Shock and awe from the wealthy class of politicians and press that Donald Trump could destroy their livelihoods, too
...we're all watching the shock and awe from the pols and press which spent the entire Biden presidency clucking their tongues at the historic recovery he'd managed to produce in the wake of Donald Trump's last negligent and costly reign in office, and promoting the absurdity that what the republican Congress managed to block and slow down represented a Democratic failure to do more on the economy.
Instead of allowing that recovery to continue, a booming Biden economy celebrated by almost every major economist, one which is still said to have been on track to at least 4% growth if Trump just stayed out of its way, this president was intent on breaking American's progress just because he could.
What stands out as I watch the incredible outpouring of concern and scorn on myriad business news outlets from so many impeccably dressed white-haired men who we've seen cheerfully and confidently in the past laying out how their money is moving through our hands to their own, is how extensively and comprehensively; how desperate they are to explain the details and intricacies of the economics that under-gird our own lives and livelihoods but is really just cold and calculating business to them.
For what may well be the first time in their lives, these money men in and outside of government are looking at the prospect of their place on the economic pyramid eroding fast, threatening to make them as vulnerable as the majority of struggling Americans they've routinely disregarded in their economic projections and manipulations.
They are in various stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, with more than a few looking for an upside for them in the disruption and chaos, hoping that there's some 'art of the deal' waiting in the wings to rescue them back to Mar a Lago for cocktails at the evening hour.
The most delusional is one repeated today by several what there was some fault and cautionary lesson to be learned in the way Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and others focused on the certain destruction of our democracy and democratic system of government by this republican class of ne'er-do-well businessmen who only got into politics because they failed at everything else.
The complaint is that instead of the Democratic campaign focusing on 'other things,' like Jan. 6 and the threatening Trump dictatorship, Democrats should have been leaning more into the fake, hyped concerns about high prices in a booming Biden economy generating record employment and wage growth.
"They should have been talking about prices instead of democracy,' goes the refrain, as if the actual anti-Democratic actions by Trump in declaring a fake emergency to impose these crippling tariffs isn't the actual point here.
There's a republican Congress RIGHT THERE in the majority with full power to legislate away this contrived authority Trump is assuming for so many of his executive actions, but the president's refusal to adhere to the law has been met by the republican majority with complicity and indifference.
The reasons for this American crisis that threatens to send America back to the mercantile system of trade and economics are entirely rooted in our democracy, and in republican legislators' refusal to defend their own part in our Democratic system of government to provide a check on the Executive.
It wasn't Democrats who muddled that question, though. The media withdrew into a fantastical denial of what had occurred in the last Trump presidency, pushed aside a multi-felony indictment IN COURT for trying to overturn the last election and harped continually about EVERY false projection from the republican campaign about voter anxiety over high prices.
But the actual threat was that all of the control of the economy would be in the hands of the person and party that was clearly demagoguing it, claiming loudly that tariffs would replace the personal income tax, and ignoring the cautions from Democrats that all of the republican economic arguments were regressive and would only lead to more evisceration of our government and more money out of our Treasury going to Trump and republicans' wealthy benefactors.
The explanation from these well-dressed, panicked people this morning for their neglect in making the full case to Americans about the consequences and devastating effects of the tariffs Trump was promising to effect on his OWN volition was that they believed the talk was a negotiating tactic.
Now there's a vain hope among these moneyed mavens that the actual enactment of the tariffs is still just a bluff that will lead to perfect phone calls and negotiations- and that, if only Democrats would just explain more....
Trump told a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 2023:
“Biden and his radical left allies like to pose as standing up as allies of democracy... Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy, Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”
At the Munich Security Conference that February, VP Kamala Harris asked, “whether it is in America’s interest to fight for democracy or to accept the rise of dictators, or like some in Washington “to embrace dictators and adopt their repressive tactics.”
That's still the question today, despite the struggle of those newly enlightened by their own foisted petards to come to that realization that the source of their own power to resist the instant evisceration of millions of their dollars is in the defense of our democratic system of government that Trump is self-servingly dismantling.
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