Many American firms have major operations there-- both manufacturing, such as smartphones, and sales, such as motor vehicles. And U.S. companies rely on China for a big chunk of their sales and profits. U.S. businesses have put off spending on major equipment and buildings as they’ve sought to look through the fog of a swirling trade conflict marked by Trump’s haphazard tariff actions and off-and-on negotiations."

"In November 2020, if Trump even makes it that far without first getting impeached and convicted," said Ted Lieu (R-CA) today, "the voters will know that he lied to them. His economic polices have benefitted the top 1% at the expense of everyone else, including those in the manufacturing sector. Trump's chaotic and ineffective trade wars have hurt the American economy, and put many farmers and manufacturers out of business. It doesn't matter anymore what Trump says, the voters will know if they have a job, and whether their community is better or worse because of his tenure. I predict an even bigger blue wave in 2020."

File Under: Another Major Campaign Promise Broken

If the Trump Regime were running up mega-deficits by improving the country's healthcare system or educational system or by improving the infrastructure-- all promises he made during his campaign and then tossed away as soon as he got into the White House in favor of massive tax cuts for the wealthy (another campaign promise broken)-- I wouldn't mind the nearly trillion dollar deficit this year. But that's not how he ran up the gargantuan deficit. He ran it up by slashing revenues with a tax cut for the super-wealthy and by wasting money on personal projects that enriched himself and his cronies. The Associated Press reported that "The $984 billion deficit tally for 2019 came in more than $200 billion more than last year's, despite very low unemployment and continuing economic growth." Conservative economists "have long taken the position that deficits and the nation's $22 trillion national debt are unsustainable. CBO noted that deficits have been growing faster than the size of the economy for four years in a row, ending 2019 at 4.7 percent of gross domestic product."

There's no appetite in Washington to try politically painful medicine to deal with the deficit. Democrats have noted the spike in deficits since President Donald Trump's tax cut plan was passed in 2017, while Trump has promised not to touch popular retirement benefits like Social Security and Medicare.

Trump has already proposed a budget that violently slashes Social Security, Medicare and other parts of the tattered social safety net. So that was stupid reporting from AP. They should have shown examples of how Trump is misappropriating funds. Major Danny Sjursen did at Truthdig this week. He's a retired U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and his piece for Truthdig, Secretary of Defense, Incorporated, is completely typical of how the entire Trumpist Regime functions. "Trump," Sjursen points out, "has installed faceless bureaucrats to run the most powerful national security state in human history. And the rest of us hardly notice. Trump’s appointment of Mark Esper as head of the largest and most active Cabinet department, and the new Defense Secretary’s near unanimous approval by the U.S. Senate, is no less of a scandal than Trump’s apparent efforts to seek foreign interference in the 2020 elections. Only it isn’t. Still, the nomination of Esper, a recent lobbyist for the defense contracting corporation Raytheon, ranks as one of the most egregious illustrations of the 'revolving door' between lobbyists and the Defense Department. It’s crony capitalism in fatigues, and while nothing new, a clear indication that things have only worsened under our reality-show-mogul-president." Bernie was out of town that day but he opposed Esper's confirmation, as did the other senators running for president, other than the Republican pretending to be a Democrat, Michael Bennet (CO).

Of course, seen through the rose-colored glasses of American empire, Esper is highly qualified to head the Defense Department. He’s a West Point graduate, former Army infantry officer, recipient of a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard and a doctorate in public policy from George Washington University, and has past experience working in the Pentagon.

If one digs further, however, Esper is wildly problematic-- loaded with conflicts of interest, a veteran of the (should be) discredited neoconservative Bush-era DOD, and little more than a corporate “company man.” He didn’t just work for Raytheon, he lobbied on the defense contractor’s behalf only recently. Under rather sharp questioning by Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation hearings, Esper refused to recuse himself from participating in government business involving Raytheon. In typically lifeless language, Esper replied that “On the advice of my ethics folks at the Pentagon, the career professionals: No, their recommendation is not to.” How’s that for accepting responsibility? No matter, he was swiftly and quietly confirmed by a vote of 90-8 in the Senate.

Expect another banner year for Raytheon. It’s already the third-largest U.S. defense contractor, and produces, among other tools of destruction, Paveway precision-guided missiles-- the very weapons that Congress recently sought to stop shipping to Saudi Arabia due to (rather tardy) concerns about the heads of Yemeni civilians upon which they’re dropped.

I predict more deals and more taxpayer billions for Raytheon with Esper at the Defense helm. Not that the company has done poorly during the Trump years. In 2018, Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy candidly quipped that “It’s the best time that we’ve ever seen for the defense industry.” Not for indebted taxpayers, bombed-out Middle Easterners or U.S. soldiers still dying in endless wars, it’s not. But sure, it truly is the best of times for what prominent American leaders-- once upon a time-- labeled the “merchants of death.”





Conflicts of interest, sliding seamlessly between defense contracting boards and the Pentagon, and securing post-government largesse on corporate boards, that’s an old story indeed. Looking back to 2001, most Defense Secretaries have troublesome private sector connections. Donald Rumsfeld entered the Pentagon after a 24-year business career; Robert Gates was on the board of directors of Fidelity Investments and the Parker Drilling Company; Chuck Hagel served on the boards of Chevron and Deutsche Bank; Ash Carter-- an exception-- was mostly an academic and a bureaucratic wonk, but still consulted for Goldman Sachs. All made millions.

That covers the Bush and Obama years. What we’ve seen in the Trump administration, is, however, something far more brazen. His three Secretaries of Defense (one of whom, Patrick Shanahan, was only acting head) have been unapologetically ensconced in the world of defense contracting and corporate lobbying.

“Saint” Jim Mattis had, while still a general, encouraged the military to buy the blood test products of Theranos, then dropped the service and joined its corporate board. But Theranos’ products did not work, the deal described by the Securities and Exchange Commission as an “elaborate, years-long fraud.” Mattis also served, both before and after his Pentagon stint, on the board of General Dynamics, the nation’s fifth largest defense contractor. Nonetheless, Mattis easily slid through his confirmation and was praised by all types of mainstream media as the administration’s “adult in the room.”

After Mattis resigned, he being unable to countenance even Trump’s hints at modest withdrawal from the wars in Syria and Afghanistan, Patrick Shanahan stepped in as interim defense chief. Unlike his predecessor, Shanahan didn’t emerge from the military, but rather from yet another defense contractor, Boeing, for which he’s worked some 30 years. Trump thought that was dandy and nominated him to officially replace Mattis, but Shanahan decided to withdraw due to alleged personal scandals. Enter Mark Esper, Raytheon lobbyist extraordinaire.

Esper’s in good company in Washington’s military-industrial swamp. Recent reports by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO)-- a vital organization that hardly any American has heard of-- identified “645 instances in the past 10 years in which a retired senior official, member of Congress or senior legislative staff member became employed as a registered lobbyist, board member or business executive at a major government contractor.” POGO also noted that “those walking through the revolving door included 25 generals, nine admirals, 43 lieutenant generals and 23 vice admirals.”

All of which begs some questions and provides some disturbing answers. Perhaps we ought to ditch the myth that the Defense Secretary simply heads the Pentagon, and admit that Esper is really the emperor of a far grander military-industrial complex that includes a veritable army of K-Street lobbyists and venal arms dealers. Maybe it’s time to concede that unelected national security czars, and not a stalemated bought-and-sold Congress, run national defense and set the gigantic Pentagon budget. Perhaps we should confess to ourselves that the nation’s vaunted soldiers are little more than political pawns in a game that’s far bigger, far more Kafkaesque, than those troopers could begin to fathom. And, finally, let’s admit one last thing: Few of us care.

At Blue America we care very much and we look for candidates who we feel will never sell out to the military industrial complex and who will, in fact, push back against it in the strongest possible ways. Progressive Nebraska congressional candidate Kara Eastman told us today that "You'd expect that Rep. Don Bacon would apply his military background to maintain a patina of oversight over this brazen wholesaling of the defense budget. However, and despite his tenure on the House Armed Services Committee, Bacon has traded oversight and review for campaign cash and ignorance. Case in point are the cost overruns at Offut Airforce Base, which used to be under his purview. Costs for repairing the base from climate change-induced flooding has gone through the roof and Bacon has signed off on diverting key funds supporting the 55th Wing to the Southern Border Wall."

Eva Putzova, a progressive Democrat from Flagstaff running for an Arizona congressional seat held by Republican-turned-Blue Dog Tom O'Halleran, one of the most right-wing Democrats in Congress, told us that " The appointment of Mark Esper, the former lobbyist for Raytheon, as Secretary of Defense, demonstrates the total corruption of our military-industrial complex. Raytheon receives billions of dollars from the Pentagon and nations like Saudi Arabia to manufacture weapons used to kill civilians in Yemen and elsewhere. My opponent, the incumbent blue dog "Democrat," takes campaign contributions from Raytheon and is silent on the influence of arms dealers in the Pentagon budgeting process.  Besides the enormous waste of taxpayers money which adds to our deficit in an unproductive manner the waste in human lives is even greater. When I am in Congress I will endorse legislation to outlaw the revolving door between private contractors and government service. I will also oppose all wars of choice and our role in the arms trade that fuels wars in which we are not directly involved."

Other Democrats May Write Off Ohio, But It's A Key State For Bernie's Campaign

Yesterday, not long after Georgia Republican Johnny Isakson noted that he deserves a whipping for his vicious bad-mouthing John McCain, Señor Trumpanzee was off to Lima Ohio. His for-TV-backdrop was an Abrams tank plant, which he says was destined for closure before massive new military spending ($2 billion for tanks) revived orders. That's on the other side of the state from General Motors' now-idled factory in Lordstown that Trump has been screeching about for a couple of weeks, blaming Mary Barra, GM's CEO, the auto workers union and anyone else but his own policies for the shutdown. In fact, many people say that it was his own misguided and ego-driven actions "to save manufacturing" that have been battering the auto industry and eating into the overall economy of Midwest "rust belt" states. Politico reported that his "tariffs on steel and aluminum have cost Ford and GM about $1 billion each" and noted that "Barra cited the tariffs in November when she announced the 14,000 job cuts that included the Lordstown plant’s shuttering. Potentially making things even worse, Trump is now weighing new tariffs on foreign automobiles that could threaten hundreds of thousands of additional U.S. jobs."

“The reality is auto tariffs would put Ohio into a recession,” said Dan Ujczo, a Columbus-based international trade lawyer who has been closely studying the impact of recent trade actions on Ohio companies.

Ultimately, that could jeopardize Trump’s support in the Mahoning Valley and other blue-collar Great Lakes regions that voted for him in 2016.

“He’ll lose those the second he puts auto tariffs on,” Ujczo said. “These people understand you can’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” According to a Morning Consult tracking poll, Trump’s approval rating in Ohio has fallen 19 percentage points since January 2017.

While Trump is focused on exhorting GM not to shutter the Lordstown plant, where it makes the compact Chevrolet Cruze model, the industry’s economic reality is much more complicated.

Trump’s simple formula of demanding that specific plants should stay open doesn’t account for the sophistication of the global auto industry. The auto making supply chain is global; foreign companies build cars in the U.S. but with some foreign-made parts. Likewise, cars made abroad often contain American parts. And automakers move workers from plant to plant as demand for different kinds of autos shifts.

GM says the Ohio plant is closing because demand has softened for the Cruze; the company says it is talking to workers about relocating to other facilities.

It’s unusual for any president-- especially a Republican one-- to tell private manufacturers how to run their businesses. “There’s a school of thought that these decisions are best left to the companies and the unions,” said Marick Masters, director of the labor studies program at Wayne State University in Detroit.

It's even more unusual for a president to blame a labor union for a plant closing. Dave Green, president of the United Auto Workers local at Lordstown, appears to have infuriated Trump Sunday when he said on Fox News that Trump's 2018 tax cut incentivized imports. Or perhaps Trump was irritated at Green for letting the press know in February that he'd written the president about the Lordstown closing in July 2018 and received no reply.

Whatever the specific provocation, Trump tweeted Sunday that "Democrat UAW Local 1112 President David Green ought to get his act together and produce," then followed up with a tweet that noted GM's Barra "blamed the UAW Union" for the shutdown, prompting an angry retort from the UAW: "Corporations close plants, workers don’t.”

Trump’s previous efforts to intervene in vehicle plant closings have resulted in tepid gains at best.

Trump lashed into Ford during the 2016 campaign for shipping jobs to Mexico, then claimed credit in early January 2017 when Ford, in an unrelated move, announced that it would create 700 jobs in Michigan to build electric and self-driving cars-- while simultaneously expanding two plants in Mexico.

Trump was similarly irate in June 2018 when Harley-Davidson said it would offshore an unspecified number of jobs to offset the impact of European tariffs imposed in retaliation to Trump’s steel tariffs. Trump was so furious that he said he’d support a boycott of Harley-Davidson, prompting the company’s steepest sales drop in nearly a decade.

Trump’s protectionist policies are cutting into profits for automakers, even though they employ far more workers than the steel and aluminum industries the tariffs are designed to protect.

The auto industry employs around a million people, while steel and aluminum less than one tenth of that (combined). Since Trump's ill-starred tariffs went interplay, the steel industry has added 6,200 jobs and the aluminum industry 100 new jobs. Trump's policies have triggered a very steep decline in investment in the auto industry. Economists are shocked not so much that "Trump doesn't seem to understand that the automobile production process involves intensely global supply chains," but that there's no one around him who can explain this to him and make him understand that his policies are harming American industry.

The Washington Post's David Ignatius noted that "Trump's angry, backward-looking approach may still appeal to some Rust Belt voters. But in the Ohio and Pennsylvania towns that helped win the presidency for Trump in 2016, his vow to turn back the clock hasn't worked out very well, and there are signs the Rust Belt may be corroding for him politically."

He explained that "Lordstown's struggles, like those of other nearby mill towns, illustrate the harsh fact that manufacturing is a dynamic process. Old jobs are disappearing because of changes in technology or consumer preferences; trying to resist change is usually a fool's game. Rust Belt communities that are succeeding are the ones that have adapted by embracing new technologies and innovation. Presidential leadership in this period of technological transition should focus on the future, rather than the past. But Trump seems almost a technophobe."

After Trump's Twitter tirade, Rep. Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat who represents the Lordstown area, fired back: "The President's tweet ... is offensive and does nothing to help bring back the manufacturing jobs he promised to my district."

Ryan argued that "the best thing is to help" GM renovate Lordstown and perhaps build electric vehicles there. Local residents said much the same thing to the Youngstown Vindicator this month: GM or a new owner should focus on new technology and making products people want to buy, rather than restore production of the low-selling Chevrolet Cruze.

Trump is vulnerable in the Rust Belt because he made such extravagant promises when he successfully wooed voters in 2016. "He won this area-- a largely Democratic area-- and he has not said a word yet, and that's just pathetic," warned Jim Graham a former UAW leader at Lordstown, in an interview with the Vindicator back in November, when GM said it planned to halt Cruze production there.

Local residents remember Trump's proclamation at a July 2017 rally in nearby Youngstown: "Those jobs [that] have left Ohio, they're all coming back... Don't sell your house." Tommy Wolikow, a Lordstown worker, told the Vindicator: "I kind of turned into a Trump supporter at that time. I believed what he said... Almost two years later, I'm seeing nothing but job losses."

Homeowners in Youngstown certainly haven't seen a boom. According to Zillow, the online realty broker, the median price for a house in Youngstown is $39,900. The national median price of homes currently listed is $279,000. Browse the real estate ads for mill towns across Ohio and Pennsylvania and you'll see just how tough it is to be a Rust Belt resident, trapped in a downward cycle.

What's the right answer for Rust Belt towns where the old manufacturing base has disappeared? An interesting example is Erie, Pennsylvania. Most big factories there have closed in recent years, but the city is rebuilding itself around its local universities and a big insurance company. Profits from a big gambling casino in Erie County are funneled partly to "innovation spaces" at four local campuses.

Erie may have lost manufacturing jobs, but it's above the state average in advanced industries, says Ben Speggen, a local journalist who helps run a think tank in Erie called the Jefferson Educational Society. "There has been a real shift in understanding that our Rust Belt economy is not solely tied to manufacturing," he says.

Another key to success is welcoming foreigners. About 10 percent of Erie's population is refugees, according to James and Deborah Fallows in their recent book, Our Towns. One of the 10 characteristics they found in successful local communities adapting to change is that "they make themselves open."

In the 2016 primaries Both Hillary and Bernie got more votes than Trump in Erie County. In fact, Hillary and Bernie together got 37,341 votes. All six Republicans combined took just 30,050. But after months of Trump's extravagant and baseless promises, he beat Hillary in the general election by 2 points. Two years later there was a significant change. In the 2018 midterms, Democrat Bob Casey beat Trumpist Lou Barletta in Erie county-- and by a lot, 58.4% to 40.0%. Governor Wolf did even better there, beating the right-wing Trumpist Scott Wagner 59.8% to 38.7%. Erie County is entirely in the 16th congressional district now and incumbent Mike Kelly was reelected 51.6% to 47.3% against a weak Blue Dog Democrat. But not in the Erie part of the district. The county gave the Blue Dog a massive D+20 margin, almost enough to overcome Kelly's lead in the other 4 counties. Does this foreshadow a Democratic win in Erie County in 2020? Most likely, yes, unless the Democrats nominate another mushy centrist, like Hillary, with nothing to offer but a slick campaign and a bio.

Trump Lied To All Americans-- But Very Specifically, He Lied To Ohio Workers

Monday night we did a quick pre-SOTU prep post to outline in a general way how Trump has lied to the American people from his campaign until now about everything big and small. Now, while Trump is chopping up the Adderall he'll be snorting before giving his second SOTU address, I want to point out a very specific lie that Madeleine Carlisle exposed at The Atlantic early this morning: Lordstown, Ohio. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump told GM workers their jobs were safe. That Chevy Cruze plant is getting ready to close down. Before we get to Carlisle's report, a little context.

Lordstown only has a population of about 3,500 but it's in the Youngstown area-- Trumbull County. General Motors' Lordstown Assembly Plant started production in 1996 and is now the Youngstown area's largest industrial employer with approximately 4,500 employees, almost a thousand of whom live in Lordstown itself. Trumbull County is a traditionally Democratic stronghold. The county was won by Jimmy Carter (twice), Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton (twice), Al Gore, John Kerry and Obama (twice). Then came 2016 and Hillary Clinton. And Trump. Hillary couldn't have been a worse nominee at a worse time for Trumbull County. Trump beat her 48,152 (51.2%) to 42,130 (44.8%), breaking over 4 decades of Democratic presidential victories. In fact, Trump won the entire region with the exception of Mahoning County, which Hillary took with a 49.8% plurality.

Last year Sherrod Brown won Trumbull County 58% to 42% against Republican Jim Renacci and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray beat Mike DeWine 52-46%. Nearly all of Trumbull County lies within Democrat Tim Ryan's 13th congressional district and he won the county in a landslide. Next year both Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are planning to use Trumbull, Mahoning, Summit, Portage as part of a base to rebuild blue Ohio after pointless neo-liberal centrists like Clinton ceded it to the GOP. Tonight, Rep. Tim Ryan's guest at the Trump shit-show is Dave Green, the president of the union at the Lordstown assembly plant.

In her report this morning Carlisle wrote that "Nanette Senters has worked in the body-shop division of General Motors’ Lordstown assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, for 20 years. She helps build the shell of what becomes the Chevy Cruze... Back in 2016, Donald Trump visited near her community, Trumbull County, on the campaign trail. '[He] told everybody, Don’t sell your houses. Manufacturing’s going to come back to your area.' Trump promised to make Ohio a 'manufacturing behemoth.' And at a rally a few months later in Detroit, Trump announced, 'My plan includes a pledge to restore manufacturing in the United States.'"

But the day after Trump was inaugurated, General Motors announced the end of one of the shifts at Senters’s plant. Six months later, another shift ended. And last November, GM announced plans to fully close five plants in the United States and Canada, cutting about 14,700 jobs. Senters’s plant will close in March. “It was like a kick in the stomach and a slap in the face,” she said. So she joined the advocacy organization Good Jobs Nation, which demands that President Trump sign an executive order to deny federal contracts to companies when they outsource jobs. The organization launched a letter-writing campaign to get Trump’s attention. “Never heard a word,” she told me. “He lied. He doesn’t care.”

...Ever since he declared his candidacy, Trump has made sweeping claims about his ability to bring back manufacturing jobs. In 2016, speaking at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis, then-President-elect Trump declared, “These companies aren’t going to be leaving anymore,” touting a deal he had struck with Carrier to keep nearly 1,000 jobs from moving to Mexico. But in the end, Carrier still laid off 632 Indianapolis-based workers in exchange for a cheaper labor force in Mexico.

A new campaign by the action fund of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, asserts that Trump failed to follow through not only on his pledge to Carrier’s workers, but also on his pledge to factory workers across America. The campaign-- which launched in anticipation of Tuesday’s State of the Union-- centers on what CAP describes as “Trump’s false promises.” CAP argues that while Trump campaigned on issues important to middle- and working-class people, his presidential policy record suggests he instead prioritizes big business and the wealthy. One of the “false promises,” according to CAP,  centers on Trump’s pledge to keep U.S. companies from moving overseas.

...Trump promised to stop factory jobs from moving overseas... [He] has pursued three particular avenues to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States: deregulation, tax cuts, and trade negotiations. He described these policies are “one step forward and two steps back.” Low labor costs and looser environmental regulations incentivize companies to move factories overseas. Trump’s renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement-- which has yet to pass Congress-- would expand protections for capital and investors, but, according to Andy Green, the managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress, would do little to lift labor or environmental standards overseas. In Green’s opinion, such trade negotiations only strengthen the pull of globalization.

But some left-leaning economists, such as Susan Helper at Case Western Reserve University, and Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, said the “new NAFTA,” titled the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, includes provisions to increase wages and collective bargaining in Mexico, particularly in the auto industry. This could make American manufacturing more competitive. While it’s not clear whether those provisions are enforceable, Bernstein said, “I’ll give Trump credit for it because you wouldn’t have had that under most presidents.”

On the other hand, Bernstein argued that Trump has accentuated the United States’ trade deficit because he “doesn’t understand” the importance of the U.S. dollar. Between tax cuts and big spending, America’s deficit has increased under his administration, which strengthens the dollar and makes U.S. exports less competitive. Scott called the strength of the U.S. dollar the “fundamental failure” of Trump’s manufacturing policy, estimating the dollar is about 25 percent overvalued. “It’s tending to depress the growth of manufacturing employment,” he explained. And a report from the International Monetary Fund last October predicted the U.S. trade deficit will nearly double in the next five years.

Perhaps the more obvious aspect of Trump’s impact on manufacturing has been his tariffs. In March 2018, Trump enacted a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent duties on aluminum imports. These tariffs were intended to save the steel and aluminum industries in the United States and, in Scott’s opinion, were “badly needed” to help save jobs in those industries. “There were half a dozen steel plants that were going to close, and they haven’t,” he explained. “Same is true with aluminum, which was in even worse shape.” However, Scott argued the tariffs didn’t address the root cause of the plants’ closures: global excess capacity in both industries, the sheer volume of metal produced in China is lowering prices and causing a trade imbalance even under a tariff regime. He said that if Trump had tried to fight that excess capacity with tariffs, he could have addressed some of the larger global pressures. “[But] he did not. He just put up a wall and wiped his hands and said, ‘Okay, job done.’” Scott said. “That’s been his style.”

Jeffrey H. Dorfman, an economist at the University of Georgia, believes the “single worst” thing Trump has done for manufacturing jobs has been his tariffs on steel and aluminum. Dorfman said that while those tariffs may have saved a few thousand jobs in steel manufacturing, they’ve hurt a much larger number of manufacturing companies that used those metals for production. “Steel and aluminum are used to make autos, to make tractors, to make skyscrapers,” he said. “We’re losing jobs in all those industries in the U.S. now.” A study at Iowa State University calculated the ratio of losses to gains in Iowa manufacturing was 2.7 jobs lost to every one job gained. And Roy Cortado, a senior economist at the conservative think tank the John Locke Foundation, told me he thinks Trump’s steel tariffs “do nothing for manufacturing and capital intensive industries in this country.”

Famed American brand Harley-Davidson announced last summer that it was moving some of its production to Europe, leading President Trump to call for a boycott of the motorcycle company. In regulatory filings, Harley-Davidson revealed that retaliatory tariffs from the European Union cost them in an average of $2,200 per motorcycle exported to the EU. Though the company never specified their relocation was related to Trump’s trade war, critics have pointed to the move as an unintended casualty of Trump’s tariffs. Ford Motor’s CEO James Hackett also announced last September that the metal tariffs had cost the car company $1 billion in profits. They announced layoffs a few weeks later. Bernstein said he believes these plant closures exemplify how Trump’s manufacturing policies haven’t worked. “He’s basically trying to recreate the 1950s, and that’s not going to happen,” he said. In Bernstein’s opinion, Trump needs to prepare the manufacturing sector for the future by focusing on clean energy.

On the other hand, while he disagrees with Trump on tariffs, Dorfman of the University of Georgia pointed to the administration’s deregulation-- rolling back environmental, industry safety, and Obamacare standards-- as definite policy attempts to boost manufacturing stateside. The conservative economists I spoke with cited this deregulation as effective policy. However, when I raised this point to Bernstein, he said, “Show me the factories that have returned to America,” and argued that the U.S. still has roughly the same share of factories currently moving abroad than before Trump’s inauguration. Scott also pointed out that, down the road, global warming will likely hurt both the U.S. and the global economy, so there’s an economic incentive for the federal government to regulate emissions. Scott said the Democrat’s Green New Deal would actually create jobs in the domestic economy because it would transition America off of oil and onto energy created by capital investment (building wind turbines, solar panels, etc).

Conservative economists also point to Trump’s tax bill, which cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, to exemplify how he has revitalized American manufacturing. “The whole purpose of the pro-business tax cut was to help revive the kind of blue collar industries in the Midwest,” said Moore. Moore also pointed to the immediate expensing provision of the tax bill, which allows businesses to write off a large purchase, such as the purchase of a factory or a truck, in the first year. He believes capital intensive industries like manufacturing will benefit the most.

However, Stan Veuger, a resident scholar at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, told me he hasn’t seen “massive upticks in business investment, or in manufacturing.” He explained that manufacturing tends to grow slowly, and the results of the tax bill might not be evident yet. But he added, “I don’t think that the early signs are extremely promising.” Green also pointed out that the tax bill actually includes some benefits to having investments abroad: dividends paid to U.S. corporate shareholders from foreign subsidiaries are, to put it broadly, exempt from taxation in the U.S.

To some economists, the major threat to manufacturing is not globalization, but automation. As factory jobs are replaced with robots, job retraining and other educational programs for laid-off workers become essential. In Drucker’s opinion, the Trump administration has made little movement on this front. In 2017, Trump created the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative, but it was disbandedshortly after multiple members resigned in protest of his comments on the white supremacists rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

When I asked Moore about the recent plant closures at Carrier or GM, he responded, “Capitalism is about creative destruction. So you’re going to have some industries decline.” He predicted that the auto-industry is going through a moment of change, and that even more auto-workers might lose their jobs in the coming years. “But the point is that, for every job that’s lost in the auto industry, we’re creating three or four in the chemical industry, in the oil and gas industry, and light manufacturing,” he said.

But that doesn’t change the fact that in 2016, Trump promised the people of Trumbull County, Ohio that their jobs were safe. And Senters told me she’s already started to see a change in her community from the layoffs at GM-- six or seven lost jobs for every one factory job that’s gone, she said. The president of her union, Dave Green, has sent President Trump two letters now, and the administration has yet to respond. But Green will be at the State of the Union on Tuesday at the invitation of Representative Tim Ryan, his Democratic congressman.

How Much Will It Matter That The Economy Is Leaving Trump Voters Behind?

There are two recent posts that I'd like you to read before this one by Ron Brownstein. The first was yesterday's Economic Inequality-- Not Just Public Policy... It Starts On A Personal Level and the second was this afternoon's opioid post, about how Trump has betrayed a key part of his base in some of the reddest states. Brownstein is also very much talking about how Trump betrayed his base in key red states that put him into the White House.

He pointed out, for CNN yesterday, that while Señor Trumpanzee relentlessly claims credit for the strengthening economy, the nation's economic growth is being driven overwhelmingly by the places that are most resistant to him. Counties that voted for Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016 accounted for nearly three-fourths of the nation's increased economic output and almost two-thirds of its new jobs in the years leading up to his election, according to previously unpublished findings provided to CNN by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

See that graphic up top, the biggest growth is in L.A. (4.430%), Houston (3.483%), Santa Clara County (San Jose- 2.951%), Manhattan (2.304%),Dallas (2.090%), Seattle, (2.029%), Orange County (CA- 1.985%), San Francisco (1.674%), San Diego (1.572%), Chicago (1.160%), Alameda County (Oakland-- 1.040%), Brooklyn (0.778%), Miami (0.638%)... all counties Hillary won. The only high-growth counties Trump won are Phoenix (1.279%) and Ft. Worth (0.744%)-- prompting Brownstein to remind us that "it is the diverse major metropolitan areas that voted in preponderant numbers against Trump that have clearly emerged as the nation's engines of growth. In the process, the big blue metros have pulled further away from the small town and rural communities that provide the foundation of Trump's support."

The key to this divergence has been the large metro areas' dominance of the job opportunities created by the diffusion of digital technologies, largely in white-collar industries from business consulting to software development. Meanwhile, smaller places remain much more reliant on resource extraction (like oil and gas production), manufacturing and agriculture, which have not grown nearly as reliably, or explosively, as the digital economy.

"We have two quite different economies, and what is happening in recent years is growth is largely emanating from these big county metros," says Mark Muro, director of policy at the Metropolitan Policy Program. "These are not political trends. They are deep economic and technological long waves. And while we are in the midst of this long wave, we are not near the end of it."

These trends long predate Trump's presidency. But the President's policy agenda, which prioritizes reviving manufacturing and promoting energy development, generally favors the smaller places over the large metros-- many of which feel threatened by his initiatives, from restricting immigration and trade to limiting the deductibility of state and local taxes.

Muro, like many economic analysts, is dubious that anything Trump does can meaningfully unwind the consolidation of economic opportunity into the largest metropolitan areas. If anything, Muro says, the tilt toward the big blue metros has intensified in recent years. "We think this is a fundamental sea change," he says.

This pattern creates what could be called the prosperity paradox. Even as economic growth is concentrating in Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas thriving in the information economy, Republicans rooted in non-urban communities largely excluded from those opportunities now control all the levers of power in Washington and in most states. That disjuncture raises a pointed long-term question: How long can the places that are mostly lagging in the economy dictate the terms of politics and policy to the places that are mostly succeeding?

Generally through American history, political power has followed economic power. From the Civil War through the Great Depression, Republicans controlled the White House for 56 of 72 years as the party of the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing Northeast and Midwest. During that era, Democrats were marginalized politically as the champions of the agricultural and resource-producing South and West that felt sublimated by the Northern-based industrial and financial economic order.

In the decades just before and after World War II, Franklin Roosevelt built an impregnable New Deal Democratic coalition that married support from traditionally internationalist Eastern business and finance interests with new efforts to integrate the South and West into the national economy (through mechanisms ranging from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the World War II defense buildup). Similarly, the shift of economic clout to the Sun Belt after World War II prefigured the conservative movement's resurgence from the 1960s through the 1990s around Republicans Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Ronald Reagan of California.

Today the nation's core economic divide is less between regions than within them. After mostly declining through the late 20th century, the large metropolitan areas have restored their position as the locus of growth across the country by emerging as the epicenter of the information economy.

That advantage has allowed many metropolitan areas to achieve booming levels of growth and investment unmatched for decades: Tim Burgess, who served as acting Seattle mayor last fall, for instance, recently told me that the city is now enjoying its best economy since the Klondike gold rush in the 1890s. The intense nationwide competition for the second Amazon headquarters-- which produced finalists located solely in large metropolitan areas-- underscores how digital technologies are concentrating economic opportunity into the nation's biggest places.

...The tilt away from Trump is even more pronounced at the very top of the economic pyramid. Of the 30 counties that generated the largest share of new jobs from 2014 through 2016, Trump carried only two: Collin County (north of Dallas) and Maricopa (Arizona), where Republican-leaning suburbs slightly outvoted a strongly Democratic metro core in Phoenix.

Clinton carried all the other places leading the employment growth list. That included not only such blue state behemoths as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Seattle, but also the economic hubs in purple and even Republican-leaning states, from Miami, Oakland County (outside Detroit), to Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties in North Carolina, and Dallas, Bexar (San Antonio) and Travis counties (Austin) in Texas.

In all, Brookings calculated, Clinton won 79 of the 100 counties that contributed the most to economic growth from 2014 to 2016, and 76 of the 100 that generated the most job growth.

Trump's struggles even in the metro areas of red states underscore how virtually every region of the country is experiencing the same consolidation of economic opportunity into Democratic-leaning urban areas also typically marked by increasing racial diversity.

Clinton won a majority of the counties in only four states. Yet from 2014 through 2016, the counties she carried accounted for a majority of the job growth in 29 states, Brookings found. Her counties accounted for a majority of the growth in economic output in 30 states.

...[E]even across that ruby red terrain, there are striking exceptions: Clinton counties generated most of the output growth in Kansas and Utah, and most of the job growth in Montana.

In the near term, experts agree, this economic realignment has fueled the GOP's political resurgence. Observers in both parties agree that the sense of economic displacement in recent years has intensified the long-standing movement toward the GOP among small-town and rural communities initially rooted in unease over cultural and demographic change.

"Unhappy people vote," says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University. "The great irony is that as the economy has had growth in industries that are driven by technology or information, that's led to vast declines in traditional manufacturing and even traditional agriculture. Those areas declining economically have not been depopulated yet, and the economy has devastated them, so their only recourse is to vote for somebody who was different [Trump]."

Yet with economic success, the blue-leaning metro areas are also inexorably gaining population, in particular among the younger, diverse and college-educated voters increasingly central to the Democratic electoral coalition. Many public and private sector leaders in the big blue metros believe their economic success is threatened by the Trump agenda of hostility to immigration and free trade, the prioritization of tax cuts over investments in education and scientific research, the stoking of racial tensions, resistance to cultural change on issues such as gay and transgender rights, and the GOP move to limit the federal deductibility of state and local taxes.

..."It looks to me that there are more technologies out there that will augment ... the blue county economy," Muro says. "This is not a temporary thing. This is more akin to the industrial revolution: The information technology, innovation, artificial intelligence economy is going to be a 100-year cycle. We are now getting deeper into that period and we are seeing greater regional variations... and greater blue metro centrality to the economy."

And that means the nation is poised for even greater tension between an economic order that increasingly favors the largest places-- and a political dynamic that, for now, sublimates them to the smaller places that are economically falling behind.

Trump Has Been All Talk, No Action On The Opioid Crisis

Tom Petty was an old friend. The first time we met in person, it involved me watching with amusement while he Dwight Twilley and a journalist friend chasing each other around a hotel room for the last bit on coke in an envelope. I think that was right before or right after the release of American Girl. More recently, many decades later, Tom became the latest of several superstars-- Prince, Heath Ledger, Philip Seymour Hoffman-- to die from opioid use. Most people caught up in the epidemic aren't superstars and aren't multimillionaires and will only be mourned by their families and close friends. Chronic pain hits all strata of society-- and is making pharmaceutical companies profitable beyond reason. According to the CDC, the highest death rates from opioid overdoses are in Trump country-- West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky-- but there are no states that are immune from the scourge.

Trump's rhetoric about fighting a war against the opioid epidemic went over well in West Virginia counties like McDowell and Kanawha-- which had the highest overdose mortality rate in the U.S. Kanawha gave Trump 58% of its vote and McDowell gave him a startling 74.7%. In October Trump declared the opioid epidemic a national public health emergency. That looked like a big deal... but it wasn't, since there was no funding behind it, just more empty rhetoric, what former congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), a member of Trump's commission called "a charade" and "a sham... tantamount to reshuffling chairs on the Titanic...You can't expect to stem the tide of a public health crisis that is claiming over 64,000 lives per year without putting your money where your mouth is." Trump, he said is "playing politics instead of pursuing solutions for issues that impact the lives of Americans. For people and families struggling with addiction in this epidemic, it's essentially been a government shutdown from the start."

Yesterday, German Lopez, writing for Vox, reported that the consensus from experts and advocates agree: "a lot of talk, little action." It's basically been a year of empty p.r. Trump promised everything-- and delivered nothing.

There has been no move by Trump’s administration to actually spend more money on the opioid crisis. Key positions in the administration remain unfilled, even without nominees in the case of the White House’s drug czar office and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). And although Trump’s emergency declaration was renewed last week, it has led to essentially no action since it was first signed-- no significant new resources, no major new initiatives.

Chuck Ingoglia, a senior vice president at the National Council for Behavioral Health, which advocates on addiction issues, summarized the general takeaway of experts and advocates: “A lot of talk, little action. It’s great that the president says this is a priority. It’s great that he convened a task force so we have another paper that says the opioid crisis in America needs attention. But too little has happened to actually do anything about it.”

For experts and advocates, this is hard to understand. Taking action on the opioid epidemic could have been an easy win. It’s an issue that crosses partisan lines, with both Democrats and Republicans angling to do something about it. There’s evidence it’s very relevant to Trump’s own base. While experts talk about needing as much as tens of billions of dollars for the crisis over the next few years, that’s actually not much in federal budget terms-- a fraction of a percent for a government that spends trillions a year.

And yet the Trump administration has barely budged. Beyond declaring a public health emergency, the administration has done little to nothing to combat the crisis.

That’s not because the crisis is getting better. In 2016, the latest year with a full official count, there were nearly 64,000 drug overdose deaths in the US-- an all-time high. The rise in drug overdose deaths was a big reason that life expectancy fell for the second year in a row in the US, which had not happened since the early 1960s. And the early data suggests that 2017 was worse: According to preliminary figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were nearly 67,000 drug overdose deaths in the 12-month period through June 2017, up from more than 57,000 in the 12-month period through June 2016.

If the worst trends continue, Stat forecast that as many as 650,000 people will die within the next decade-- the equivalent of the entire population of Baltimore.

This is the reality facing Trump, the reality in which his administration has responded with next to nothing.

...The most notable actual policy change is the INTERDICT Act. This law’s effect, however, will likely be greatly limited. The federal government has for decades tried to intercept illicit drugs before they come into the US, but drugs have consistently gotten through in huge numbers anyway. Along these lines, experts are deeply skeptical that any effort to beef up border security, including Trump’s wall, would do much, if anything, to stop the flow of drugs into the US.

Meanwhile, Trump hasn’t appointed anyone to lead the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the office is mired by staffing problems-- including the hiring of a deputy chief of staff who apparently lied in parts of his résumé. The drug czar’s office, as it’s known colloquially, is crucial to coordinating federal efforts on drugs, according to experts.

Trump also has not nominated anyone to head the DEA, which is tasked with enforcing the nation’s drug laws.

In his proposals, Trump has also tried to cut the budget for the Office of National Drug Control Policy by 95 percent-- a move that his team initially walked back after facing bipartisan opposition during last year’s budget talks but reportedly may try again this year.

His budget plan also proposed keeping spending for addiction treatment relatively flat, while cutting prevention funding. The administration has also been silent on proposals in Congress to increase funding to the opioid epidemic, including Democratic plans to add tens of billions of dollars in spending to deal with the crisis.

...[E]xperts generally agree on what more federal resources should go to: They could be used to boost access to treatment (particularly highly effective medications for opioid addiction), pull back lax access to opioid painkillers while keeping them accessible to patients who truly need them, and adopt harm reduction policies that mitigate the damage caused by opioids and other drugs.

Advocates and experts argue about whether the extra resources should come through Medicaid, block grants for mental health and addiction care, or some other source. The consensus, though, is that much more federal support is needed-- in the tens of billions of dollars over the next few years.

“I was just in West Virginia this week. These counties are really devastated,” LaBelle said. “I know that’s been covered a lot. But it’s really something when you talk to a county official and you see how little money they have to put toward the epidemic.”

Some states are attempting to seriously confront this crisis. Vermont, for example, has built a “hub and spoke” system that treats addiction as a public health issue and integrates treatment into the rest of health care. The state was the only one in New England to have an overdose death rate that wasn’t significantly above the national average in 2016. (For more, check out my in-depth breakdown of Vermont’s system.)

But Vermont managed to build this new system in large part with federal dollars, particularly through Obamacare’s insurance expansion and a special Medicaid waiver that states can obtain through the health care law. It’s that kind of federal support that budget-strained states will need to deal with the opioid crisis.

These are the kinds of considerations and ideas that experts say can help the country move toward ending the opioid epidemic.

But in its first year, the Trump administration did nothing to make sure states can set up more programs like Vermont’s. So the opioid epidemic continues, killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.

Trump's job approval rating in West Virginia-- his strongest state in 2016-- has finally started to slip. 51% approve and 48% disapprove. His approval in states with the biggest opioid problems are down significantly since they voted for him:

• West Virginia- minus 20 points from +42
• Ohio- minus 13 points from +8
• Pennsylvania- minus 11 points from +1%
• Kentucky- minus 22 points from +30