I didn't expect much from the first 100 days of the Trump Presidency. I didn't get much. I'm happy a conservative, pro life, constitutional constructionist was appointed to the Supreme Court. But with Syria, and now with North Korea, Trump is continuing the debacle of the military interventionism of the last 50 years, which has produced nothing but the futile 'little wars' so characteristic of an Empire.
Trade has clearly taken a back seat to these hot button issues. North Korea is a backwater swamp of a country.. isolated, politically cloistered of no particular threat to anybody but their own people. But Trump is using it as wedge to back off confronting China on currency and trade.
NAFTA has now become something that has to be 'renegotiated' rather than repealed. We all know that means a few cosmetic changes, and no real change at all. The steel, auto, primary metals processing and small manufacturing sector will continue to rust.
His tax policies have an uncomfortable resemblance to disastrous 'supply side' Reaganomics, with tax cuts for all supposed to stimulate growth and compensate for deficits. It has never worked. It never will.
Wall Street and investment deregulation will be every bit as catastrophic as Bill Clinton's dereg of the late 1990s which led directly to the Derivatives/Housing bubble and collapse (and Depression) of 2008.
His Health Care policies seem a capitulation to 'states rights' and insurance company profits. The only thing that will work is a public, one payer insurance system supporting private, competitive health care providers. That 's not even on the table.
Essentially America did not vote for a NeoConservative Agenda.. they've had their fill of that from BOTH parties. And in economic terms that is what has been delivered. Trump, in this arena, is following Ideology and ignoring his working class Constituency. The world is reeling from the failure of global, free market, regressive, post structural economic ideologies. The only alternative in national, dirigiste, progressive, populist economics.
Trump has been useful in blunting and disorganizing the Global Free Market, Monetarist momentum.... but he has not stopped it and he has not articulated a coherent alternative. The success of his Presidency and the prospects of a second term all rest with that, and the rebuilding of a national, integrated, industrial economy.
