President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I look forward to the folks who tracked Obama's rounds of golf and days outside of DC doing the same for Trump.

 

You go way too far assigning very specific, devious intentions and motivations to news organizations and politicians, and state your conjecture about virtually unknowable states of mind as fact.

 

Lies, bigly lies.

Opinion | Trump just gave a remarkable new interview. Here’s a tally of all his lies.

 

Man, I don't know how Sargent sleeps at night with all that gloom and doom sloshing around inside his brain.

 

Trump: It'd be better to cancel meeting if Mexico won't pay for wall

 

My parents went to Super Bowl XVI in Pontiac, the one with the massive traffic jam, which was caused because VICE-President G.H.W. Bush attended. Guys had to file stories without quotes at the 1994 Final Four because Bill Clinton went. Presidents should let winning teams come to the White House, not the other way around.

 

Sean Spicer might have accidentally tweeted out his Twitter password.

http://gizmodo.com/sean-spicer-just-tweeted-something-that-looks-an-awful-1791649692

 

I think he can extend a go-go era quite a while with infrastructure spending while papering over long-term drawbacks to low taxes and high spending long enough to get to 2020. It's why I'm pretty sure he's going to win re-election before things crater. He's going to be G.W. Bush on steroids. Those of us opposing Trump are going to look like morons for a while as his economic cocaine juices up the markets. What does he care? He's an overweight 70-year old with a penchant for KFC and McDonald's. He's got 15 more years to worry about.

The comedown is going to be hell, though. We'll be looking at nearly 30 trillion in debt (assuming he doesn't go adventuring overseas with our military, which would then balloon that further) and have a further-decimated education system. And what will we have for it? Improved infrastructure? A giant concrete wall that we can't afford to maintain on our southern border that will cost about $3 million per mile? Cool. But China will have taken over its hemisphere. We'll have 1920s-style tariffs and trade agreements in place and an economy based in the 20th century — with hundreds of thousands of jobs Trump has political stakes in maintaining in things like coal and oil production and autoworkers who could be otherwise replaced with robotics. The Chinese have already recently opportunistically stepped in and pretended to become the global leaders in alternative energy since Trump's inauguration. While it's mostly a feigned role, they have the ability to actually follow through in a one-party state if and when it becomes viable. We'll be flat-footed.

 

It would have been a good thing for them to have stated earlier in the story that it's illegal to try to hack Spicer's account with that password.

 

We should check in with Paul Krugman for his prediction. His election night column has held up well:

It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?

Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.

Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.

Under any circumstances, putting an irresponsible, ignorant man who takes his advice from all the wrong people in charge of the nation with the world’s most important economy would be very bad news. What makes it especially bad right now, however, is the fundamentally fragile state much of the world is still in, eight years after the great financial crisis.

Paul Krugman: The Economic Fallout

 

I fear if the Mexico rhetoric continues, Mexicans will come to the construction of the border wall and start killing American workers. It's not that far-fetched of a scenario.