The Republican Party has, for some years now, been a spawning ground for lunatics. We had assumed that eventually the party would tire of them and toss them out. Donald Trump, however, is elevating them to the top levels of government.
Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), the ultra-conservative congressman tapped by Donald Trump to run the Office of Management and Budget, recently accepted a speaking invitation from the notorious John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing group known for peddling outlandish conspiracy theories for more than half a century.
The John Birch Society is one of the few conservative groups so implausibly paranoid and conspiracy-minded as to be shunned wholesale by the rest of the movement. They have been implausibly paranoid and conspiracy-minded for decades. But Mulvaney's a sport, and we live in implausibly paranoid and conspiracy-minded times.
His July speech, flagged by the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge, was billed as an address on "the Federal Reserve's role in bailing out Europe." According to its website, the John Birch Society believes that the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional and should be abolished and that "the only constitutional money is gold and silver coin."
Sure, fine, whatever. He'll be in charge of budgets now. Mulvaney was pro-government shutdown, simply refusing to acknowledge any possible “negative consequences” from refusing to raise the debt ceiling, and is thus one of the people in the nation most directly responsible for lowering the United States’ credit rating. At this rate, his mere presence in the Office of Management and Budget may end up lowering it again.
We probably won't be going back to the gold standard, though. But only because Trump will instead be using the nation's gold reserves to gild the walls of his vacation homes.