CBS News anchor Scott Pelley interviewed Trump for the show yesterday and I found it hilarious. Trump was himself, supremely confident and unfiltered. He is promising universal health care, opposing cuts in Social Security, raising taxes on some wealthy people and eliminating some tax loopholes while reducing taxes on the middle class and the poor, repairing all the broken infrastructure, canceling free trade agreements and imposing tariffs on imports by US businesses that shift manufacturing overseas and also from countries like China that he thinks are acting unfairly. Today he released his tax reform plan that he only teased Pelley about and, as Kevin Drum points out, it is most specific when it comes to giving breaks for the rich, no doubt to try and gain establishment Republican and business support.
He again said those familiar things that have offended huge swathes of the public such as his plan to build a wall and deport all undocumented immigrants (he would do this ‘humanely’ of course), although he said that his wall would have a huge door because he wants to have immigrants, just legally. He also promised to create a super-colossal military and if necessary send US forces to fight ISIS in Iraq and either get Russia to fight ISIS in Syria or failing that let ISIS destroy the government of Assad and then send US military in to destroy ISIS.
How would he pay for all this? Easy. Under his plans the economy would grow at an unbelievable rate and generate huge amounts of revenues for the government. He will have the best minds on Wall Street working for him.
How would he get all these measures through Congress since, as he conceded, the establishments of both parties don’t like him that much? Easy. He knows how to make deals with members of Congress since he has done so all these years in order to run his businesses.
How would he get other countries to not retaliate against the US for his trade tariffs? Easy. Other world leaders will respect him. He deals with foreign governments all the time and so knows how to make deals with them and he will have the best negotiators, not the wusses that president Obama sends that have caused the US to lose respect so that other countries just walk over the US.
It is vintage Trump can-do bragging, with all potential difficulties swept contemptuously aside. You can see why it would appeal to a certain kind of person who thinks that there are simple solutions to complex problems and that all it takes is determination to carry them out. And there are quite a few of them as can be seen by the support for Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina.
And he’ll only bankrupt the country twice. Since he has done that all these years in order to run his businesses.
So did George Bush. That is how we got a huge national debt and the Great Recession.
Wall Street never saw it coming as they said so themselves. However millions of Americans did and bailed out of the stock markets, including myself.
There aren’t any best minds on Wall Street. There are many uber-greedy and uber-amoral ones though.
I recommend giving mortgage-backed securities another try.
😉
Simple Solutions to Complex Problems would have been Trump’s campaign slogan, except it fails to distinguish him from the rest of the crazies.
Trump’s companies have gone bankrupt more than twice. I saw a list of 19 failures and BK’s and the list stopped in 2012.
What he does is convert OPM, Other People’s Money to HM, His Money. Since a lot is probably Hedge fund money, the Hedge managers don’t much care since they get paid up front.
I can see how Trump and his WS cronies would run the USA. They would simply loot it, do as much damage as possible to the social fabric, and then drop the empty husk and run to someplace with no US extradition treaty. Why not, it’s just business. And it isn’t much different from what Bush and Darth Cheney did for that matter.
Are we really sure Trump isn’t just a performance artist in the Barry Humphries Dame Edna / Sir Les Patterson mould (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Humphries ) playing the most ridiculous Presidential contender for the LOlz and seeing how many people he can actually have take him seriously before revealing the charade and saying “punk’d y’all?!?
Because, well, really?