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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Saturday, April 1, 2017
By Paul Waldman March 21
On Monday, while he was suffering an unusually bad news day in Washington, President Trump went to Kentucky to hold a rally with his loyal supporters. As he always does, he spent some time regaling the crowd with how fantastic his election victory was, making one wonder at what point he’ll stop talking about that.
On Monday, while he was suffering an unusually bad news day in Washington, President Trump went to Kentucky to hold a rally with his loyal supporters. As he always does, he spent some time regaling the crowd with how fantastic his election victory was, making one wonder at what point he’ll stop talking about that.
But the location provided a vivid case study in the dangers Trump will
face as time goes on. This early in his presidency, he can still talk
about the glittering future he’ll deliver. But at some point, he’ll have
to reckon with what his policies have actually done and failed to do.
Trump is applying to governing the same theory that worked quite well
for him in his business career. But the rules have already changed for
him.
Naturally, Trump promised that the Republican health-care bill will save
Americans from the catastrophe of the Affordable Care Act. But it’s an
odd thing to say in Kentucky, which may have fared better than any other
state under the ACA. The state accepted the law’s expansion of Medicaid
and saw an additional 443,000
of its citizens — a full 10 percent of the state’s population — get
health coverage at no cost. The state also launched its own ACA
exchange, Kynect, which was one of the most successful in the country. According to
Gallup, the uninsured rate fell from 20.4 percent in 2013 before the
law took effect down to 7.8 percent in 2016, a dramatic drop of more
than 12 percentage points.
Which means that if the Republicans succeed in repealing the ACA, no
state will suffer more than Kentucky. But hey, who needs Medicaid or
subsidized health coverage if you’ve got a great job mining coal, where
salaries are high and benefits are comprehensive? Trump repeated that
promise, too — that once we get rid of some environmental regulations,
all those coal jobs will come back:
“We are going to put our coal miners back to work. They have not been treated well, but they’re going to be treated well now. Clean coal, right? Clean coal. I have already eliminated a devastating anti-coal regulation. And that is just the beginning. You saw that, got a lot thank yous from a lot of great people that work very hard and want to keep working. Lot of people are going to be put back to work, lot of coal miners are going back to work. As we speak, we are preparing new executive actions to save our coal industry and to save our wonderful coal miners from continuing to be put out of work. The miners are coming back.”
I can’t say how many people in Kentucky actually believe that, but no
one who knows anything about the coal industry does. The fact is that
coal jobs have been declining for
decades, and while environmental regulations have some effect, the two
big drivers of the reduction in mining jobs are automation (which means
fewer miners are needed to produce the same amount of coal) and
competition from other forms of energy. Coal is being steadily replaced
by renewables such as solar and wind, but more immediately by natural
gas, which because of the fracking boom has become plentiful and cheap.
Trump has also vowed to promote fracking, though he hasn’t explained how
that jibes with his pledge to bring back all the coal jobs. There are
now only about 50,000 coal-mining jobs left in the country, and no
serious person thinks that number is going to go anywhere but down, no
matter what policy changes come out of Washington.
The administration hasn’t yet said what executive orders Trump is going
to sign, but unless he plans to ban fracking, chances are they’ll have
something to do with relaxing environmental regulations, and will do
little if anything to restore any coal jobs. So why is it that Trump
feels comfortable repeatedly making this promise that no serious person,
Republican or Democrat, thinks he’ll be able to keep?
I’d argue that the answer lies in Trump’s unique experience as a
businessman. In his particular corner of the business world, you really
can create wealth just by managing public perception — or at least he could.
This was the theory of his entire career, that by fashioning a public
persona that was as much of a caricature of wealth and success as
Scrooge McDuck, he could turn himself into the picture he was painting.
The more people saw Donald Trump as the embodiment of wealth, the more
they would want to invest in his projects and buy his products, which
would in turn make him wealthier. Making ridiculous promises and
outright lying were all part of creating the image; one of my favorite
examples is how Trump Tower is 58 stories high, but he numbered the floors up to 68 so that everyone would think it was taller than it is.
And it worked, even if not to quite the extent he claims. Over time, the
Trump Organization became less about actual real estate development and
more about brand licensing, where he would give someone rights to use
the Trump name and its association with garish conspicuous consumption,
take little or no risk and just collect the fees. It’s a good business,
but it’s not the same as politics. Brand management is certainly
important to political success, but if you’re the president, you have to
deliver for people, and deliver on things such as health care, which
are complex and require difficult trade-offs.
There’s another key difference between Trump’s business experience and
politics. When he conned someone, like the attendees of Trump
University, no matter how unhappy they were he could move on to other
marks (even if he might have to pay his victims off if
the courts caught up with him). It was a big world, and there were
always other people who might be taken in by the next scam. But in
politics, you have to go back to the people you made promises to the
first time around, and ask them to put their faith in you again.
For now, it’s obvious that Trump looks at his first legislative priority much like one of his buildings:
What matters is that people think it’s the tallest one around,
even if it isn’t. He doesn’t seem to know or care much about what’s in
the GOP’s bill to repeal the ACA or what the effects would be. It’s just
about getting a win one way or the other. Today he met with congressional
Republicans not to discuss the content of the bill, but to cajole and
threaten them into voting for it. He told Mark Meadows, head of the
far-right Freedom Caucus, to stand up while he told him, “I’m gonna come
after you, but I know I won’t have to, because I know you’ll vote
‘yes.’ ” (Meadows says he’s still voting no.)
And, in a telling moment, Trump referred to his audience Monday night in
Kentucky, and said, “We won’t have these crowds if we don’t get this
done.”
So what happens when Trump goes back to Kentucky in three years, and he
has taken away voters’ health coverage but didn’t manage to bring back
the coal jobs of yesteryear? We’ve seen so many profiles of loyal Trump
supporters that it’s easy to believe that everyone who voted for him in
2016 will do so again no matter what he does or fails to do. But that’s
not true.
There were a lot of people who voted for Trump even though they knew he
was a blowhard and utterly lacking in anything resembling common human
decency, but were dissatisfied enough with their personal situation and
the state of their communities that they said, “What the hell, let’s
give him a shot.”
Their support is not guaranteed. Trump will have to win it all over
again if they’re going to vote for him in 2020, or vote to keep his
party in control in Congress. And if he can’t come through for them in
real ways, they won’t come through for him at the ballot box.