Trump is far more dangerous than many believe
Some people believe that a DeSantis presidency would be a bigger threat to democracy than a second Trump presidency. The thought is that DeSantis is just as authoritarian as Trump, but more competent.
I agree that DeSantis appears to be a dangerous authoritarian and he might well be more effective than Trump at undermining democratic control. However, there are reasons to think that a second Trump presidency would be more dangerous than a DeSantis presidency, for reasons having to do with character traits other than authoritarianism.
Trump is impulsive, self-involved, corrupt and dishonest, undisciplined, and intellectually lazy. He surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear. These traits will make it more difficult for him to undermine democracy. They also will impair his ability to competently navigate a high stakes international crisis or economic crisis. It is easy to see him deciding whether to go to war, or which side to back in a war, based on whether a leader has flattered or offended him, or seems likely to be a better business partner, or whether Trump just likes the cut of one leader’s jib. (I can’t believe I have to write that, but here we are.) It is easy to see him destroying alliances or treaties on a whim, the same way he undermined the Iran nuclear deal and tried to undermine NATO. It is easy to see him leading us into a severe economic crisis by refusing to defuse an international financial crisis (“it’s a shithole country, not our problem”), or by focusing on his own financial interests.
During his first term we were shielded from the worst in two ways. First, we got lucky. There were no existential crises on his watch. NATO held together, Russia did not invade Ukraine, the situation in Iran did not completely fall apart (though it may still), and the economy grew at a steady clip until COVID. COVID was indeed a very serious problem, arguably a crisis, and there is no doubt that Trump handled it badly in many ways. However, it is important to distinguish between the disruption caused by COVID, and the disruption caused by Trump’s policy choices and public statements. Most of the disruption caused by COVID would very likely have occurred under any President. Trump’s incompetence made things marginally worse than they could have been, and it was tragic for those who might have been spared an early death, but at the end of the day his bad handling of COVID was not a threat to world peace or democratic order. His bumbling and chaotic mishandling of COVID arguably did less damage than Bush’s invasion of Iraq. (To be clear, handling a pandemic poorly could indeed lead to an existential crisis, but COVID was not that pandemic.)
A related point is that Trump was restrained during his presidency, to some extent, by career military and civil servants. This will be less true if he is restored to office. He knows how to play the game now. He also has an established network of compromised loyalists to draw on. How effective he will be in getting his loyalists appointed to key positions in the military and at the DOJ and other agencies is unclear, but we have very good reasons not to want to find out. He would also have a much friendlier judiciary in a second term than he did during most of his first term.
The upshot is that Trump is not just dangerous because he is an authoritarian. Whether this makes him a bigger threat than DeSantis is certainly debatable, in part because there is so much we do not know about DeSantis – how lawless he will be, how he will govern, etc. The solution is not to elect either of them.
So will Trump be restored to office? It’s far from clear. He is unpopular with voters, and there is no reason to think that will change. But whoever wins the Republican nomination has a real shot at winning the election. Even an unpopular Trump could beat Biden for many reasons – recession, a prolonged war in Ukraine, a health event.
So what about the nomination? It’s really hard to say.
Trump’s campaign roll out was dreadful – sour, resentful, overwhelmingly negative in tone. He’s given bad teleprompter speeches before, but he lacked his old charisma and confidence. He should be brash, putting down Biden not harshly but in a “things-were-so-much-better-when-I-was-president-and-everything-could-be-great-again” kind of way. Unless Trump can pull himself together and project a less vindictive, divisive message there is a decent chance Republican voters will wonder about his electability and look for an alternative. The West / Fuentes debacle and Trump’s tweet about suspending the constitution suggest he is incapable of rising above his grievances and appealing to the center. We will see. Republican elites clearly worry about his electability (but not his fitness for office, naturally). They are trying to telegraph these concerns to voters. Whether the message will get through to voters is unclear. We also do not know if Trump will be indicted. An indictment may rally his loyalists and repel other voters and lead to a drawn out and damaging primary fight, or it could lead to a decisive defeat.
The fact that Trump has not started campaigning in any serious way suggests that his main motivation for announcing early was to avoid prosecution, though perhaps he also feels threatened and wanted to clear the field. Either way, I suspect he will keep DeSantis out for a while. DeSantis will want to avoid financing restrictions, and it is far better for DeSantis to let Trump self-destruct or get sick or withdraw or fight with someone else than to challenge him directly. If Trump loses to DeSantis, Trump may try to take DeSantis down. (Jonathan Chait disputes this.) DeSantis may not run at all if Trump doesn’t implode. My guess is that regardless of what DeSantis does Trump will have challengers. The future is unclear.
At this point it is ridiculous and counter-productive to point fingers at Trump or Desantis. The title and subject of this article should be “Republicans are far more dangerous than you think.” Republicans want what Trump wants: fascism, racism, misgovernment, oppression of women and minorities, gutting of social programs, and massive handouts to the rich. Trump is just a rather stupid and offensive figurehead. He is is obnoxious and obvious face of all that is evil about the GOP.
This article seems to imply that without Trump, all would be peachy. LOL.
It increasingly looks like there will be a multitude of plausible contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, not just Trump and DeSanitize. Since most Republican primaries are winner-take-all, this could set the stage for a repeat of 2016 — Trump gets only a minority of the vote, but several non-Trump candidates split the non-Trump vote and so Trump gets the nomination because no other single candidate got as many votes as he did.
I have a hard time picturing him winning the general election again, but it’s two years away, and a lot can happen in two years.
Well,
now we know about Trump. But what about DeSantis?
I think a competent evil man is more dangerous than an incompetent one.
So why don’t we work on electing a democrat instead? I don’t buy the sleepy Joe rhetoric. Joe seems to be running a competent administration, Not the one I would have wanted, but you know the Rumsfeld rule.
I’m more worried about the incompetent Left. As far as I can see from here they are locked into meaningless issues…things that do nothing to ease the poverty of the poor, but just make the left feel good about their virtuous feelings about gays, abortions, and blacks, but don’t delver anything of real value.
Actually, there isn’t much point my bringing that up. Conversations I have had give me no good feeling there is nothing that can be done about that, absent real leadership, which we have not got.
that DeSantis is just as authoritarian as Trump, but more competent. I
“
How would we know if he is more competent?
this is very simple :
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/images/church-figure1.png
do you see what happened during the year of 008? do you see how the CPI declined but the GDP increased? how do you make that happen again?
this is very simple. you reduce the money supply but simultaneously give tax relief to producers and the inputs to production. more specifically you cut tax on capital gains, corporations, and payroll tax, but you simultaneously shrink the M2 money supply by putting a tax on real property. the M2 shrinkage allows consumers to pay only the smaller price thus vendors then have to drop their prices in order to dump their inventory. when the inventory is dumped the manager of the factory sees the vanishing inventory thus hires an extra shift to make more of the widgets, replenish the inventory. but the extra shift comes with a multiplier effect because the new workers doing the extra shift start spending their money which increases the M2 velocity and GDP without raising prices without causing inflation because of the shrinking money supply.
do you see how the unemployment rate is nearly a lagging indicator but the leading indicators are the yield curve on treasuries and the M2 money supply which are both showing that we are headed straight towards a recession unless we change our policies.
now that you know what to do go
for
it
!
Justin
I don’t know that DeSantis’ competence extends to economic policy. I was thinking of his ability to not make a fool of himself in public while destroying people’s lives for personal gain.
but as for economic policy..i can write mathematical models myself, but the problem is always do they work in the real world.
Coberly:
Most people would not understand them. Justin does have a good commentary
I don’t see it. Reduce taxes on “producers”, cut the payroll tax…so workers are not contributing to their retirement? increase real estate taxes so people are priced out of their homes.
this is the same nonsense that money people always come up with. give “producers” a break so they can produce more?
maybe we don’t need so much production. we are drowning in it now. maybe we don’t need to play games with taxes. just tax for what we need and let “the market” take care of the rest. think of taxes as something like gravity or friction..an unavoidable cost of “production.”
it seems to me all the tax jiggerers do is guarantee a boom and bust cycle… which of course they make money on because they have inside knowledge…qnother inevitable fact of life.
generally when someone tells me i am too dumb to understand their explanation of something, i can be pretty sure they don’t undertand it either.
Coberly,
Totally, exactly, yep.
[Thank God or maybe Satan for the capital gains tax preference. My favorite sentence from Keynes’s General Theory Chapter 12 Section V quoted verbatim below.]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch12.htm
…Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of “liquid” securities…
Ron
… and grateful to have the support of someone who actually knows something. thank you.
Coberly
Now you are clearer in your comment.
run
it is hard to be clear. a good reason for extended dialogue to clear up misunderstanding. i wish it were possible to write more comprehensively on a blog. Truth is, my understanding of “economics” is quite limited, but I don’t mind pointing out where my so-called common sense leads me, and hope the “expert” is good enough at his job to correct and inform me if necessary.