The Trump Doctrine

On Donald Trump: I have some good news and some bad news

First the bad news. Stop tweeting! His comments are jarring, immature and those of an egotistical bully. I said the same during his first term and I feel even more strongly now. Of course there are those who will defend whatever the president does, much like those that defended and keep defending Joe Biden. Mind you, I am not anti-Trump. I am anti-Trump, the tweeter. He continues to insult Fed chair, Jerome Powell.

“With Energy Costs way down, food prices (including Biden’s egg disaster!) substantially lower, and most other ‘things’ trending down, there is virtually No Inflation. With these costs trending down so nicely, just what I predicted they would do, there can almost be no inflation, but there can be a SLOWING of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW,”

“Powell has always been ‘To Late,’ except when it came to the Election period when he lowered in order to help Sleepy Joe Biden, later Kamala, get elected. How did that work out?”

“If I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast, believe me,” “I’m not happy with him.”

“Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”

These tweets are a bad look and makes one wonder if Trump is losing it. Is he feeling the pressure from the market tanking, the dollar falling and the Treasury bond rates rising as reactions to his tariffs? The last round of insults caused the Dow Jones to fall by 972 points and the dollar hit new lows against the major currencies. Trump is trying to set up Powell as the fall guy if his policies fail. However, he isn’t fooling anyone. He needs to end the threats against Powell and the uncertainty about tariffs. Although Trump favors weakening the dollar, maybe the sharp rise in Treasury yields will cause him to back off his childish tweets. But Powell is not the only one. Remember all the ones about (Crooked) Hillary Clinton and (Sleepy) Joe Biden? In fact the New York Times has compiled a list of 281 people that Trump has insulted so far on social media. Maybe the president thinks that insulting a person enough times will result in a change in behavior. I don’t think he can intimidate Powell. I don’t even know if he has even sat down and had a conversation with him. What he needs to do is have a weekly scheduled meeting with the Fed chair and discuss matters privately rather than loudly on social media.

Now the good news.

This administration has done more in its first one hundred days than most administrations do in eight years. Of course, it was left a mess by the Biden Administration. DEI had infested corporations, universities, the federal government and the US military. Critical race theory is a Marxist doctrine that was teaching our kids to hate each other. I remember what a black high school physics teacher once told me that CRT was being used to cover up the failure of teachers to teach black kids and to blame it on racism. He said “What am I to tell my white students who are struggling?” The Green New Deal which seemed to be a bad joke when it was first introduced by Bernie Sanders and AOC turned out to be Biden’s industrial policy. Bad regulations were enacted and trillions thrown to their green buddies on wasteful, inefficient projects. Natural gas terminals were ordered shuttered. Millions of acres of resource rich lands were closed to exploration. Coal plants were driven out of business. Al Gore got rich. Biden opened the border and let over 10 million illegals flood into the country, many of them totally undesirable. Biden turned a deaf ear to the fentanyl, child trafficking and sexual assaults occurring among the illegals. The government was bloated – is overbloated a word? Government spending was out of control rife with waste and fraud. All of this led to powerful and entrenched special interests in government, academia, and corporate America that was not going to go away quietly. Resist might be the mantra of the leftists on campus but it is the mantra of all those whose wallets and interests are adversely impacted by Trump.

Biden’s foreign policy was a disaster. Trump came in and immediately started negotiating to end the war in Ukraine. He pledged more support to Israel and backed their stated desire to completely wipe away Hamas. He threatened Iran. He bombed the Houthis. He kicked out the South African ambassador and offered the Afrikaner farmers entry and an easy path to American citizenship. However, it seemed that he only picked on the little guys, leaving Russia and China basically threat free despite Russian aggression in Ukraine and Chinese aggression in the South China Sea and towards Taiwan. It appears that he is jettisoning all of sub-Sahara Africa and leaving it to the Chinese. But he has threatened to force Canada to become the 51^st state, invade Panama, Mexico and Greenland. He has even vowed aggressive action if Venezuela invades Guyana. I am surprised he hasn’t brought back the Monroe Doctrine. He has even threatened the foundations of NATO.

Yes there was a lot to do. More, perhaps, than any administration had attempted in the past. I am for most for it. It needed to be done. Of course, the only problem is that Trump’s efforts and those of Elon Musk and DOGE are only temporary. They can and will be overturned by the next democrat administration. The only way to make them permanent is to keep the majority in the House and elect 60 republican senators – of which there is no chance of happening. As a matter of fact, the opposite is more likely if Trump doesn’t stop doing the one thing that will severely damage his administration – tariffs.

Trump is obsessed with tariffs and somehow thinks that our trillion dollar deficit in goods (omitting the surplus in services) constitutes a “national emergency.” His instincts are backed by his economic yes-men, Peter Navarro and Stephen Miran, both of whom have Harvard PhDs – which should give one caution. So Trump announces his tariffs on Mexico and Canada in violation of his own trade agreement from his first term. He then imposes tariffs on aluminum and steel and announces his “reciprocal” tariffs which place tariffs on all countries even those that we have trade surpluses not deficits. The market tanks so he announces a slight reprieve for 90 days. However, the tariffs stay on Mexico and Canada and go to 145% on China. BTW, the tariffs on solar panels made in Southeast Asia are over 3,521 percent (that’s not a misprint).

Now some more bad news.

I am convinced that Trump is anti-small business. Trump discriminated against small firms during covid and now he is doing it with tariffs. His tariffs will drive many small business out of business. It will cause a significant decrease in employment as small businesses fail. A company that imports fake eyelashes has stopped shipments because with the high tariffs, its cost of importing is greater than the price at which it can sell the eyelashes. Maybe they should call Kristi Noem and get her to give them an exemption from Trump much like he gave Apple and the big electronics firms. If there should be an exemption from these tariffs it should be with small firms not the big ones.