Category: Trump Era Page 9 of 19

So, as you’ve probably heard by now, Trump is opposing the Covid “stimulus” bill and asking it be amended to include a $2,000 check, not a $600 one. Pelosi says he should pass the bill then they’ll pass another bill with the extra $1,400 (which is a ludicrous lie and we all know that).

The cries from many liberal supporters of the bill are that it is a good bill because it includes unemployment insurance relief increases of $300 a week. That’s sort of true, it’s the main good thing in the bill, but the problem is that a lot of people who need help aren’t currently getting UI.

Trump’s simply right about this, whatever his motives. Moreover, throughout the year he’s fairly consistently advocated more relief than Congress has provided.

But the standard play is unfolding. Screamed warnings that if the bill doesn’t pass no one will get relief, and that if it isn’t passed by the 26th, 12 million people will go off UI, so pass the bill, even if it’s inadequate. “We’re giving you something, in a bill packed with pork, and that’s not nothing, so take something.”

This is based on standard economic-neoliberal thinking. There’s a little decision game about it. You and another person are given a hundred dollars. The other person decides how the money is split. You can’t change how it is split, but you can veto getting any money.

The theory is that even if the person deciding how the money is split offers you a cent, you should take it. After all, you’re better off, right? In the real world, people don’t do that. If the split gets too low, they veto any money.

This is correct if you are dealing with a situation where the “game” will be played more often than once. If you don’t do it, you get a cent each time, and the other person gets almost all the money.

The correct action is a veto.

It’s why the Squad should have taken down Pelosi if she didn’t meet some essential demands — to show that they can’t be bullied, and that they have to be dealt with. If you wont use whatever power you have, you have no power, and you get nothing but table scraps.

In this sense, Trump is able to be “wrong” because he’s lame duck now. If he was going to be around for another four years, this threat would have real power because he could gum a lot of things up and he could insist those 12 million people be put back on UI (it’s not like an amended bill couldn’t do that). Biden is very unlikely to veto such a bill.

But he’s not wrong that $600 checks are too little and an insult. That’s not even a month’s rent for most people.

And if he runs in 2024, a lot of people will remember this attempt to get them more money as his last fight.

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GUEST POST BY ZACHARIUS BRACISZEWICZ

I’ve said a number of times now that my intuition is that Trump will be gone soon. My current intuition is within five weeks of today. But the more I look at the numbers, the more true it seems to me, and might be worth unpacking.

It seems clear that Trump is the figurehead for an informal oligarchy of CEO’s and finance heavy-hitters, and they are rapidly developing a ‘back to work’ consensus, to be delivered by Trump at some point in the immediate future, mostly to try and staunch the catastrophic market losses they are all suffering.

But, on the other hand, the US is just starting the steep ascent of its exponential infection curve, and therefore, its death rate. In certain places, mostly LA and New York, they might be able to implement lockdowns sufficiently strong to flatten their curves, but this will be far outweighed by a complete lack of distancing and quarantine in other regions, and the resulting backflow cases into areas with better protocols.

It appears right now that total deaths are doubling every three to four days. There are 780 deaths so far. Five weeks would be between eight and 12 more doublings. That’s, on the low side, around 200,000-400,000 deaths. And this is being very conservative, I think. Fortunate areas of the US will look like Italy at it’s worst, and quite a bit will look more like Iran. (As an aside, the parallels between the social/ideological forces in red states vs those in Iran are quite interesting to think about.)

Anyway. Let’s say half a million deaths in under two months from now. Nothing like that has happened in living memory. It will be completely undeniable. Unspinnable. And it will hit the Trump base hardest of all. And the market impacts will dwarf anything we’ve seen so far. It will, quite simply, blow any consensus currently keeping Trump in power to pieces. The money people will need him out, so they can try to restore some confidence and recoup losses, and his political base will be dragged under by a wave of ill or dead constituents. There will be no rallies–that would be abject insanity. No one will be listening anymore to his pronouncements, as they will be manifestly, grotesquely, false. There will probably not even be White House briefings at that point. He might try to start a war, but I simply do not believe the military would go along with that. There might even be a coup if he tried.

At that point, he will be in a vice: Either strengthen the lockdowns, in which case the money people will dispense with him, or release the lockdowns totally and risk mass insurrection on many levels.

His best bet, at that stage, to avoid removal and probably jail is to resign, blame whoever, and have Pence pardon him for everything. At that point, things will be so bad I doubt anyone will have a problem with it. He will just need to be out, so that professionals can tackle the crisis he created.

That’s it. I don’t really see any holes in the theory. You could adjust some of the numbers a bit, but exponential growth is exponential growth, and unless I’m drastically wrong in some respect, it would only change the timeline by a week or two.

The alternative to his removal is complete pandemonium and the collapse of the United States as a world power, and even I am not that pessimistic, or optimistic, depending on my mood.