A Few Thoughts On The Future

I have refrained from speculating about what Donald Trump will actually do as President because, frankly, I have no idea. Primarily, that is because the media did such a pathetic job of actually pinning Trump down on any policy, no matter how ridiculous the proposal. And, to paraphrase Bill Maher, Trump could totally flip his policy stance from the beginning of a sentence to the end. The biggest wall ever became a virtual wall and then back to being a wall and is now talked about as a fence. Similar contortions occurred with the deportation force and the Muslim ban. So the default position should be to take Trump at his word for the most extreme proposal he has made on every policy. That is surely what his voters are expecting. Already, we have seen no move by Trump or his surrogates to condemn the rash of hate crimes that is sweeping the country. Rather, they continue to focus on mythical paid protestors as being behind the demonstrations against Trump and demand that Obama and Clinton speak out against these people peacefully expressing their constitutional rights. Not an auspicious start. And we know the establishment Republican party is intent on essentially dismantling the New Deal and re-establishing a Jim Crow environment by restricting voting rights. So we should always presume the worst.

In addition, Trump will absolutely hate being President. By definition, it is a very lonely and difficult job. Trump has already expressed a desire to be less engaged by not being in Washington so much and in his desire to continue to go around the country holding rallies. So the tension will always be between his need to be somewhat of a control freak and his lack of interest and resulting delegation of decision making to Pence, Giuliani, etc. Who knows how that tension will be resolved on each individual issue. Incredibly, there may be issues where it would be preferable for Democrats to actually have Trump involved and engaged. (I can’t believe I wrote that last sentence.)

Finally, do not believe a word about the Trump administration’s plans that comes from the mainstream media. Trump, Bannon, and his team know how the play the media for the fools they are. Trump despises the media and will probably severely limit their access, meaning that the press will rely even more heavily on “unnamed sources” who will merely be passing along propaganda. They know the media is always looking for that mythical “middle ground” which has meant for years that Democrats have to “compromise” by moving to the right. You see this with the calls for Clinton and Obama to “normalize” Trump by saying we all need to support him; by the way media glommed on to the offhand comment that some parts of Obamacare might be retained; and by the resistance to call out Trump for not condemning the racist attacks around the country. So the Trump administration will feed these hints to the media who will say Trump is moderating but the actually legislation will turn out to never include any of those “moderating” elements that were hinted at. And the media will be shocked but probably blame the Democrats for not negotiating on the issue or some other nonsense.

There are many reasons to fear what will happen in the days ahead. But adding to that level of fear is the fact that we really have no idea to what extremes a Trump administration will go. We have always had a pretty good idea of the parameters that any administration, Democratic or Republican would be working within. Until now. And that alone should make us all afraid.