Following my post on Nov. 3, “The impeachment focus can’t be only on this one Ukraine thing,” in this article I will consider just what legacy the Trump administration is likely to leave in its wake, as it appears we just may be entering the last throes of the regime.
There are, of course, some positive elements, starting with the economy and the unemployment rate, which has reached record lows.
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 128,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 3.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Notable job gains occurred in food services and drinking places, social assistance, and financial activities. Within manufacturing, employment in motor vehicles and parts decreased due to strike activity. Federal government employment was down, reflecting a drop in the number of temporary jobs for the 2020 Census.
This, of course, is the one measurement that Trump himself likes to consider. He rates everything in cold black-and-white numbers. But there are other measures by which we can analyze the effect and impact of this administration. And those measures tell a different story.
As we talk about jobs, it should be noted that, while unemployment has been low, the wage gap between the haves and the have-nots has only increased.
Today, in 2018, the economy is strong, unemployment is at an all-time low, many businesses are turning healthy profits and the financial markets have surged. Yet those developments have not translated into robust wage growth for many U.S. workers, even though basic economic theory holds that this should have happened. Instead, wages for many low- and middle-income workers have remained relatively stagnant, in some cases barely keeping pace with the yearly rise in the cost of living and in other cases not keeping pace at all.
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"We think that companies are trying to protect themselves from the next [recession], investing in their physical and technological infrastructures, and [are] not willing to increase wages as fast as the HR profession was expecting coming out of the [last] recession," said Bruce and Blair Johanson, principal partners at DBSquared, a compensation software firm based in Fayetteville, Ark., in a joint comment. "We see wage budget [increases] in state and local governments and in the nonprofit sector in the range of 4 to 8 percentage [points] per year as they are trying hard to be competitive again, but public and private companies are still holding the line to around 3 percent per year."
Trump’s massive tax cut for the rich was supposed to give the economy a massive boost, but has instead left it limping along at 1%-2% growth, mostly generated by massive stock buybacks rather than wage improvements.
The TJCA changed the law such that profits are taxed only where earned. To facilitate the transition between the two systems, the TJCA offered a tax “holiday” on pre-2018 foreign profits at a reduced rate of 15.5% on liquid assets (and 8% percent on other assets). The underlying logic for the TCJA was that allowing companies to keep a greater share of profits, would stimulate investments in long term growth. Instead, the dominant company response to the TCJA was stock buybacks. For the first three quarters of 2018, buybacks were $583.4 billion (up up 52.6% from 2017). In contrast, aggregate capital investment increased 8.8% over 2017, while R&D investment growth at US public companies increased 12.5% over 2017 growth.
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This surge created a backlash culminating in the The Accountable Capitalism Act, a federal bill introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren in August 2018. “The surge in corporate buybacks is driving wealth inequality and wage stagnation in our country by hurting long-term economic growth and shared prosperity for workers," said Sen Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) one of the bill’s co-sponsors, in a news release.
The bill also reduced incoming revenues and generated an annual deficit of over $1 trillion.
In 2017, trying to sell Congress on a $1.5 trillion package of tax cuts, President Donald Trump made some pretty Trumpian predictions.
“The economy now is at 3% (growth),” he said. "Nobody thought it would be anywhere close. I think it could go to 4, 5 and maybe even 6%, ultimately.”
In fact, the economic growth rate that year was not 3% but 2.4%. And with Trump’s sweeping, massive, transformative, awesome, really huge tax cuts, the growth rate in 2018 surged all the way up to — drumroll, please — 2.9%.
That’s right, half a percentage point, and even that uptick was short-lived. Most projections for this year have it back below where it was before enactment of the tax cuts. Next year’s projections range from 2% to outright recession.
But the tax cuts, along with some bipartisan spending in the Trump era, have moved the needle in one significant way: They have caused federal borrowing to skyrocket. The Treasury Department has reported that for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the government spent $984 billion more than it collected. That’s an astoundingly large deficit at a time of record low unemployment, and a deeply troubling one to boot.
The 2019 deficit was more than double what it was in 2015 and up from $160 billion in 2007, before the Great Recession.
Another record-breaking figure from this administration is the over 100,000 migrant children being held in detention, which is the highest rate in the world.
The United States has the world’s highest rate of children in detention, including more than 100,000 in immigration-related custody that violates international law, the author of a United Nations study said on Monday.
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Children should only be detained as a measure of last resort and for the shortest time possible, according to the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty.
“The United States is one of the countries with the highest numbers – we still have more than 100,000 children in migration-related detention in the (U.S.),” Nowak told a news briefing
“Of course separating children, as was done by the Trump administration, from their parents and even small children at the Mexican-U.S. border is absolutely prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I would call it inhuman treatment for both the parents and the children.”
But violating international law, particularly the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, is of little concern to Trump and his ilk. Not when it comes to people who come from "shithole countries" and need Temporary Protected Status to keep them from being sent back to a nation that has suffered a major national disaster.
That's not much of a concern for Trump, who has threatened to cancel protections for and deport over 300,000 people currently under TPS who've been in this nation for decades—many of whom now have American-born children.
Since taking office, President Trump has ended crucial protections for immigrants from six countries. Over 300,000 people are at risk of losing legal Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
TPS is a provision under which the government grants protection from deportation to people from certain countries afflicted by natural disasters, war, or other dangerous conditions.
These moves continue a series of cruel attacks on immigrants in the U.S. that rip apart families and hurt our communities. The administration must extend TPS. And Congress should enact a permanent solution that creates a roadmap to citizenship for recipients and the millions of other immigrants in the U.S.
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Multiple lawsuits are challenging the administration’s termination of TPS for several countries. Generally, the suits seek to stop the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from implementing terminations. The suits also accuse the administration of ending TPS for certain countries based on racial discrimination and infringing on the constitutional rights of TPS beneficiaries, among other issues.
Two lawsuits resulted in preliminary injunctions that blocked the administration from ending the program—one suit filed by people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan and a second suit filed by TPS holders from Honduras and Nepal and their U.S. citizen children. In order to comply with the injunctions, the DHS announced it would automatically extend TPS for all six countries through Jan. 4, 2021, pending a decision from the lawsuits.
For those who have been requesting asylum because their lives are in danger, there is evidence that when their asylum application is rejected and they are deported, many have been killed.
These conversations have been largely theoretical, devoid of names and faces. No U.S. government body monitors the fate of deportees, and immigrant-aid groups typically lack the resources to document what happens to those who have been sent back. Fear of retribution keeps most grieving families from speaking publicly. In early 2016, as the director of the Global Migration Project, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, I set out, with a dozen graduate students, to create a record of people who had been deported to their deaths or to other harms—a sort of shadow database of the one that the Trump Administration later compiled to track the crimes of “alien offenders.” We contacted more than two hundred local legal-aid organizations, domestic-violence shelters, and immigrants’-rights groups nationwide, as well as migrant shelters, humanitarian operations, law offices, and mortuaries across Central America. We spoke to families of the deceased. And we gathered the stories of immigrants who had endured other harms—including kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault—as a result of deportations under Obama and Trump.
As the database grew to include more than sixty cases, patterns emerged. Often, immigrants or their families had warned U.S. officials that they were in danger if sent back. Ana Lopez, the mother of a twenty-year-old gay asylum seeker named Nelson Avila-Lopez, wrote a letter to the U.S. government during Christmas week in 2011, two months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accidentally deported him to Honduras. Nelson had fled the country at seventeen, after receiving gang threats. He’d entered the U.S. unauthorized and been ordered removed, but an immigration judge then granted him an emergency stay of his deportation so that he could reopen his case for asylum. An ice agent told his family’s legal team that Nelson was deported because “someone screwed up,” and ice alleges that the proper office had not been notified of the judge’s stay.
“His life is in danger,” Ana Lopez wrote, begging U.S. authorities to reverse her son’s deportation. Her efforts proved fruitless. Two months later, Nelson died in a prison fire, along with more than three hundred and fifty other inmates. His lawyer told me that Nelson had been detained by the Honduran government without charges, in an anti-gang initiative. Survivors of the fire alleged that it was set intentionally, perhaps as an act of gang retaliation, and that the guards had done little to help the men as they screamed and burned to death in their cells.
While this is going on, the Trump administration has also been trying to fast-track immigration for wealthy Europeans into our nation.
Last year President Donald Trump ordered his U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, to develop a plan that would “fast track” immigration by wealthy Europeans into the United States. It does not appear he ordered similar plans from any other ambassadors.
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Believing Sondland’s orders were “racially motivated,” U.S. diplomats at the E.U. mission “were unsettled by the idea.”
One said, “the way this was going to come off was that the United States is fishing for white people, while reducing opportunities for needier people to immigrate.”
Fishing for white people. Literally.
Perhaps many of these types of racially motivated policies have been affected by White House adviser Stephen Miller, who was recently discovered sending over 900 racially insensitive emails to Breitbart.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage, according to leaked emails reviewed by Hatewatch.
The emails, which Miller sent to the conservative website Breitbart News in 2015 and 2016, showcase the extremist, anti-immigrant ideology that undergirds the policies he has helped create as an architect of Donald Trump’s presidency. These policies include reportedly setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, an executive order effectively banning immigration from five Muslim-majority countries and a policy of family separation at refugee resettlement facilities that the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General said is causing “intense trauma” in children.
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Miller’s perspective on race and immigration across the emails is repetitious. When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites. On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States. Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.
In response to this revelation, the Trump White House decided to stand by and support Miller. This permissive attitude toward white supremacy was something we saw after Charlottesville, and it has contributed to the growth of supremacist cells and violent attacks from the Christchurch, New Zealand, killer who praised Trump as a new messiah for white people, to the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which was influenced by the "replacement" theory that has been endorsed by Trump and his 2018 campaign ads and public statements.
Speaking of policy that seeks to harm hundreds of thousands, there is also the Trump administration’s support for the lawsuit that seeks to eliminate the Affordable Care Act.
The Trump Justice Department, going further than it had before, said it supports a federal judge’s ruling that President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law, the Affordable Care Act, is unconstitutional, according to a court filing.
Amid mounting Democratic criticism of the administration’s stance, President Donald Trump asserted in a tweet Tuesday afternoon that, “The Republican Party will become ‘The Party of Healthcare!’”
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Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec told CNBC: “The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s comprehensive opinion came to the correct conclusion and will support it on appeal.”
If courts dismantle the ACA, it would likely cause millions of consumers to lose health care or face higher costs, in no small part due to the end of Medicaid expansion. Ending Obamacare is a long held goal of Trump and fellow Republicans. They failed to accomplish doing so in 2017 when the Senate fell short of passing a repeal bill.
Scrapping the law without a replacement would lead to 32 million more uninsured people by 2026, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2017.
Needless to say, the Trump administration has so far failed to propose a replacement for the current law, which would be needed to prevent 32 million people from losing their health care if the suit were to succeed.
Placing even more people at risk, there are also EPA rules adopted by the Trump administration that, it has been said, will lead to the deaths of thousands of people.
As the Trump administration unveiled its new plan to replace former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan (CPP) on Tuesday, rolling back restrictions on coal-fired power plants, it also revealed just how many lives could be at risk if the proposal is approved.
The Environmental Working Group warned on Tuesday that the Trump administration's new Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) Plan would "mean more children suffering from asthma, more Americans dying early deaths and only miniscule reduction of global warming pollution."
And, as the EWG has pointed out, the Environmental Protection Agency's own analysis of the proposal supports that claim, making clear the ACE Plan could increase carbon emissions and potentially cause as many as 1,400 premature deaths each year by 2030.
All of this is in addition to Trump's clumsy trade wars with China and Europe, which have massively damaged our farm sector and many other businesses. The resultant farm bailout has now totalled more than twice the cost of the auto bailout implemented by Barack Obama during the Great Recession.
President Donald Trump's trade-related payments to American farmers have quietly become the mother of all bailouts.
Back when General Motors and Chrysler faced bankruptcy during the Great Recession, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama pumped billions into a rescue of the auto industry. That bailout ultimately cost the public about $12 billion when everything was settled and loans repaid.
But that looks like small potatoes compared with the farm bailout underway now. So far, Trump's direct payments to farmers hurt by his trade dispute with China have totaled some $28 billion — more than twice what the auto bailout cost, according to calculations from Bloomberg Businessweek. And the payments are still flowing with no end in sight to the trade dispute.
And, of course, there are the many business failures that have resulted from Trump's trade tariffs.
The Fed will not save them. American companies are not hurting for capital and don't need lower interest rates. What they need is certainty. Their problem is the trade war. They've had enough of it.
"The trade war is all about uncertainty and people are sick of it," says Scott McCandless, head of the U.S. trade practice at PwC in Washington DC. "To the extent the Fed cuts rates further, I am not sure how effective it would be because the people we talk with are saying access to capital is not the problem for them. They're not investing because of trade uncertainty."
So while unemployment has been low, there is a great deal more to the overall story. There are many other issues, many other factors that have direct impacts on the people of the United States and their quality of life. There are moral issues, issues of law and justice, issues of right and wrong, issues of life and death that are playing out daily.
This goes beyond the way that Trump himself talks, how he spreads ridiculous conspiracy theories and distorts and mangles facts. Beyond how he uses personal insults and attacks against his critics and political opposition, how he coddles up to international dictators and despots such as Putin, Erdogan, Kim, and Duterte. How he hires members of his own family, then violates and overrides security protocols intended to protect the nation by granting them clearances they don't deserve. This goes beyond his tendency to use an unsecured personal cellphone for calls that are likely to be intercepted by foreign intelligence services.
President Donald Trump routinely calls old friends, business partners, and confidants on his personal iPhone while in the White House, giving Chinese and Russia spies easy access to his personal communications and interests, reports The New York Times.
The story cites American intelligence reports, which detail how Trump aides have repeatedly warned the president not to use his personal iPhone and to use the secure White House landline instead. Despite the warnings, Trump continues to take personal cellphone calls, and the White House has resolved to simply hoping the president doesn’t discuss classified matters over the phone.
According to the report, US intelligence agencies have reason to believe that Chinese and Russian spies are regularly eavesdropping on Trump’s calls by way of human sources within foreign governments and through the interception of communications between foreign officials.
And this goes beyond his personal management style, which more like that of a mafia boss than a political professional, as noted by his former chief of staff John Kelly, who told him that if he was served by a yes man, he'd likely be Impeached.
Kelly said Saturday that before departing the White House he privately told Trump not to hire a "yes man."
"I said, whatever you do, don't hire a 'yes man,' someone who won’t tell you the truth. Don’t do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached," Kelly said at the conservative Washington Examiner Political Summit.
Kelly said he warned the president not to hire a lackey to run his staff.
"Don't hire someone that will just, you know, nod and say, 'You know, that’s a great idea Mr. President,'" he told the partisan crowd. "'Because you will be impeached.'"
This is in addition to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who said that he repeatedly had to push back on Trump's demands because they weren't legal.
Tillerson commented on his time in the Trump administration during a rare public appearance in Houston Thursday night, according to reports in local media. He said he pushed back on the president’s efforts to get him to do things that were against the law.
“So often, the president would say here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it and I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law,’” Tillerson said.
The former Exxon Mobil CEO said that his pushback frustrated the president. Tillerson said he offered to lobby Congress to pass legislation enabling the president to get what he wanted legally.
“We can go back to Congress and get this law changed,” he said. “And if that’s what you want to do, there’s nothing wrong with that. I told him I’m ready to go up there and fight the fight, if that’s what you want to do.”
He doesn't care about or respect the law. He doesn't care about the Constitution. It's likely that factor over all others that has launched the current Impeachment inquiry that he now faces.
He's a criminal.
This is ultimately what he will be remembered for. This will be his legacy.