"“Trump Believes There’s a Coup”: Freaked by the Times Op-Ed, the President Is Seeing Enemies Everywhere"
T.L. Friedman, has a 'group therapy' theory about the NYT anonymous Op-Ed which goes a bit toward Trump's general mistrust of most everyone around him. Trump probably couldn't get to the notion of the anonymous culprit being more than one by himself, but if he did it could drive him closer to deservedly being put into wrap-around attire reserved for some different problem people.
Then Friedman ranges widely in this one. Except for his love of big corporate tax cuts the rest of it reads pretty well.
The G.O.P. crowd who accepted the devil’s bargain is huge.
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
Sept. 11, 2018
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
More and more, I wonder if the disgruntled senior Trump administration official who wrote the anonymous Op-Ed .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html .. in The Times was actually representing a group — like a “Murder on the Orient Express” plotline where every senior Trump adviser was in on it. Why? Because the article so perfectly captured the devil’s bargain they’ve all struck with this president: Donald Trump is amoral, dishonest and disturbed, a man totally unfit to be president, but, as the anonymous author self-servingly wrote, “There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”
That’s the anonymous-G.O.P. credo today: We know Trump is a jerk, but you’ve gotta love the good stuff — you’ve got to admit that his tax cuts, deregulation, destruction of Obamacare and military buildup have fueled so much growth, defense spending and record stock market highs that we’re wealthier and more secure as a country, even if Trump is nuts. So our consciences are clear.
This view is not without foundation. Economic growth and employment have clearly been on a tear since Trump took office. I’m glad about that.
But what if Trump is actually heating up our economy by burning all the furniture in the house? It’s going to be nice and toasty for us — at least for a while — but where will our kids sleep?
What if Trump’s tax cuts, deregulation, scrapping of Obamacare without any alternative and military spending surge were actually ill-thought-through, short-term-focused initiatives that all ignored expert opinion — because they mostly emerged from off-the-cuff remarks at Trump pep rallies — and collectively amount to a sugar high that not only will be unsustainable but will leave our economy far more vulnerable in the long term?
President Trump promised to support the coal industry at a rally in Charleston, W.Va., in August. Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
Let’s take that view for a spin: I favor corporate tax cuts — big ones. But I would have offset them with a carbon tax, a tax on sugar and a small financial transaction tax. That way, we’d unleash the energy of our corporations while mitigating climate change, spurring the next great global industry — clean power — curbing childhood asthma and diabetes and not adding to our national debt, thereby making ourselves more resilient as a country.
When Trump simultaneously cuts corporate taxes and withdraws America from the Paris climate accord, tries to revive the coal industry by lowering pollution standards and weakens fuel economy standards for U.S.-made cars and trucks, he is vastly adding to the financial debts and carbon debts that will burden our children.
And he is doing this despite many economists warning that increasing the deficit when your economy is already growing nicely is really, really reckless — because you may need that money to stimulate your way out of the next recession.
And he is doing this at a time when virtually every climate scientist has warned that global-warming-driven extreme weather events — droughts, floods and wildfires — are sharply on the rise and we are staring through the last window of time to mitigate climate change so that we can manage the impacts that are already unavoidable and avoid the impacts that will be terrifyingly unmanageable.
In June, The Associated Press reported .. https://www.apnews.com/48e914635f85474ea0df5502e1e5e78f .. on the latest International Monetary Fund survey of the U.S. economy, which concluded that as a result of Trump’s “tax cuts and expected increases in defense and domestic programs, the federal budget deficit as a percentage of the total economy will exceed 4.5 percent of G.D.P. by next year — nearly double what it was just three years ago.” Such a “big boost … has not been seen in the United States since President Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s boosted spending on the Vietnam War at the same time it was adopting Johnson’s Great Society programs.”
The National Debt Clock topped $21 trillion in July.CreditMichael Brochstein/Sipa, via Associated Press
Faced with so much debt, which the country will not be able to grow out of, The A.P. story continued, paraphrasing the I.M.F. report, the U.S. “may need to take politically painful steps,” such as cutting Social Security benefits and imposing higher taxes on consumers. (We’ll probably also have to limit spending on new roads, bridges and research.)
[INSERT: and new gas pipes in areas where early 19C ones still exist such as Andover Mass.]
You might want to let your kids know that.
You might also want to share with your kids the recent study from a group of Australian climate scientists who modeled the damage to different economies if we don’t work together to achieve the Paris climate accord’s goal of limiting the increase in global average temperature by 2100 to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The rise in sea level will require massive movements of people and cities, and the soaring heat levels will cause losses in agricultural productivity and declines in human health across the globe. As a result, the study found .. https://phys.org/news/2018-08-trillion-lost-temperatures-degrees.html , the economic impacts of ignoring the Paris limits will be “comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s, with its global fall in G.D.P. of 15 percent, except these will occur year after year, with no way for effective redress. … Many governments around the globe won’t be able to cope and will, to put it simply, fail.”
There were responsible ways to cut taxes on things we want more of — like corporate investment — while boosting them on things we want less of — like carbon, reckless financial speculation and diabetes — that could have stimulated jobs and growth but also left us more financially and environmentally resilient. But both Trump and the anonymous-G.O.P. crowd rejected them, just as they rejected smart improvements to Obamacare, preferring a total scrapping.
So when Republicans say they’re disgusted by Trump’s ignorance and indecency but love his “deregulations” and “tax reforms” — those very sanitized words — this is what they love: taking huge fiscal and environmental risks — effectively throwing away our bumpers and spare tires that we may soon need to drive through the next financial or climate storm — for a short-term economic and political high.
How different is that from Trump’s indecency? Let’s be clear, Trump cheated on his wife, but his party’s now cheating on their kids. You tell me who’s worse.
And don’t get me started on the recently signed $716 billion defense budget for the 2019 fiscal year — a spending hike so dramatic, as defense analyst Lawrence Korb pointed out .. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/news/2018/02/28/447248/trumps-defense-budget/ , that it means since Trump took office under two years ago, “the defense budget will have grown by $133 billion, or 23 percent.” And there’s no major war going on.
Here again, the anonymous-Republicans equate a bigger defense budget and more weapons with strategy and strength. Thus, by definition, if Trump increased defense spending, he did something right. Did I miss the series of congressional hearings with independent military experts that addressed the question: What are the new (and old) threats we’re facing today, and how will these new and vastly expensive weapons systems enable us to better address them?
Some of the smartest military analysts I know think that investing in so many big, new weapons systems is the equivalent of taking sledgehammers to droplets of quicksilver, considering that so many enemies we face today are super-empowered individuals or nations that have opted to hurt us with cheap cyberweapons and cheap but massive swarming tactics.
Did any of these Republican lawmakers take note of the Iranian naval exercise in the gulf in August? The Iranians took some big old ships from the shah’s days and said “you will be the American Navy.” And then they used swarming tactics to ravage those big ships — deploying scores of very small, cheap speedboats and kamikaze coastal craft, armed with light missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.
John Arquilla, a senior strategist at the Naval Postgraduate School, likes to say that in today’s networked world — where ISIS was buying drones from online shopping sites and turning them into aerial grenade launchers — “many and small can beat few and large.”
The Chinese, he notes, “are building sea power without a traditional navy,” focusing on building hundreds of cheap, small missile and torpedo boats to take on our multibillion-dollar aircraft carriers and flotillas. Moreover, Arquilla notes, “when you have such a massive defense budget, you don’t have to ask yourself hard questions” such as: What the hell are we still doing in Afghanistan after 17 years of “failing to reroute the currents of history and culture there and make the place into a democracy by armed force?”
Members of the Chinese Navy taking part in a review in the South China Sea in April. VCG, via Getty Images
In sum, I believe in a robust military and U.S. global engagement. But this does not automatically translate into support for a radically higher defense budget.
So the next time anonymous-G.O.P. lawmakers tell you that while Trump is a moral wreck — and they are saving the nation from his wretchedness — they love his tax cuts, deregulation and military budget, ask them to describe the strategic vision behind that defense budget. Ask them if they really are unbothered by massively increasing the deficit at a time when our economy was already growing — just when we should be saving cash to soften our next recession. Ask them if they really think it is smart to roll back our auto mileage standards, when the last time we did that the more fuel-efficient Japanese and Korean auto industries nearly killed Detroit.
Lastly, ask them if they have kids — and how they think all these Trumpian policies that they like, even if they don’t like Trump, will serve the next generation.
Why did the slump last so long? Cynical, bad-faith Republican politics.
By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist
[...]
But the most important reason the great slump went on so long was scorched-earth Republican opposition to anything and everything that might have helped offset the fallout from the housing bust.
When I say “scorched earth,” I’m not being hyperbolic. Let’s not forget that in the summer of 2011 Republicans in Congress threatened to provoke a new financial crisis by refusing to raise the debt limit. Their goal was to blackmail President Barack Obama into cutting spending at a time when unemployment was still 9 percent and U.S. real borrowing costs were close to zero.
Now, Republicans claimed that their opposition to anything that might limit mass unemployment was driven by a deep commitment to fiscal responsibility. But this was complete hypocrisy — something that was obvious to anyone who looked at the actual content of G.O.P. budget proposals, which gave smoke and mirrors a bad name. You had to be extremely credulous to take fake G.O.P. deficit hawkery seriously; unfortunately, there were a lot of credulous pundits out there.
Anyway, the events of the past two years have made the reality of what happened crystal clear. The very same politicians who piously declared that America couldn’t afford to spend money supporting jobs in the face of a deep, prolonged slump just rammed through a huge, deficit-exploding tax cut for corporations and the wealthy even though the economy is currently near full employment. No, they haven’t abandoned their commitment to fiscal responsibility; they never cared about deficits in the first place.
So if you want to understand why the great slump that began in 2008 went on so long, blighting so many American lives, the answer is politics. Specifically, policy failed because cynical, bad-faith Republicans were willing to sacrifice millions of jobs rather than let anything good happen to the economy while a Democrat sat in the White House.
Donald Trump is Tiring of Defense Secretary James Mattis, Thinks He is Secretly a Democrat: Report
"“Trump Believes There’s a Coup”: Freaked by the Times Op-Ed, the President Is Seeing Enemies Everywhere"
By Ramsey Touchberry On 9/15/18 at 12:09 PM
VIDEO
Department of Defense Secretary James Mattis is no stranger to disagreements with President Donald Trump. The president, according to more than a dozen White House, congressional, and current and former DOD officials cited byThe New York Times, is growing tired of his defense chief and believes Mattis could be a Democrat.
A new deputy national security adviser, Mira Ricardel, who has had past disagreements with Mattis, was added to the White House in May. Ricardel and Mattis reportedly clashed when it came to Pentagon appointees. Mattis privately said she was intentionally blocking nominees. The move to add her as a national security adviser, coupled with sources who spoke with The Times, suggests Trump could replace Mattis after the November midterm elections.
Mattis and Trump have privately, and publicly, been at odds over numerous policies since the defense secretary assumed his role the day Trump took office. The lack of praise, according to officials, has driven a wedge between the two and caused the president to question his role as the top Pentagon official. Two aides said the president wants Mattis to be more like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who offers more support and praise.
Aides said that because Mattis disagrees with Trump and does not want to publicly offer insincere praise, Mattis largely remains silent.
“Secretary Mattis lives by a code that is part of his DNA,” Captain Jeff Davis told The Times. He served as a former spokesman for Mattis and retired from the Navy last month. “He is genetically incapable of lying, and genetically incapable of disloyalty.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Newsweek on Saturday that allegations Trump is mulling a replacement for Mattis are "completely untrue. The president addressed directly last week as well," Sanders added.
Mattis has long been viewed as someone who stands between Trump and potentially impetuous or dangerous actions that many of his aides fear he might take on an angry whim.
In Bob Woodward’s new book Fear: Trump in the White House, Mattis reportedly said Trump “acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader .. https://www.newsweek.com/mattis-trump-fifth-grader-woodward-book-1104417 ’” after they discussed why the U.S. military spent so much money and resources on having a strong presence on the Korean Peninsula. Mattis told the president it was to “prevent World War III.”
In a statement released by the White House earlier this month, Mattis called Woodward's book "fiction" and the idea he would "show contempt" for Trump or "tolerate disrespect" toward the president was "a product of someone's rich imagination."
Mattis also denied being the author of a New York Times op-ed written by an anonymous administration official who said there was a “quiet resistance” that existed within the president’s administration.
Update: This story has been updated to include comments from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
James Mattis, the last “adult” in the Trump administration, resigns as defense secretary
---- Sept. 2018 - "“Trump Believes There’s a Coup”: Freaked by the Times Op-Ed, the President Is Seeing Enemies Everywhere [...] Besides family, one of the only people Trump continues to trust is Stephen Miller. “The op-ed has validated Miller’s view, which was also Steve Bannon’s, that there’s an ‘administrative state’ out to get Trump,” a Republican close to the White House said. “There is a coup, and it’s not slow-rolling or concealed,” Bannon told me. “Trump believes there’s a coup,” a person familiar with his thinking said. Trump’s relationship with Secretary of Defense James Mattis, which was already strained, has become almost nonexistent, a former official said." ----
Trump announced the retired general would depart early next year in a Thursday tweet.
By Alex Ward and Jen Kirby Updated Dec 20, 2018, 5:56pm EST
James Mattis will leave his post as the secretary of defense at the end of February. Zach Gibson/Getty Images
Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned on Thursday, writing in an unsparing letter that he was stepping down because the president had “the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”
Mattis’s resignation comes a day after President Donald Trump made the abrupt decision to withdraw 2,000 troops from Syria, and his resignation letter notes the differences in Mattis’s worldview compared to Trump’s.
In the letter, Mattis reiterates his “core belief” in America’s alliance and partnerships, specifically NATO, and America’s need to be “resolute and unambiguous” in challenging countries such as China and Russia.
“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion on these issues,” Mattis wrote. “We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.”
[...]
Mattis’s departure will leave the Trump administration more chaotic
Mattis .. https://www.vox.com/world/2018/5/9/17335908/trump-iran-deal-announcement-mattis , a retired four-star general who went by the call sign “Chaos” in the Marine Corps, was considered by many to be one of the president’s most critical Cabinet members in part because he acted as a strong check against Trump’s worst national security impulses.
With him gone, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will likely face less resistance as they offer more hawkish advice on North Korea, Iran, and more.
Mattis had a mixed record of success with Trump. Mattis opposed pulling out of the Iran deal; moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; creating a Space Force .. https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/5/15905018/space-force-trump-congress-russia-china ; and starting a trade war with America’s allies. But the now-former secretary failed to persuade Trump to see things his way on each of those issues, despite his good rapport with the president.
Ultimately, though, Mattis’s tumultuous time paints a picture of a sharp mind and defender of America’s traditional role in the world who struggled to agree with his boss on matters of life and death. And it seems clear from Mattis’s resignation letter that he feels he can no longer perform that task.
The worry now is that, with Mattis gone, Trump is left with few if any moderating influences on his national security team. Mattis — along with National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, both ousted — was frequently labeled one of the few “adults” in the room whose military and strategic expertise would help him gain Trump’s trust and moderate the president’s most dangerous foreign policy impulses.
Like much in Trump’s world, it didn’t happen quite that way. But many still say they’ll miss Mattis — and that the US foreign policy may be worse off without him.
“I’d rather have Jim Mattis in the room than not in the room,” Leon Panetta, one of former President Obama’s defense secretaries, told Vox in March, nearly 10 months before Mattis’s ouster. “His legacy will be he fought the good battle. But because of the nature of the president, it was one he couldn’t win.”
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