Making Sense of Trump

He is always on to something

Disclaimer: I think Donald Trump is unfit for office and that his very election has proven the United States unfit for alliance. If We, the People, will put such an awful man in office, what won’t we do? That said, we should not fall into genetic fallacy. Trump is always awful, but he is not always wrong. On the contrary, he is too often right.

One of Trump’s seminal ideas — remember, he doesn’t have the tools to articulate his own thoughts — is that the Marshall Plan has done its job and Europe can remove the training wheels. It’s not 1946 anymore. Shouldn’t some things change?

Drug Prices

Why should the EU should pay less than American distributors for drugs? To me, Trump’s “most-favored-nation” idea for drug pricing makes eminent sense. He should take it to Congress, get it fleshed out, and pass it into law. Policing such a policy is challenging if drugs are manufactured in Ireland and sold on the continent, but Congress could probably come up with something. Executive orders and legally defective tariffs are not the way. Point is, voters can sense that we are subsidizing the free healthcare that Europeans and Canadians have and the American left says we should be providing. Only, who would subsidize us?

NATO

On defense, Trump asks whether the US needs NATO. The better question is whether Europe needs it. As is his wont, Trump phrases the matter in terms of the US being “ripped off.” We put more into NATO than our allies. He forgets that we are the only country to have invoked the mutual defense clause (Article V), and he insults European members by saying he doesn’t trust them to come to our aid in the future. He is, of course, lying, but if his intent is to break up the alliance, he is merely giving the Europeans a reason to agree. If the world’s projector in chief says he doesn’t expect his allies to help him, shouldn’t they read him to mean he wouldn’t help them?

But there is again a germ of wisdom here. If the European members of NATO spent as much of its GDP on defense as we do, would they need us? We are already seeing evidence of Europe’s potential independence in their “retaliation” for Trump’s antagonism toward them. Several European countries (and Canada) are rethinking their purchases of US F-35 jet fighters in favor of planes made in or by European manufacturers. That’s bad for some of the companies that make the F-35 (GE makes engines for SAAB, too), but European self-sufficiency is not a bad thing for Europe. If they don’t need our protection, they don’t need to buy our stuff.

Greenland

I don’t think people understand Trump’s “obsession” with Greenland, in part thanks to his own style of “explaining.” What he and his flunkies won’t say is that their quest for Greenland is related to their desire to get out of NATO. Think of NATO as a marriage and Greenland — which is necessary to the defense of the US, Canada, and Europe — as the family dog. Trump wants a divorce from NATO, but he wants the dog in the break-up. If he “owns” the dog, he gets the dog. If he has “sovereignty” over the land in Greenland where we have bases, he gets the dog. The model for the sovereignty deal is an arrangement the British have with Cyprus, although maybe Guantanamo Bay will make more sense to Americans.

If one thinks of Trump’s machinations regarding Greenland as preparation for a divorce from NATO, it all comes together. Now, I don’t know if Trump will get the sovereignty he wants. When he has “pretty much a concept of a deal,” he typically has nothing. But, as he likes to say, we’ll see what happens. Critics are wrong, though, to say that sovereignty over bases is just the status quo or a TACO surrender. Not only is it something for nothing, it is, if the divorce goes forward and we get the bases, a very big something.

If we only had a Congress…

Mitch McConnell broke the government, and Donald Trump has picked up the pieces. There is no telling what policy changes the US might have enacted in this century if the President and leaders of both parties sat down and tried to hash out a national vision. Maybe we’d have MFN pricing for drugs, tariffs on steel, and a better deal with NATO. But when Mitch made “Make Obama Look Bad” his mission, he made “Make America Great Again” an aspiration. (Trump will always be a symptom to me; he’s too insignificant a person to be considered the disease.) I’d like to say we can do better. But I have no evidence that we can.

In short, when Trump does something stupid, ask yourself what a functioning Congress and competent President would be doing about the same situation. Then think about what you can do to get us a functioning Congress and a competent President.