Now? Do You See It Yet?

On my last visit with family, I got into a polite political discussion with my 85 year-old mother. I had vowed to avoid arguing politics with her because (1) She's my mom & I love her (2) She's an old lady [sorry mom] (3) There's no way that she's going to change her mind based on anything that I say. But she kept bringing up! During one discussion over coffee and the local diner one night, she suggested that Dotard Donnie was doing a good job "because the economy". And I hear this a lot from Trumpists: the economy is doing so well, better than ever, because of Trump. It's not an unusual sentiment, self interest. I'm doing okay, so I'll ignore the bad things. And if you're going to support Donnie because you think the economy is doing well, you have to ignore or rationalize away the hate speech, the accommodation and encouragement of racism, of hatred, of misogyny, of xenophobia. You have to be okay with the constant lying, not just your usual butt-covering lies that politicians tell, but lies about everything, lying about what we all heard him say five minutes ago. You have to be okay with the appointment of cabinet secretaries who either have no knowledge of the departments that they are tasked with overseeing or are hell-bent on dismantling or neutralizing the mission of those departments. You have to be okay with the utter incompetence and ignorance of the basics of governance. It's one thing to cheer on an outsider who shakes up a moribund system, but we have laws that constrain what our elected officials can do, but he doesn't seem to understand that. He has no concept of how laws are made. He is completely ignorant about economics, economic concepts that a first year college student has mastered are a mystery to him. You have to be okay with his antagonizing our allies while cozying up to dictators, calling them his good friends. You have to be okay with his reneging on international agreements that took years to negotiate. You have to be okay with the daily Twitter rants, often attacking American business or individuals that disagree with him. You have to be okay with the garden variety evidence that he's nuts...buy Greenland?

But, hey, the economy is doing great!

Until it's not.

We're starting to see some signs that some problems are appearing on the horizon. A healthy economy in large part depends that people believe that it's a healthy economy. The lower yields on ten-year bonds is a direct result of lower confidence of investors. Foreign investment is down and domestic companies are starting to slow their investment because Donnie's unpredictable "policies" create uncertainty, and if there's anything that businesses hate, it's uncertainty.

So what will the Trumpists do when the economy starts to tank? Will they abandon him? No, they'll do what their cult leader is already doing: blame The Fed (which they don't understand), blame the media, blame the Democrats, blame the "Deep State".

There's no convincing them, stop trying. There just needs to be more of us than them next election day.