A Day In Trump World—The Good,The Bad And The Stupid

Any conservative who still thinks Donald Trump will Make America Great Again really ought to stop smoking whatever it is that’s producing their acute brain fog.

The fact is, the nation’s 47th president is a reckless, principle-free, egomaniacal Cesarean—same as the 45th president. In that modality he functions essentially as a random policy generator, unleashing a flow of the good, the bad and the stupid—depending upon whatever glandular impulse strikes him at any given moment because otherwise he has no plan, no compass and no consistent policy agenda other than making noise and getting attention 24/7.

That this modus operandi is more likely to exacerbate the already deep political conflict and chaos in Washington than actually foster social and economic improvement on main street was more than evident in the falderal of the last several days. In a matter of just hours, the Donald managed to—

• launch the shortest trade war in history, which was apparently a drug war that is far from over.

• unleash Elon Musk to score a bullseye shutting down USAID.

• authorize his hapless Secretary of the Treasury to launch a Sovereign Wealth Fund at a joint that’s flat broke with $36 trillion of debt already and spewing so much daily red ink as to ensure this figure will hit $70 trillion within the decade and $150 trillion by the halfway points in the 21st century.

So it behooves us to elucidate upon the crazy mix of screaming contradictions, blatant nonsense and solid hits that run through all of these random emissions from the vicinity of the Oval Office.

As to the third item, you have to chuckle loudly. Washington is utterly incontinent fiscally yet the Donald sees fit to jabber about a wholly imaginary “sovereign wealth fund” when Uncle Sam has no wealth or assets to put into it.

Moreover, a government-run sovereign wealth fund constitutes the very worst kind of malefaction against the principles of free markets and minimal government because it amounts to industrial policy—the control and allocation of economic resources by state bureaucrats and politicians. So even if Washington had assets to invest, the very last thing you want in the Great Swamp on the Potomac is to enable the pork barrel artists on Capitol Hill an opportunity to tamper with hundreds of billions worth of investable funds.

As it happens, of course, the only real sovereign wealth funds of material size are at places like Saudi Arabia and Norway, and these odd ducks in a world of mainly fiscally impaired governments are based on the socialist ownership and/or control of petroleum reserves. Fortunately, however, when it comes to the ample potential hydrocarbon reserves beneath US public lands, the Donald has managed to draw the correct “drill baby, drill” straw and therefore seeks to maximize Federal leasing to efficient, at-risk private enterprise drillers and producers.