Donald Trump may not have done much else, but he’s definitely developed a style—throw out a story, no matter how ridiculous, and count on the base to believe it anyway. This technique gets a new test this week as Trump not only launches Ridiculous Infrastructure Plan 2.0, but introduces a budget whose chances of passing are less than one in it’s $4 trillion cost.
Readers should file both documents under the genre of “science fiction.” The budget is dead on arrival because presidential budgets are always dead on arrival, and the infrastructure plan appears to be dead on arrival because of a larger crisis facing the party.
The crisis of the moment isn’t located along the Trump-Nunes axis of attempting to invert the justice system for fun and profit. Instead it’s the immediate result of the the Republican tax bill, other than giving all Americans that “I’ve got an extra buck and a half in my pocket” swagger. The tax gift to corporations and billionaires scooped money out of the budget by the double handful, creating a fresh trillion or so of debt for the country. And against that backdrop, Republicans just agreed to increase spending, so they could brag about what they’ve done for the military. It’s enough to make fiscal conservatives scream. If there were any.
So now Trump is left peddling an infrastructure plan in which $1.8 trillion out of $2 trillion comes from … somewhere. And the remaining $200 million comes from … somewhere else. Neither of those somewheres is at all defined and neither of them is likely to be discovered in Congress. Already Rand Paul is defending his vote against the spending bill not because the treasury was emptied by hollowing it out for billionaires, but because the budget didn’t include enough cuts of Medicare and Social Security, and Paul Ryan seems ready to rediscover the Randian religion, now that it’s more convenient.
Unable to agree on a budget, unable to find any remaining crumbs to create a real infrastructure plan, unable to agree on anything other than that average people really should be made to suffer, Republicans are struggling to come up with a solid approach to the coming elections.
A source close to the White House tells me that with an eye to getting Republicans excited about voting for Republicans in midterms, the president this year will be looking for "unexpected cultural flashpoints" — like the NFL and kneeling — that he can latch onto in person and on Twitter.
The Republican plan for the fall is literally looking for ways to divide the nation … for the win.
Even though the Freedom Caucus was all in on giving away funds when they knew they were safely going straight into the hands of the wealthy, investing in things like infrastructure is a less reliable means of distributing funds to the people who pay for Republican campaigns. Infrastructure projects have to pay people. Buy things. And generally don’t result in direct payment to those who keep the important, if mostly invisible, infrastructure of the Republican Party ticking along. All those institutes, think tanks, consultancies and general sinecures that guarantee minimum six-figure incomes to Republican ex-politicians and would-be-politicians don’t come cheap. And without creations like ALEX and Heritage, Republicans might have to spend time studying and writing their own bills. None of them want that.
So Republicans won’t be running on the economy — except in a sort of vague, hand-wavy fashion as they attempt to retro-attribute nine years of growth to a tax cut that hasn’t yet gone into effect. Instead, they’ll be running for office on the American Horror Story.
The source said Trump "is going to be looking for opportunities to stir up the base, more than focusing on any particular legislation or issue."
Last week, Trump devoted a day to talking about the MS-13 gang, a threat which continues to be inflated at least ten fold, with claims that “thousands” of gang members have been apprehended and that all of them are invaders.
President Donald Trump is portraying the violent MS-13 gang as a collection of immigrants sneaking illegally into the U.S., an account that ignores the organization's homegrown roots and the fact many of its members are U.S. citizens.
By fall that’s sure to translate into a theme of how Democrats blocked the building of the wall, and ads that portray every Democratic candidate as somehow personally responsible for a murder by an immigrant. Even where no immigrant is responsible. Or there’s no murder.
On the night of Nov. 18, Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez was found dying on the side of an interstate in West Texas. There were immediate signs it had been an accident. Martinez’s partner, Stephen Garland (who suffered a head injury and doesn’t recall the incident), had radioed for help, saying he thought he ran into a culvert.
But President Trump and his allies saw an opportunity to whip up anti-immigrant fervor. At a Cabinet meeting Nov. 20, Trump announced, with cameras rolling, that “we lost a Border Patrol officer just yesterday, and another one was brutally beaten and badly, badly hurt. . . . We’re going to have the wall.” He also issued a similar tweet.
That’s going to be 2018 in a nutshell. Republicans have carried through on the one point they all agreed on—the extremely rich deserve to be even richer. Now they’re united only by racism and a disdain for the people they nominally serve. So … it’s going to be horror stories, right through till election day.
Which could make for a massacre … metaphorically.