The White House Is Not A Box Of Chocolates, Part 1

Surely the apt metaphor for Trump World 2.0 was spoken on the big screen by Forrest Gump more than 30 years ago. So to paraphrase—

“Trumpian policy is like a box of chocolates. You never know what your gonna get.”

That is, there has been a decent outpouring of good stuff, large and small. We’re referring to bull’s eye hits like the Donald’s ixnay on paper straws, the penny, the global climate hoax, DEI idiocy, green energy boondoggles, post-two gender biology and the rat-hole of waste at the USAID. Beyond that, turning the enormously gifted and committed Elon Musk loose on the Deep State bureaucracy is in itself a remarkable stroke for sanity on the banks of the Potomac.

But, unfortunately, we are also getting a lot of foul balls in the form of random attacks on the US trade accounts, the US labor force and America’s already wobbly fiscal foundations. And that’s to say nothing of utter stink bombs like annexing Greenland and Canada, standing up a Sovereign Wealth Fund, retaking the Panama Canal and occupying and rebuilding a Palestinian-free Gaza Strip.

Most of this list of “buts” is going to lead to big time trouble that is almost impossible to fully imagine. Particularly, the Donald’s unhinged wars on imports and immigrants could actually turn an already weak, debt-entombed national economy into a veritable basket case.

Likewise, the United States is already way too big to govern effectively and via honest democratic politics. But throw in another half of the North American continent on top of a global trade war and sudden depletion of America’s migrant labor force and you really have to shout: Stop with the high jinks already!

Sure, you can alternatively say—cool your jets. The Donald is just doing the art of the deal. That is, he’s taking exaggerated positions—allegedly playing “crazy” like a fox—in order to get some more achievable fixes and deals done down the road.

We don’t buy it. Not for a New York minute. The Donald is not remotely a strategic bargainer playing three dimensional chess a dozen moves down the board. Actually, it’s the very opposite—Trump’s just a loud mouth attention-seeker who is likely to say almost anything that strikes his fancy or sounds clever to a real estate hondler who still knows virtually nothing about high policy.

In any event, what ails the American economy cannot by remediated by a frenzy of presidential deal-making. We do not need an all-powerful Cesarean ruling by an endless stream of ad hocery, whims and political theatrics emanating from the Oval Office. What’s desperately needed, instead, is a return to sound monetary and fiscal policies and a drastic shrinkage of the state’s footprint both at home and abroad.