Trump Is the Dictator of Our Dialogue
What's going unsaid is a problem
You could pretty much write a “Trump did a bad thing” column every day. I try to dole them out sparingly because: 1) I think that comedians have the “Trump is bad” angle pretty well covered, and 2) If this blog becomes one-note, I would like that note to be “George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky was a self-indulgent pile of dinosaur shit.”
One of the most frustrating things about Trump is that he does more than just make shockingly bad decisions on the issues of the day; he decides what the issues of the day even are. None of us were talking about the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics a month ago; that conversation started when a BLS employee committed the sin of competence, leading Trump to choose a replacement who is to economics what Gob Bluth is to magic. Nobody was talking about federal control of DC until Trump cooked up a policy in response to an imagined crime spike; if Fox News had aired Ferris Bueller's Day Off instead of their usual fare, Trump surely would have deployed troops to Chicago to crack down on delinquent teens. Reacting to the Trump outrage du jour engages Trump on a battlefield of his choosing.
But a universe of important issues are being ignored while Trump pursues a Fox-News-and-petty-revenge-fueled agenda. In the end, the most damaging impacts of his presidency might come not from issues he bungled, but from issues he simply ignored. Here are some issues that are non-entities in our dialogue while Trump feuds with the Smithsonian and seeks to build a Lavish, Grand, And Totally Heterosexual Ballroom at the White House.
The cost of living is too high. There’s an “abundance agenda” dialogue that seeks to balance the need for progress with people’s right to control their environment, and Trump is nowhere in that dialogue. Americans spend a lot of money on education, health care, and child care, and in a sane world we’d be talking about how to keep those costs down. But in our world we’re not, possibly because part of the answer is clearly “immigration”.
Probably nothing improves our lives more than medicine — how can we speed up medical advances? How can research be robustly funded and targeted to where it would do the most good? How do we make life-saving drugs and treatments affordable while still incentivising development? This is an area where Trump doing nothing would actually be an improvement; he’s taking us in exactly the wrong direction by cancelling research and appointing a nutcase to run HHS who just defunded one of our most promising medical technologies.
The national debt is a real problem, so real that even a Soft Money Deficit Weenie like myself is concerned. We should chart a course to fiscal solvency, but Trump’s Blast the Budget in the Butthole bill made everything worse. This is another area where the president being a cantaloupe with googly eyes would be a vast improvement.
Green energy is happening; India just achieved a green energy milestone five years early due to wind and solar, and China’s year-on-year greenhouse gas emissions just ticked down for the first time ever. Green energy is no longer for Ed Begley, Jr. and hippies who can cover an entire commune with solar panels to run a single rice cooker. How do we make the future come faster, and how do we dominate this emerging technology?
How do we increase our technological dominance, generally? Once again, surely part of the answer is “immigration”, and bad news: Another part of the answer is “Harvard”.
Our tax code is a haunted hall of mirrors loved by no-one except the sadists at Intuit. How do we make it simpler and more rational?
Our healthcare system makes our tax code look like a model of elegant design. How do we make that simpler and more rational?
For reals, tho: What are we going to do about gerrymandering? We’re on the cusp of a gerrymandering nuclear exchange that could make things so bad that people actually start caring about gerrymandering (that’s really bad!). Many of the dozen or so people who follow this stuff agree that the best solution is some sort of proportional representation, but that idea needs to gain a lot of momentum before it achieves escape velocity from the Planet of the Poly Sci Dweebs.
Our president — though a big, dumb, dummy — is ultimately a very small man. His gaze is perpetually downward, inward, and backwards. He’s obsessed with the trivial and short term, he devotes hit time to petty grudges and old scores instead of to grand visions and farsighted plans. The most diligent rebuttal of his actions still grants him the ability to dictate the conversation, which means that his worst-case scenario is a half-win. It makes sense to focus on areas where he’s actively causing harm; those are the challenges in front of us. But the problems that metasticize outside of our narrow field of vision might ultimately cause the most harm.
It really is remarkable how much better off our country would be if there was just an empty chair in the Oval Office for the next 3.5 years.
"Blast the Budget in the Butthole bill" is excellent 😁