My Views of the Trump Administration

Congratulations, your cancer is cured. But that might be a heart attack

The world is changing very fast and I do not know if I should be booing or cheering. Seen from one angle, the Trump administration is a disaster. Seen from another, it is a better change in America than I could have hoped for, the end of the gradual shift from private to political decision making here and elsewhere, a slow moving catastrophe that has concerned me for most of my life.¹

Seen through dark glasses we have a president who is a bully, a blatant liar, either out of touch with reality or disinterested in the connection between what he says and what is, optimizing not for the welfare of America, not even for his own long-term welfare but for attention, status, the fun of being president. Out of either policy or temper he is about to throw Ukraine to the wolves, reward Putin’s aggression, risk the long-term political stability of Europe. Out of bad economics, demagoguery, or both, he is about to cripple America’s trade relations with the rest of the world, making both us and them worse off. For two of his favorite themes, tariffs and immigration, he is even further on the wrong side than Biden was. His surgical reshaping of the federal government is being done with a chainsaw.

Seen through rose tinted glasses, we are finally getting what I have been wanting for more than sixty years, a reversal of the slow drift away from the classical liberalism that built the modern world, the slow drift towards a world where fewer and fewer things are decided by individual choice, towards

EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.²

As a free bonus, it looks as though the expensive policies based on the climate consensus I have been criticizing for more than a decade are finally being abandoned. As a second free bonus, in part due to Trump’s election, the insanely distorted picture of the world that views all problems of America as due to sexism and racism, mostly imaginary, is gradually falling out of favor.

Foreign Policy

The second edition of my first book contained a chapter entitled “Is There a Libertarian Foreign Policy.” The conclusion was that if libertarianism was defined by its moral views, the rejection of coercion, there was not. We had a choice of an interventionist policy, which in practice would involve allying with foreign states some of them oppressive,

In practice, an interventionist policy almost inevitably involves alliances with the Shah of Iran, or Joseph Stalin, or Ferdinand Marcos, or, in the case of the actual policy of the U.S. over the past 70 years, all of the above.

or a non-interventionist policy.

Under such a policy we defend ourselves not by a network of foreign alliances but by a large number of missiles equipped with thermonuclear warheads. The missiles are pointed at the Soviet Union; if the Soviet Union attacks the U.S., we fire them. The result is to kill something between fifty million and two hundred million inhabitants of the Soviet Union. While a few may be high ranking party officials, most will be innocent victims of the Soviet system …

If libertarianism is defined not as a moral theory but as a view of how the world works, on the other hand, it does give us some basis for choosing between the broad alternatives. The practical problem with an intervention foreign policy:

In order for the policy to work, you must correctly figure out which countries are going to be your enemies and which your allies ten years down the road. If you get it wrong, you find yourself unnecessarily blundering into other people's wars, spending your blood and treasure in their fights instead of theirs in yours. You may, to take an example not entirely at random, get into one war as a result of trying to defend China from Japan, spend the next thirty years trying to defend Japan (and Korea, and Vietnam,. ..) from China, then finally discover that the Chinese are your natural allies against the Soviet Union.

…

The problem with an interventionist foreign policy is that doing it badly is much worse than not doing it at all. Something which must be done well to be worth doing is being done by the same people who run the post office—and about as well.

My conclusion as of the late eighties — the edition was published in 1989:

The first step is to make it clear that the U.S. is moving towards a non-interventionist policy, that at some point in the near future we will stop defending the countries that have been our allies.

So much for theory. Trump is now ending US support for Ukraine, hinting at a future withdrawal from NATO, and I don’t like it. I very much do not want Putin to successfully conquer Ukraine, both for the sake of the Ukrainians and the rest of Europe.

It is tempting to claim that Trump is doing the right thing but doing it wrong, that he should have announced that the US will continue to support Ukraine for another two years to give the European powers time to ramp up their military, end our support then. But it would be tempting for European voters, with lots of other things to spend their money on, to conclude that the arguments that imply support now will still imply it in another two years.

We could at least have continued to deliver arms already pledged.

At some point you have to bite the bullet, end support for present allies with the knowledge that we might not be happy with the results. I can hope that the European NATO powers, with a combined GNP a multiple of Russia’s, will be able to produce or buy enough ammunition and military gear to keep the Ukrainian military fighting. Hopefully, if we are not willing to give arms to Ukraine we will at least be willing to sell them to its supporters.

But there is no guarantee.

Trade Policy

Tariffs are one of the two issues on which Trump is unambiguously worse than his predecessors, judged at least by what he says. For reasons I have discussed here before, I, like most economists, regard the standard arguments for tariffs as nonsense, believe both that our trade deficit is not an inherently bad thing and that there is little reason to expect tariffs to reduce the deficit or increase US employment. Trump claims to believe those things, which means that he is either ignorant or lying.

The one optimistic possibility is that he is lying, that his objective is not to end up with tariffs but to use the threat of tariffs to get other countries to do things he wants, hopefully including dropping their tariffs. One earlier post described some possible evidence for that theory, but I don’t think the odds are very high.

Immigration

My ideal policy would be free immigration into a laissez-faire economy where immigrants had to support themselves, what the US had when my grandparents came. Neither Trump nor his opponents will give us that. The best that can be said for Biden is that although he had mostly the same immigration policy as Trump he didn’t enforce it and Trump may. My guess is that even with the present economy, where immigrants can be substantially subsidized by tax money, we are on net better off having them, but I cannot prove it. If I am right, and if Trump succeeds in deporting most of the illegals, that will make both us and them worse off.

Tests

I voted for neither Trump nor Harris, regarding her as a certainty of bad things, him as a gamble between good and very bad. The evidence on how the gamble came out will come in over the next few years.

The questions are:

Is the federal budget bigger or smaller than in previous years? Part of Trump’s claim is that he is reducing the size of government, shrinking the budget. Is it true or is he cutting things he dislikes, expanding things he likes, for a net increase to be paid for with borrowed money? That should be the first and most unambiguous evidence.

Are tariffs higher or lower a year, two years, three years after Trump takes office? I am afraid I know the answer but I could be wrong.

Has Trump deported most of the illegal immigrants or only the ones who can be collected easily because they have been arrested for crimes other than illegal immigration? Has legal immigration increased or decreased?

Does Trump’s foreign policy look more like a move to noninterventionism or like switching sides, intervening in the Ukraine war in favor of Russia?

I know what answers I want, will be pleasantly surprised if I get them.

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1. A poem I wrote sixty years ago.

2. Sign over the ant nest in The Once and Future King.