On the day of his presidential inauguration, it's already clear how Donald Trump will govern. We've seen his Cabinet appointees, and watched some of their confirmation hearings. Now we've got a first glimpse of his budget ideas.
Brace yourself, America: The Trump administration is going to be an epic disaster — an orgy of looting, corruption, and austerity.
Let's examine his budget plan first. During the campaign, Trump flirted with left-leaning fiscal ideas, saying he wouldn't cut Social Security and Medicare. But thus far he is going in the exact opposite direction. Last year the Republican Study Committee came up with an ultra-conservative plan to slash federal spending by $8.6 trillion over 10 years. But Trump's initial budget has cuts of $10.5 trillion.
The details aren't worked out yet, but The Hill reports that all manner of government agencies would be gored or killed off altogether. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities would be killed. Several offices designed to help minorities would be gone. Research and scientific spending would be sharply rolled back and several agencies dedicated to climate change and renewable research would be abolished.
But more fundamentally, the scale of these proposed cuts is simply staggering. The military, debt payments, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid account for just about three-quarters of federal spending. It is literally impossible to get that scale of cuts without cutting deeply into some of those programs. And when you dig into the budget proposed by the Heritage Foundation, which the Trump plan is based on, it turns out everything but defense is getting slashed — Social Security by 8 percent, Medicare by 41 percent, all domestic discretionary spending by 41 percent, and Medicaid by 47 percent. And with Republicans in charge of most state governments, huge austerity at the state level is also coming.
The Hill's account, like most budget reporting, swallows the preposterous Republican line that this is about cutting the deficit. In reality, the main point of these cuts, aside from abolishing miniscule disliked agencies and programs, is to make budget headroom for large tax cuts on the rich. Much of the government is about to be devoured by the top 1 percent.
Second, his staff choices. Charles Pierce ably described the Trump cabinet like this:
As nearly as I can tell, the nominees for the president-elect's Cabinet fall into several different categories. There are the people you'd pretty much expect from any Republican administration. (James Mattis, Michael Flynn, Ryan Zinke). There are the people who understand the mission of their departments and have spent their lives undermining it. (Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Rick Perry at energy, Andrew Puzder at labor). And there are the people who are fundamentally clueless about the general nature of public service. (Rex Tillerson at state.) On Tuesday night, DeVos demonstrated that she is that rarest of Trump administration fauna: Someone who fits capably into all three categories. [Esquire]
It'll be foxes in every henhouse, private industry in charge of the state, and an epidemic of looting and corruption.
For Republicans, this might be business as usual. In these dark times, it's worth returning to Thomas Frank's book The Wrecking Crew, which lays out a convincing account of how the rash of Republican corruption in the mid-2000s was a natural and logical product of their approach to government. Movement conservatism views the very idea of quality government with scorn, and its major normative principles are the positive value of greed, love of private industry as such, and worship of markets as the institution to which all human society must be subordinated. Such a political faction naturally spits out Jack Abramoffs by the score.
The Trump administration gives every sign of being just like the second Bush administration, only more corrupt, more incompetent, more gauche, and more brazen. He is still refusing to release his tax returns, and is baldly defying the constitutional requirement to avoid "emoluments" from foreign powers. And he's quite obviously going to use his authority to enrich himself:
The one silver lining here is that all this is certain to be spectacularly unpopular. This combination of spending-side austerity and huge tax cuts will likely create major economic problems, as similar policies at the state level (and during Bush's time as well) have shown. Trump is already the most disliked president-elect in the history of polling, and what little support he does have is partly the result of a campaign whose major message was the precise opposite of what's about to happen.
Democrats, if they can muster popular outrage, will stand a good chance of being able to stop some of the Trump agenda. But if they can't, it won't be pretty.
