Maybe Sesame Street Has An Answer

How Best to Understand This Administration

Remember Sesame Street And The Alphabet?

You may remember that Sesame Street has offered sessions that focus on one letter of the alphabet, with examples of how that letter could be used to spell words. Given the constant mess and communications kerfuffle that is the Trump administration, maybe the Sesame Street approach of one focus at a time might help.

So, ladies and gentlemen, let us consider The Letter C – a letter with TONS of applications for this administration. We will look at a few of them today.

C is for Chaos

This is a core element of Trump world, for two reasons. One is the deliberate strategy of constant change and confusion, making it harder for opposing forces to organize and counter strike. The second is this is an essential part of Trump’s personality, a trait reinforced by a lack of in depth planning on almost anything except a given objective at anyone time. This is not a crowd in which the question “What if?” ever occurs.

So recognize that chaos is here to stay as long as this group is in power. You might find it helpful to think of it as background noise used as distraction. It is much more than that for foreign governments and international business, but as US citizens we may choose to just ignore at as much as possible.

C is for Cruelty

This element is in evidence everywhere now, but none more so than with ICE and the ugly mess that deportation has become. I don’t know about you, but for me the scenes of detainees being crammed into cells, marched in forced and difficult bend-over positions, and similar scenes break my heart. This looks like the kind of thing we saw in Germany during Crystal Nacht. We are such a better people than this. Conduct like this is not necessary for control. It is a blot on our soul. Truly, ICE has gone rogue.

Like Chaos, Cruelty has two roots here. One is to use it to control those in government hands and to intimidate others, making them think the same could happen to them. But the other element is that there are people in power now who simply enjoy this. They take direct pleasure from cruelty. These are sick people.

C is for Competition vs Cooperation

This one is at the very core of Trump’s mental state and shapes almost everything he does. Much that government does, in domestic and international politics is, of course, a form of competition. But in a sane approach, one also looks for opportunities to cooperate. That includes making some tradeoffs, so everyone gains something, gives up something, in the interest of general progress and building trust for further endeavors.

This is especially important domestically. In general, US presidents get elected with a less than 5% vote majority. That means that about half the country chose someone else than the president. To make governance an all or nothing game, to reject any compromise is to tell half the country they do not count and have no voice at all. Not of much use in building a United States of America. Just the opposite.

Trump is completely unable to envision a process other than one side wins, the other loses. He is emotionally and intellectually incapable of even grasping the concept. Thus a transactional approach to everything. Relationships and alliances have no standing. Most world leaders have figured this out by now. As a result, the US is now generally considered an unreliable partner in anything – not security, not human rights, not defense and security.

C is for Clumsy

I really meant Incompetence here, but hey, we needed a C word, so Clumsy it is. We saw a lot of this in the first Trump administration – ranging from spelling errors in official documents to obvious lack of knowledge how anything actually works in government. The second administration brought in more hired guns that knew about such things, but still the problem persists. This time around it is most evident at the cabinet officer level. By any measure, this is the most amateurish and unqualified cabinet in all of American history. That at least will slow a bit the damage they do.

One of the almost comical examples cited early was a directive by the so-called Secretary of Defense to get rid of anything that referred to gays or anything remotely related. For a while there, that led to removal of pictures of the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb. The aircraft, the Enola Gay, was named after the pilot’s mother.

More serious examples are seen in the Federal workplace. In many agencies, loads of people were fired (arbitrarily, but that is another conversation). In those same agencies, others who had been working remotely where ordered back to the office on short notice. When they got their they found zero office supplies, as procurement accounts had been frozen at $1. No copy paper, no writing instruments, no forms – no toilet paper!

These kinds of thing happens when you get arrogant amateurs in charge AND they are too lazy to do the homework.

C is for Culpability

Actually, this one is missing in this administration. No one, most of all Trump, will ever take responsibility for any error or any bad decision. They will ALWAYS blame someone else – it’s a leftover problem from the last administration, the Deep State did it, the reports are false news, it’s not really a problem, etc.

Once again, Trump is psychologically incapable of admitting a mistake and that mindset is filtering down through his administration. If you do not admit a mistake, you will never get it right. In a similar vein, if the other side is always wrong and you are always right, you are not a serious person to be followed. Real life has speed bumps. Own them or become one yourself.

C is for Consistency

This is one that everyone longs for but is completely absent in this administration. If everything is transactional, and outcomes are only win/lose, the idea of being consistent, reasonably predictable to friend and foe, and building confidence in potential team mates are not going to happen. Long range planning now runs to about Thursday of the next week, at best.

Governments around the world now know that US policy is likely to change on any given day, depending on what mood Trump is in when he finally gets out of bed and heads to the office (or the golf course). This makes planning for international matters, be they economic or defense related, is only a crap shoot at best.

And in many ways, it is even worse for business. How in the world can a business, especially a small one, make procurement and pricing decisions. Take a minute and count how many changes in tariffs have come out in the past 90 days. The lack of consistency weakens America on every front. I know, there are Trumpers who say this empowers Trump, making him hard to game. That dog will not hunt, folks. Keeping your enemies guessing a bit is smart. Making your friends and the economy throw up their hands in hopelessness makes no one stronger.

C is for Corruption

This is a big one, although it gets nowhere near the publicity it should. Trump 2016 was, by any reasonable measure, the most corrupt administration in modern American history. This one is already orders of magnitude worse. Recent stories about profiting through insider knowledge of recent market changes are examples. Clearly Congress and the administration will take zero corrective actions on any of this – they love it. I am hoping some state attorneys general in the home states of offenders will pick this up.

We all saw this coming. Trump’s constant personal profiteering last time around showed what was coming. Firing essentially all the Inspector Generals – the people who police from inside organizations – told us all we need to know. Trump has basically a mafia mindset on this stuff. Corruption is a privilege of power. Here’s hoping the next administration goes on the hunt and cleans up to make the case of you do the crime, you do the time.

It won’t happen on this watch. Trump and DOGE are gutting the IRS, as well as the tax division of the Justice Department. Reliable estimates are that the richest 1% of Americans already underpay their taxes by as much as $205 billion each year. For each $1 the IRS invests in auditing the tax returns of the richest 1%, it collects $13 in additional tax revenue. Trump and his buddies make the deficit even larger by making it easy to cheat on taxes for the rich.

A Footnote or Two

I join the growing ranks of economists and business leaders who see a recession in the near future as almost certain. We may well see rising inflation as well, giving us stagflation, which takes a long time to dig out of, if history is any guide. A lot of people are focused on the stock market. A better clue is what is happening in the bond market, and the news there is not good from any perspective.

How is this possible? A lot of people assume that Republicans, many having business backgrounds, likely run a better economy. With Trump of course, we have a “businessman” who rans six businesses into bankruptcy. How do you not make money with a casino?!

But it is not just Trump. The last five recessions all started while a Republican was in the White House (Reagan. G.H.W. Bush, G.W. Bush twice, and Trump). Jeffrey Frankel from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government reports that “A remarkable 9 of the last 10 recessions have started when a Republican was president. The odds that this outcome would have occurred just by chance are even more remote: one out of 100.”

Elections have consequences.

Bill Clontz

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