What Will Be, Will Be: Redux

Something you and I absolutely agree upon:  I’m not that smart.  However, this post is entered in shocked reaction to a comment by MSNBC’s Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough today, to the effect that legislators and financiers with whom Mr. Scarborough talks are stunned that President Donald Trump is actually doing … exactly what he said he was going to do during the campaign — now augmented by hints that Mr. Trump and Elon Musk are considering doing what Mr. Trump has always said he wouldn’t do:  tamper with Social Security and Medicare.  What follows are excerpts (all italics appeared in the original) from a post entitled, “What Will Be, Will Be,” entered in these pages six days after Mr. Trump’s election.  (If you care, scroll down to fill in the portions I’ve omitted here.)

“‘Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow?  Never!  All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?  I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.  It cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.’

• Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1838

…

I have always thought that the American presidency called for a fundamentally good person who was willing to take morally questionable actions to achieve a greater good.  It is clear that many Americans are willing to abide a man whom even a large share of his supporters concede is amoral in hopes that he will do good things.  [I am particularly struck by those Evangelicals who admit that they wouldn’t want Mr. Trump as a pastor but can abide him as president.  Granting that the Bible can be cited for just about anything anyone wants, one cannot help but pause at the seeming … let’s say, incongruity … that any such literalist Christians so readily disregarded Matthew 7: 17-18:  ‘Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears rotten fruit.  A good tree cannot bear rotten fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit.’] It is what it is.

What comes next?

…

Over the next four years, I expect:  that Mr. Trump – already exhausted and mentally degrading – to become a figurehead for a radical reformation of our federal government by Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, Jr., and the MAGA zealots who have put together Project 2025; that all criminal charges now adjudged or pending against Mr. Trump will be dispensed with; that all of the convicted January 6^th rioters will be pardoned; that many of Mr. Trump’s most prominent political and media critics will be prosecuted by the Trump Justice Department on trumped up (if you will 😉 ) charges … or otherwise pressured into submission; that MAGAs will pass measures that in fact if not in name will serve to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning constituencies; that many legal as well as illegal immigrants will be swept up in the Administration’s deportation initiatives; that MAGA-sympathetic generals will be appointed to lead the American military, and that at some point under their direction our armed forces will take action against peaceful American citizen demonstrators; that violence will increase against African Americans, legal immigrants of color, non-Christians, and Americans with untraditional gender and sexual preferences; that NATO will remain in name, but will have severely reduced effectiveness as America substantially limits its participation; that Russia will absorb at least Ukraine and possibly a number of NATO countries formerly members of the USSR; that Mr. Trump and his cohort will continue their approach of division and distraction; … and that — the bitterest irony of all — the gap between the American rich and those poor who consider Mr. Trump their Messiah will continue to widen.  (The cruelest joke will be that because of alt-right propaganda, most are likely not to even realize that Mr. Trump did nothing for them.)

…

If Mr. Trump and his minions actually effect the tariffs and tax cuts for which he’s advocated and bend securities laws to favor powerful oligarchs like Elon Musk, it doesn’t take an economics degree to predict that inflation, the deficit, and accordingly interest rates will soar and the stock market will drop; if they effect the mass deportations of illegal aliens he has promised, certain sectors of our economy dependent on illegal labor will crater, materially adversely affecting the entire economy; and that if they obtain the control over the Federal Reserve Mr. Trump seeks, global confidence in the dollar will plummet along with its value and hasten its abandonment as the world’s reserve currency.    

For clues as to whether the MAGA Administration will be willing, contrary to my deepest misgivings, to allow for a free and fair 2028 election, an early indication will be how the Administration approaches issues that do matter to Trump voters.  Ones coming to mind are the conservative shibboleths of a nationwide abortion ban, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts (there are a lot of Trump voters who benefit from Medicaid), and repeal of the now-popular Affordable Care Act without an essentially-like replacement.  In these areas, Mr. Trump, even in his obviously mentally and emotionally degraded state, is cannier than his doctrinaire followers.  If he or his MAGA cohort truly intend to subject their hold on power to the free will of all American citizens in 2028, they will abstain from any actions that they know will outrage their base.  A more ominous indicator of any anti-democratic intentions they may harbor will arise, if at all, after the 2026 mid-terms, if MAGA propaganda starts to stoke unfounded fears of civil unrest or insurrection.” 

I apologize for taking your time with an unplanned vent, particularly one which is little more than a repeat of what has already been entered here (although surrendering to such impulses is one of the perks of a site like this 😉 ). I am just having trouble grasping that the supposed sophisticates Mr. Scarborough referred to couldn’t see coming what was as plain as the noses on their faces.  I hope to post an entry in the not-too-distant future regarding the condition our traditional guardrails – those destroyed, and those remaining.  Keep your seatbelt on.