I am writing on October 2, 2019. Today the stock market went down, but reportedly because of a sharp decline in manufacturing, and not because the president is threatening civil war. I am glad to have lived long enough to witness such serenity in my fellow citizens.
Maybe the market is unconcerned because it knows something? Will the GOP abandon Trump? It may seem absurd that the Senate will vote to convict Trump and remove him from office, but let’s think this through. Why is Trump president today? To oversimplify a bit, there are three reasons:
- Trump was the only Republican nominee who would talk about immigration, which is a hot-button issue with many Republican voters.
- The billionaires knew Trump was one of their own, and that he would give them (and himself) a huge tax cut.
- Russian interference in the 2016 election, which was intended to help Trump and which did so.
Of course there were other factors—job losses due to free trade, Hillary Clinton’s weakness as a candidate, and that the Great Recession never ended for many voters—but the focus on immigration allowed Trump to break away from the pack in the Republican primary, because no one else would even discuss it.
And there was never any question that he was on-board with an enormous tax cut, and indeed any measure designed to concentrate wealth—his whole life has been about that.
And Russian interference—which started with pro-Sanders attacks on Hillary—was critical.
What’s changed since then? Yes, Trump still owns the immigration issue, but putting children in cages has turned that issue into a negative for him. And Trump will never deliver another tax cut for billionaires; he is too weak politically.
In fact, it’s possible that Trump’s political weakness could result in broad-ranging tax increases on the very wealthy, if a Democrat wins the presidency and the Senate flips. This is particularly the case if Warren or Sanders is elected. And without Trump, and absent a recession, neither Warren nor Sanders would have much of a chance to be president.
And Russian interference will probably be much less effective in the next election—assuming the Russians want a second term for Trump, which they may not. Pulling the rug out from under Trump might serve their purpose of de-stabilizing the US just as well as supporting him again. But in any case, Americans—and Facebook—are on the watch. The way the Russians ran amok on Facebook in 2016 will not be repeated.
The billionaires may well conclude that Trump is no longer useful and lay him off. The question is, what would this do to the Republican political coalition? If he’s impeached and convicted with the help of Republican senators, his supporters might take the news badly.
But if the coalition could be kept together, getting rid of Trump would make it more likely that billionaires will get another tax cut. The preceding sentence sums up the 2020 election from a Republican point of view, and I would not under-estimate the force of this logic. Since 1980, tax cuts have been at the core of most of our presidential elections, and the billionaires may wonder, why even win an election, if there are no tax cuts?
So yes, the Republican Party may drop Trump. It’s not inevitable, of course. But the fact that the Senate unanimously passed a resolution urging the White House to release the whistleblower’s complaint to Congress—essentially to Schiff and Pelosi—is a red flag. This was an unambiguous warning to Trump not to screw around, not to stonewall too much.
Of course, he may not have gotten the message.
Elections are about issues, and the Republicans cannot win if the 2020 election is about Trump’s mental stability, his corruption and his abuses of power. He won’t need to bring up civil war or treason too many more times to convince everyone who voted Democratic in 2018 to vote twice in 2020.
A blowout defeat in 2020 would be the biggest setback billionaire capitalism has ever suffered. It would probably open the door to a range of “progressive” initiatives, some of which would be quite popular. The Democrats might keep the initiative for some time to come.
Republican senators might reasonably fear this more than the rage of Trump’s followers.
The Socialist Investor 