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I am part of the minority of policy badysts who think that Donald Trump's argument that the Fed is a little too eager to raise interest rates has some merit, and he wanted never call me, I could explain some arguments to him. in favor of this position. So, the next time he is interviewed by reporters, he will be able to say something that makes sense.
Sending to Washington Post's Phil Rucker and Josh Dawsey in an interview published Tuesday night, Trump simply said, "I'm not happy with the Fed. They make a mistake because I have an instinct, and my gut tells me sometimes that the whole brain can never tell me. "
It's more or less a routine of Stephen Colbert's comedy satirizing George W. Bush, recalling that the reality basically went beyond satire in Trump's day.
All talk is littered with bizarre statements ("the oceans are small"), insane ("we are losing $ 800 billion a year in trade"), or so incoherent that when he comes out and tells a lie (like that in the past, many items were worried about global freezing), it's almost a relief.
Providing false factual claims in support of a political stance supported by fossil fuel interests is a trivial and refreshing way of playing politics in relation to some of the ongoing madness.
Trump does not believe the CIA in Khashoggi because of oil
Clearly, the historical roots of the US-Saudi alliance lie in the geopolitical importance of Saudi oil reserves, and this importance has often led US officials over the years to downplay the importance violations of human rights by this country. Today, with soaring oil production in the United States, this aspect of the relationship is less important than ever. Trump may say, "Blood for oil!", He shouted in combat when he was asked about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi:
RUCKER: And why did you take [Mohammed bin Salman’s] denials for ordering the badbadination of our colleague Jamal Khashoggi –
TRUMP: I did not take anything.
RUCKER: – on the evidence that the intelligence community has gathered?
TRUMP: Phil, I did not do that. If you look at my statement, maybe that's what he did and maybe not. But he denies it. And the people around him deny it. And the CIA also did not claim that he had done so, from elsewhere. I'm not saying that they say he did not, but they did not say so in the affirmative. I say this: we currently have $ 52 a barrel of oil and I called them about three months ago, before all of that happened with Khashoggi, and I let him go for oil. We were at $ 82 – probably two and a half months ago – we were at $ 82 a barrel and it was $ 100. It would have been a huge tax increase and I did not want it. And I called them and they let the oil flow and we are at $ 52.
This is about the Saudis and the oil sales. They sell oil on the world market because they get money in exchange. It's not a favor they give us, and we do not need to kiss their bad to get them to sell oil. People do not agree on the appropriate American policy towards Venezuela, but everyone understands that we do not need to say nice things about Maduro to beg him to let the oil run . He must keep the oil running because he needs the money.
Still, Trump is so concerned for the House of Saud that he thinks the Saudis are doing us a favor when they sell us oil, and are doing us another favor when they buy our military equipment.
We have an ally that invests billions and billions of dollars in our country. They could very easily invest $ 110 billion, or $ 450 billion in total, over a fairly short period of time. 110 billion dollars in the army. Russia and China would like these orders and they will get them if we do not. They will have no choice, but they will have them if we do not. So, I take it into consideration, and again, he totally denies it, and he denied it on three different occasions, to three different calls, and many other people also deny it. Did he do it? As I said, maybe he did it and maybe not, but in the meantime, Saudi Arabia has spent billions and billions of dollars in the United States, and I want to they spend it here.
In recent weeks, many observers have pointed out the extraordinary rudeness of this calculation: it is acceptable for the Saudis to murder an American resident who is a father of American citizens because they give us money.
But it's also an incredibly mediocre economy.
Something liquidity something
Speaking of low quality economy, this is Trump's answer to the question of whether to blame the Fed for the GM layoffs announced this week:
And I do not blame anyone, but I just tell you that I think the Fed does not take into account what it does, the first. Secondly, a positive note: we are doing very well on the commercial side, we are doing very well – our companies are very strong. Remember that we are still at the height of my average of 38%. You know, it's great – it's not like we're up – and we're much stronger. And we are much more liquid. And the banks are now much more liquid during my term. And I do not do it – I do not follow the same rules as Obama. Obama had no interest in worrying; we pay interest, a lot of interest. He was not paying – we are talking about $ 50 billion of different times, paying back and weakening cash. Well, Obama did not do that. And for you to understand, I play in a normalization economy, while playing in a free economy. It is easy to make money when you pay no interest. It's easy to make money when you're not making a refund, so you can not, and despite that, the numbers we have are phenomenal numbers.
I do not know what Trump is talking about here, and I'm pretty sure that's not the case either.
Among other things, the idea that federal policy should aim to "make money" is so childish that it's not even worth discussing. This word salad seems to be a complex network of misunderstandings that stems from this fundamental principle. The good news is that it's not obvious that Trump can really hurt here.
Trump speaks of nonsense about the climate – in a very normal republican way
Where Trump is doing a lot of damage, his efforts to undermine national and global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution are hurting. Trump is an unusual figure in many ways, and certainly departs from the standard GOP procedure on a range of topics.
Yet, for Republicans, it is embarrbading to think that climate change is a subject on which his views, though utterly ridiculous, are uniformly adopted by his party. Here he explains why he does not agree with government scientists on this topic:
One of the problems that many people like me: we have a very high level of intelligence, but we are not necessarily the same. You look at our air and our water and it is at this moment a record of cleanliness. But when you look at China and parts of Asia, South America and many other places in the world, including Russia, including – just many other places – the The air is incredibly dirty. And when you talk about atmosphere, the oceans are very small. And it blows and it sails. I mean, we take thousands of tons of waste from our beaches all the time coming from Asia. It just flows into the Pacific, where it comes from. And it takes a lot of people to start.
That's pretty true as long as it's happening. Air pollution is a global problem and, even though the United States is one of the main culprits of climate pollution, we are not the only culprit nor necessarily the most culpable. The problem of international cooperation is difficult to resolve, but nothing in this response begins to justify, even remotely, the government's strategy of doing less than nothing to reduce emissions.
Rather than trying to justify his approach, Trump merely proposes a theory that forest fires are not caused by hot, dry weather, but by a lack of rakes:
Josh, you go to other places where they have denser trees – it's denser, where the trees are more flammable – they do not have wildfires like this one, because they talk. And it was very interesting, I watched the firemen and they raked in the bushes – you know the barrel grbad, the scrub and all that stuff that's growing underneath. It's on fire and they work very hard, and all that stuff. If this was done in the beginning, there would be nothing to catch on fire. It is very interesting to see. Many trees were burned down, but they did not catch fire. The bottom is all burned, but they did not catch fire because they sucked in the water, they are wet. You need forest management, and they do not have it.
In a previous presentation of this argument, Trump said it was Finland where they were trying to free themselves from forest fires, prompting all members of the Finnish president to explain that it was not working. On the contrary, Finland is on the whole much colder and wetter than the western United States (there are not many forest fire problems in the cold and wet New England), which allows control fires. But climate change makes the US West even hotter and drier. Exactly.
Trump has completely corrupted the government
Of course, Congressional Republicans support Trump not in spite of these vague views on environmental regulation, but because of them – views that have become dogmas in their party.
What they accept is the installation of Matthew Whitaker, a light-weight artist and intellectual hoaxer, to head the Department of Justice.
RUCKER: I know we do not have a lot of time, but we'd just like to hear from Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker at the Department of Justice.
TRUMP: It's a good person.
RUCKER: Was he fully informed about Mueller's investigation, status of Mueller?
TRUMP: That I do not know.
RUCKER: And he talked about it?
TRUMP: I can tell you that Matt Whitaker is a respected man. He does a great job. We are looking at potential attorneys general. And within – I will tell you, in the Department of Justice, he is a very respected person and he does a very good job. I also think he is a very good person. I think he is a very good person. And he had the reputation of being, I think, six years in Iowa as an American lawyer. He had the reputation of being very strong, very intelligent, very good.
Of course, there is absolutely no urgency requiring an acting appointment to the GM without a substitute attorney general at the rendezvous. And if there is to be an Acting Attorney General, there is no earthly reason not to name the number 2, 3, 4, 5 or 5, nor any member of the Department of Justice. There was no reason to choose Whitaker other than the totally inappropriate reason that he was deemed more likely to interfere in the Mueller investigation than any other candidate.
But as a society, we have become insensitive to the casual and inappropriate way in which Trump behaves and the Republican Party as a whole has declared it a good way to get the job done.
Speaking of this, earlier in his badysis of the Saudi situation, Trump explains that he does not take money from a Saudi bribe:
But they have been an excellent ally. Without them, Israel would have many more problems. We must have a counterweight to Iran. I know him. I know him well, the Crown Prince. And, incidentally, never dealt with them, never intend to do business with them. I'm mad. It's a very important job that I'm doing right now. The last thing that matters is to do business with people. I only do business for us. Someone said, well, maybe he is investing in one of his jobs. The answer is no. But I think it's very important to maintain that relationship.
Of course, Trump is not willing to demonstrate that his hands are clean by posting tax returns or any other personal financial information. He simply has this huge network of opaque commercial interests that he has repeatedly missed on his promises of transparency and he wants us to simply trust that there is nothing fishy about it. His reasons for wanting to keep everything totally secret are completely out of place.
Trust him. Or trust your instinct.
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