As I look forward to the next four years with dread, I
thought it would be useful to try to assess what I fear might actually happen.
Top of mind for me is immigration. His flagship campaign
promise is to shut down the border and to deport all of the immigrants
currently here. While it would be impossible to do that entirely, they will do
their best to visibly scale up deportations. If they are effective in that,
expect significant adverse impact to industries that rely heavily on
immigrants, such as agriculture, construction, healthcare, and hospitality
(restaurants and hotels). This is not a good recipe for reducing the cost of food
and housing. Longer term, this will dampen entrepreneurship and invention, in both
of which immigrants participate above their numbers. (Unlike crime, in which
immigrants participate below their numbers, so one shouldn’t expect any drop
there.) Despite what half the country has been lead to fear, immigration is the
lifeblood of this nation, the vitality of our economy, and essential to our
future prosperity. While it would be ideal to have more order in the immigration
process than we have had, we shut it off to our detriment.
Another major fear is, ironically, inflation. Despite the
fact that the con man persuaded half the country that he could magically bring
prices down (a promise he’s already been backtracking from), so many of the other
things he has talked about doing are inflationary. Cutting off immigration, as
already noted, will raise prices on groceries and housing. He’s promised
massive tariffs, which will be inflationary. (No, sadly, China doesn’t pay for
the tariffs. We the consumers do.) He’s promised more tax cuts, which will
inevitably increase the debt, which leads to more inflation. My real fear in
this regard is that his failure to tame inflation will bring him into conflict
with the Fed, who will want to raise interest rates (which is the right thing
to do, but politicians always loath the short term tough medicine). For now, he’s
saying he supports Fed chair Jay Powell, but watch for that to change. He will do
his best to stack the Fed Board with people who will be “loyal” (i.e., not to
the nation and to their fiduciary duty, but to him personally). On the bright
side, it looks as though his party may end up being the ones who finally kill
that ridiculous time bomb called the “debt ceiling”. But if he makes the Fed
compliant to his short-term political interest, the way that Richard Nixon
broke Arthur Burns, well, some of us are old enough to remember where that
lead. (See 1970s rampant inflation.)
If he actually implements the large broad-scale tariffs that
he has threatened to, that would have bad effects beyond driving prices of almost
everything up. The United States has long enjoyed substantial economic benefit
from our dollar being the world’s principal reserve currency and most widely
used for world trade. That position allows us to enjoy extraordinarily low
interest rates for our national debt. If we were to significantly reduce our
participation in world trade, as seems to be the aim of his policy, we could
erode the primacy of the dollar. Other world powers such as China would be
happy to step into any breach we create, ultimately increasing the cost of our
debt service.
That brings me to the promised tax cuts (by far the most
likely promise to be kept). That doesn’t have any immediate obvious downside,
but long term compounds the risk of the above concerns. The Republican
mythology that tax cuts pay for themselves has been conclusively disproven time
and again. This administration is likely to be the worst ever for the national
debt (not that very many people actually care about that anymore). While I don’t
believe (as some do) that deficits are always bad, I believe they need to be
used only for investments in national capacity and productivity, not just in
making the rich richer. Also, while our national credit limit is very high, it’s
not infinite, and when we finally hit it, it will be like going over a cliff. If
we increase our need to borrow at the same time as we’re reducing our ability
to borrow cheaply (see tariffs above), that could be a self-multiplying
economic disaster.
In foreign policy, I have fears too, but am very uncertain
what to actually expect. In every regard, he says outrageous things with
varying distance from what he actually does, and in foreign policy that
distance may be the greatest. The bad things could be pretty bad, but I have a
perverse optimism here that he might accidentally do some good things too. With
Ukraine, he seems inclined to pressure both Putin and Ukraine to come to some
kind of settlement to end their conflict. If he can actually do that (and he
may be uniquely positioned to do so), whether that is good or bad all depends
on the terms. If he pushes Ukraine to essentially capitulate and gives Putin
everything he wants, that would only embolden Putin to expand his aims to
include other former Soviet republics, and could indirectly embolden China with
regard to Taiwan as well. On the other hand, if he can actually bring a
settlement with some meaningful concessions from Putin, like Ukraine joining NATO,
that could actually be good. My hope is that Trump’s ego would work against the
total capitulation scenario because it would not make him look like the great
dealmaker that he fancies himself. With the Middle East, as I write this, the
first hostages are being released as part of a cease fire that was negotiated
with the incoming president’s people participating alongside the current
president’s people, and I will give his team credit for bringing Netanyahu to
the table, something Biden’s team had been unable to do. I just worry what the
long game is here. While this is a promising start, he has appointed people who
are disposed to aid and abet the worst Israeli factions, so I don’t have much
hope for a good and fair long term outcome for the Palestinians. And I don’t
see any path to long term security for Israel that doesn’t involve an
independent Palestine and something like a Marshall Plan for them that gives
them something positive to live for. But I don’t believe the incoming
administration shares that view, so my fear is ongoing misery in Gaza, ongoing annexation
of the West Bank, and increasing global isolation of Israel.
At the Justice Dept, I share the fear of many that it will
be weaponized to punish political enemies, as some (including the
administration’s own nominee for FBI director) have advocated it should be. The
policy for the FBI is somewhat incoherent, with some calls for dismantling the
FBI wholesale while at the same time calling for it to be used to investigate
political enemies. Either of those would be terrible for the nation. (Some
would argue that the FBI and the Justice Dept have already been practicing “lawfare”
against political enemies, but they miss the crucial distinction of prosecuting
those where there is probable cause that actual crimes have been committed.)
At the Defense Dept, I fear a Defense Secretary who believes
that “wokeness” is the most significant challenge facing the organization of
our national defense will pursue that chimera to the detriment of the actual
significant challenges. At best, we’ll see the Secretary be relatively isolated
and ineffective while the military leadership does what is best for the
country. At worst, we’ll see purges of the military leadership, bringing us
closer to a banana republic.
At HHS, I fear a Secretary who has no grounding in science-based
medicine, who will further undermine public confidence in actual medicine (vaccines
in particular) and public health, who will lend credibility to all manner of
snake oil, and who will leave us less well prepared for the next pandemic.
At the IRS, I fear (and expect) that the IRS budget will be
further cut, particularly in the area of compliance, despite the fact that
investment in compliance has been shown to have a significant positive return.
At the so-called “Dept of Government Efficiency”, one can
look to past task forces chartered with cutting government waste, which have
little history of success or impact. While the narrative of “outsiders” being
more capable of “taming” government bureaucracy than “insiders”, the actual
history of such task forces would suggest otherwise, with those few having much
success drew more on “insider” expertise who knew how to make effective fixes
with a scalpel rather than just inexpertly swinging a machete. This doesn’t
bode well for DOGE, which is already failing to exemplify efficiency by
starting with two leaders.
Across the government, I fear purges of dedicated civil
servants who have faithfully served numerous administrations, in the name of “eliminating
the deep state”. We already saw some of that in the first administration, and
we should expect to see more. They will resurrect their plan called “Schedule F”,
which is a tool for cutting deep into the civil service to fire people at will
and replace them with political loyalists. This would be to steer us back
toward the time when the whole civil service changed with each administration,
and which initially prompted the creation of Civil Service protections in the
first place. And I fear the significant erosion of the institutionalization of
ethics and expertise in civil service. Neither ethics nor expertise are understood
or properly valued by this administration, starting at the top with the first
modern president who refuses financial disclosure and who is incapable of recognizing
the most blatant conflicts of interest.
Four years from now, I fear we will not see the end of him,
when he decides that his administration is just so great and beautiful that he
needs to extend his term as president, Constitution be damned. I don’t rate
this as highly probable, but neither do I dismiss it as practically impossible.
Those who do dismiss that notion as absurd fail to appreciate just how close we
came four years ago to being Venezuela.
Finally, I fear for our trans friends and family, who are
the current scapegoat in fashion with the GOP. As those of us in the first
couple of letters of the LGBTQ+ community learned in the 1990s, increased
visibility comes with increased backlash. Last year, we elected the first trans
member of Congress, and the GOP’s top legislative priority was to restrict
where she could go to the bathroom in the Capitol. As Motormouth Maybelle said
in Hairspray, "better brace yourselves for a whole lotta ugly comin' at
you from a never-ending parade of stupid".
Of course who knows what will actually happen. It’s
difficult to predict much. In his last administration he said a lot of
outrageous things, but incompetence and guardrails kept much of it from actually
happening. This time around, some of his cronies have tried to learn from their
previous failures, and may be more effective. Then again, he has very thin
margins in Congress, and we’re already seeing the dissension within his own
ranks, as the OG nativist-populist monsters like Miller and Bannon clash with
his new favorite billionaire bro buddies. All we know for sure is that we can
expect chaos. As we in Los Angeles watched multiple wildfires burning out of
control around us, the city filled with smoke and ash everywhere, I thought to
myself, this is a preview of the next four years.
