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Is Trump On the Verge of His Biggest Legislative Humiliation Yet?

Is Trump On the Verge of His Biggest Legislative Humiliation Yet?

President Trump’s plan for protecting and creating American jobs has taken three forms while he’s been in office.

First, he talks up American jobs and browbeats companies relocating to Mexico or overseas. While Trump exaggerates and takes credit when he doesn’t deserve it, he regularly ties his image and his presidency to the story of jobs in America, a politically astute move. But Trump needs more than rhetoric on jobs if he wants to protect Republican congressional majority in 2018 and have any chance of reelection in 2020. He needs to take measures that actually create jobs.

The second plank of Trump’s job program is the much touted and much delayed “trillion-dollar infrastructure jobs plan,” favored by White House adviser Steve Bannon. However, the plan has yet to be drawn up and is not scheduled for presentation until next year. It remains to be seen if Trump and Bannon can harmonize their infrastructure jobs program with that of Senate Democrats or the American Society of Civil Engineers. So far, Trump has made health care and tax reform a higher priority and shown little ability to work with anybody on passing legislation.

The third and most substantive part of Trump’s job plan is buried in current tax reform legislation: a border tax on imported goods that (Trump says) will favor U.S.-based manufacturers and exporters and thus create jobs in the United States. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but with “tax reform” now trumpeted as the administration’s top legislative priority, Trump’s jobs agenda is up for approval on Capitol Hill for the first time.

Trump is already faltering, even in his messaging. To describe the administration’s top priority as “tax reform,” and not “job creation” reflects Paul Ryan’s priorities more than Trump’s. The label weakens the president’s ability to sell a radical change in corporate tax policy that is already proving as divisive as Trump’s failed health care bill.

Trump’s salesmanship is not particularly aggressive or compelling. In an interview with Reuters in February, Trump embraced the notion of an import tax, also known as a “border adjustment tax.”

“I certainly support a form of tax on the border,” Trump said. He argued the measure would encourage companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, a critical component of his platform. Even when announcing his adminstration’s pivot to tax reform after the health care debacle, Trump didn’t talk much about the import border tax or jobs.

As with Obamacare repeal, the most right-wing factions on Capitol Hill are not buying into Trump’s vision.

“Conservative Split Over Import Tax Imperils Trump’s Overhaul,” the New York Times reported last Sunday.

A month ago I asked, “Who Wins? Trump v. the Koch Brothers on Jobs.” So far the answer, according to the Times, is the Koch brothers. Supported by Walmart and other giants of the retail industry, Koch family political front groups are moving to stifle Trump’s tax plan before it ever gets out of the House Ways and Means committee.

What Trump touts as a jobs plan, one Koch-funded group defines as a tax increase on millennials.

Another Koch-funded organization, Americans for Prosperity, is running TV ads denouncing the border adjustment tax (or BAT) as a $1.2 trillion tax increase on seniors and the working poor.

The split over Trump’s tax and jobs plans, says the Times,“is exposing the broader ideological divide between nationalist policies embraced by Mr. Trump and the traditional small-government movement that his election ejected from the driver’s seat of Republican policy-making.”

Trump does have leverage in this negotiation. To enact a tax bill that does not increase the federal deficit but does deliver what Republicans want most—rate cuts for wealthy taxpayers and corporations—Congress needs to find some source of new revenue. Hence the import tax.

To prevail, Trump will have to convince a majority of the House Ways and Means committee that BAT is worth adopting because it will create American jobs and will not raise prices on imported goods, despite what the local retail business community is saying. And if the House approves the BAT, Trump will have to protect those provisions in the Senate, where opposition is likely to be even stiffer.

That would be a heavy lift for any White House. For a president as disengaged and disorganized as Trump, it seems highly unlikely, if not impossible.

Trump doesn’t have a strong relationship with Ryan, who cares more about tax cuts than job creation. Trump doesn’t have a White House staff capable of coaxing and threatening wavering congress members to come around to his point of view. And he doesn’t have the discipline or the intellect to explain and sell a radical policy change to Congress, much less to the country. It’s not something you can do in 140-character bursts.

So the only substantive measure in Trump’s much-touted jobs agenda is at risk of dying a slow and invisible death.

Writing tax legislation is one of the slowest and most complex of the lawmaking arts. Congressional leaders have talked about having a tax bill ready to send to the president by August. Whether it will contain any of Trump’s job stimulation measures is already very much in doubt.

One of Trump’s most effective lines on the campaign trail was that the Washington establishment was “all talk and no action.”

If Trump can’t defeat the Koch brothers, pass the border tax and claim a job creation victory this year, he is going to be vulnerable to the same charge on jobs.

 Jefferson Morley is Washington correspondent for Alternet. He is the author of  JFK and CIA: The Secret Assassination Files (Kindle) and Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.
Ex-Goldman Banker Mnuchin Installed As Treasury Secretary

Ex-Goldman Banker Mnuchin Installed As Treasury Secretary

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump swore in former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood financier, Steven Mnuchin, as Treasury secretary on Monday, putting him to work on tax reform, financial de-regulation, and economic diplomacy efforts.

The U.S. Senate voted to confirm Mnuchin 53-47, with all but one Democrat opposing him over his handling of thousands of foreclosures as head of OneWest Bank after the 2007-2009 housing collapse.

At a White House swearing-in ceremony, Trump said Mnuchin would be a “great champion” for U.S. citizens.

“He will fight for middle-class tax reductions, financial reforms that open up lending and create millions of new jobs, and fiercely defend the American tax dollar and your financial security,” Trump said. “And he will also defend our manufacturing jobs from those who cheat and steal and rob us blind.”

Lawmakers, lobbyists, and business groups have been nervously waiting for Mnuchin to take office and fill in the many blanks on how he will pursue tax reform and handle delicate economic cooperation efforts with China, Mexico, and other trading partners worried that Trump’s “America First” strategy will upend decades-old trade rules and currency practices.

Mnuchin, 54, provided no details of his plans as he was sworn in.

“I am committed to using the full powers of this office to create more jobs, to combat terrorist activities and financing, and to make America great again,” Mnuchin said.

Trump has pledged to roll back the stricter financial regulation under the Dodd-Frank reform law enacted after the financial crisis, pursue tougher trade policies on China and Mexico to reduce U.S. trade deficits, and reduce business tax rates.

CHALLENGES COMING UP FAST

Mnuchin faces immediate challenges with the March 15 expiration of a U.S. debt ceiling suspension, ushering in the threat of a new default showdown, and a March 17 meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 major economies, where he will face tough questions about Trump’s plans to increase trade protections.

In April, Mnuchin will have to determine whether to declare China a currency manipulator as part of Treasury’s semi-annual currency report.

“There is a real open question as to whether this administration is going to cut itself off from international monetary cooperation, whether it’s exchange rate policies or attitudes towards multilateral institutions or international regulatory policy,” said Edwin Truman, a former Treasury and Federal Reserve official now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics

Among Mnuchin’s biggest jobs is managing a sprawling congressional tax reform effort that seeks to slash business tax rates and enact a new border tax adjustment system aimed at boosting U.S. exports.

Mnuchin will quickly need to build a core management team to handle such challenges.

Treasury and White House representatives did not respond to requests for comment on Monday on reports that Trump would soon nominate David Malpass, a former economist at failed Wall Street bank Bear Stearns, as Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, the agency’s top economic diplomacy job.

Malpass, a Trump campaign adviser who had been leading Treasury transition efforts, was seen as a leading candidate for the job, with experience from international economic posts in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

Other names that have been floated for senior posts include Goldman Sachs banker Jim Donovan for deputy Treasury secretary and Justin Muzinich, a former Morgan Stanley banker, for undersecretary of domestic finance.

“FORECLOSURE MACHINE”

Mnuchin, a second-generation Goldman Sachs banker who led the firm’s mortgage bond trading but left the bank in 2002, came under fire from Democrats over his investor group’s 2009 acquisition of another failed lender, IndyMac Bank, from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The bank, rebranded as OneWest, subsequently foreclosed on more than 36,000 homeowners, drawing charges from housing advocates that it was a “foreclosure machine.”

Mnuchin grew OneWest into Southern California’s largest lender and sold it for $3.4 billion in 2015. He has also helped finance Hollywood blockbusters such as “Avatar,” “American Sniper” and this past weekend’s box office champion, “The Lego Batman Movie,” which took in $55.6 million.

The Senate on Monday also unanimously confirmed David Shulkin as secretary of veterans affairs, putting the only holdover from the Obama administration in charge of the second largest federal agency. Shulkin had been in charge of the VA’s sprawling health system for the past 18 months.

(Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson; Editing by Peter Cooney and Leslie Adler)

IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) watches as Vice President Mike Pence (R) swears in Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary next to his fiancée Louise Linton in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington February 13, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

6 Countries Trump Has Already Insulted And Provoked

6 Countries Trump Has Already Insulted And Provoked

Two weeks into Donald Trump’s belligerent presidency, one must ask: Where will this administration’s launch its first serious international conflict?

The White House’s announcement Friday of narrow economic sanctions against Iran, in response to its dumb test firing of a missile, came after Trump made it sound like Iran had done something outsized and horrific. It hadn’t. Still, the president tweeted hours before announcing the sanctions, “Iran is playing with fire” and, “They don’t appreciate how ‘kind’ President Obama was to them. Not me!”

Diplomats and foreign policy experts see an emerging pattern of needless spats, provocations and threats coming from Trump, and they’ve already labeled it. “I think we are just facing a normal Trump tantrum,” Graham Richardson, a senior cabinet minister in a previous Australian government, toldSky News, in response to Trump’s telephone tirade with the prime minister of one of the U.S.’ most loyal allies. Apparently, Trump hit the roof when he learned that the Obama administration had promised to take 1,250 war refugees stranded offshore in Australia—if they passed U.S. federal immigration review.

But Australia’s prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, just as Mexico’s president did days earlier, covered for Trump,  saying, no, the U.S. president didn’t hang up on him. Mexico’s presidential spokesman said no, Trump didn’t threaten a military invasion—rather he offered troops to combat crime. This is what seasoned diplomats do, when bulls stampede in the china shop.

“None of this is normal,” Dan Nexon, a professor at Georgetown University who studies American global strategy, toldVox. “It’s not just that the president is apparently acting like a petulant bully with these people. It’s also that it’s for no obvious policy purpose.”

Actually, Trump is doing what he pledged to do during his campaign—shake up all the old systems by injecting chaos and instability.

“We must as a nation be more unpredictable,” he said last summer in his major foreign policy address at the Center for the National Interest. Trump’s complaints about foreign policy—then and now—are the same. The U.S. is overextended with allies taking advantage of us, not paying a fair share, think we’re unreliable, and rivals do not respect us, Trump said. “We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.”

Here’s a list of six countries and major international institutions that Trump and his team have threatened—injecting anything but stability into international affairs. Certainly this behavior is silly, unnecessary, and stupid. The question is, will these provocations and others to likely follow lead to serious new international conflict.

1. Iran. The Iranian decision to test-fire a ballistic missile this week was an example of the dumb provoking the dumb. Trump took the bait and tweeted early Friday, “Iran is playing with fire.” That reply came two days after his administration put Iran “on notice” about its missile tests and its support of terrorism. While Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, tweeted Friday that his country was unmoved by U.S. threats and would never initiate a war, Trump’s martial hardliner, National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn, preposterously claimed that the Islamic Republic was still a major threat to the United States. “Iran’s senior leadership continues to threaten the United Stated and its allies,” his statement released by the White House said. “The days of turning a blind eye to Iran’s hostile and belligerent actions toward the United States and the world community are over.”

2. North Korea. Here, too, the Trump administration is saber rattling with an isolated nuclear-armed regime that likes to flash its teeth, and drawing eye-for-an-eye lines in the sand. The new Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, on his first trip abroad since taking over the Pentagon, visited South Korea and Japan, and as with Iran, said that North Korea was a bad actor continuing to “engage in threatening rhetoric and behavior.” Speaking to the press before meeting South Korea’s defense minister, he said, “Any attack on the United States or our allies will be defeated and any use of nuclear weapons would be met with a response that would be effective and overwhelming.”

3. China. Here, Trump’s administration isn’t just making eye-for-an-eye threats, they are throwing the first punch. During his confirmation hearings for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson called for a more confrontational stance on China’s expansion of military bases off their coast in the South China Sea. “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops, and second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed,” he said. That came after the president-elect spoke to Taiwan’s president, provoking China, and scuttled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, which lessens the clout the U.S. has in the region. “By preemptively eliminating tools like economic statecraft from its foreign-policy toolbox, the Trump administration will be leaving itself with only hard power to counteract China’s ambitions,” ForeignPolicy.com wrote. “That would probably mean an attempted military blockade against the Chinese navy in the South China Sea.”

4. Mexico. Trump’s attacks against Mexico and its people are too numerous to recount, starting with his early campaign slurs smearing Mexicans and continuing with recent boasts about forcing the country to pay for a new border wall, which it has consistently dismissed. But last week, this needlessly fraught relationship took a darker turn when Trump threatened Mexican president Peña Nieto with sending U.S. troops over the border to fight crime, according to leaked transcripts of the phone call. “Trump threatened to send U.S. troops into Mexico to stop ‘bad hombres down there’” said the Los Angeles Times. Immediately afterward, the White House and the Mexican president’s office walked that back, saying no such threat was made—the predictable diplomatic and public relations damage control response. On the other hand, the Mexican president canceled his January 30 meeting with Trump, after Trump kept saying the U.S. would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it.

5. Australia. Trump’s executive order ending U.S. commitment to the Trans-Pacific Partnership has left U.S. allies in the region, especially Japan and Australia, reeling as they saw it as a withdrawal of U.S. power from the region. As he did in his conversation with Mexico’s president, Trump went ballistic in a phone call last weekend with Australia Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, apparently because he did not know about Obama’s pledge to resettle 1,250 refugees. Trump called it “the worst deal ever,” according to news reports. Later, he tweeted angrily about it, prompting Turnbull to downplay the incident and a former cabinet member there to label it “a normal Trump tantrum.” Obviously, the U.S. is not going to incite a dispute with Australia, a key military and intelligence ally, especially when it’s picking fights with nearby China. But yet another kneejerk and dumb reaction is hardly going to lower the temperature in the region.

6. Germany. This is another example of Trump’s team needlessly provoking a key ally. Trump, of course, supported Great Britain’s exit from the European Union, which does not help that continent achieve more economic and social stability. But his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, went after Germany and accused it of being a currency manipulator, by gaming the euro’s value to “exploit” the U.S. dollar. This is the diplomatic equivalent of an ambush. Allies don’t expect their longtime partners to wage these fights in public and this has a cost that’s going to hurt the U.S., because, as in the case in the Pacific, the perception is this American administration is withdrawing and cannot be trusted.

Words Have Meaning and Actions Have Consequences.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the world is watching Trump, and apart from Russia—where Trump is portrayed in the press as their new best friend—is not impressed.

On Tuesday this week, the European Council president Donald Tusk sent a letter to the heads of European Union member states with deep misgivings about Trump. Tusk cited Trump questioning NATO’s value, applauding Britain’s exit from the EU, saying other countries might want to leave to reclaim “their own identity,” and that the EU was a “vehicle for Germany” to assert its power.

Trump has also lashed out at the United Nations, threatening to cut U.S. funding there and for other global organizations by 40 percent. However imperfect the U.N. may be, shrinking it would undermine its peacekeeping and international cooperation efforts. Trump’s advisers have also said they want to walk away from international climate change treaties, which will lead to more—not less—global instability.

Two weeks into his administration, Trump is the proverbial bull in the diplomatic china shop. But his provocations and precedents are serious and are likely to lead to a conflict somewhere that cooler heads would avoid. Writing for Foreign Policy, Stephen Martin Walt, an American professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who describes himself as a realist, said Trump has already blown it, is offending people in every direction, and he doesn’t get it.

“They started to pick several fights with China while undercutting the U.S. position in Asia,” he wrote. “He badgered Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in an acrimonious phone call—and here we are talking about the leader of the country that has fought at America’s side in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—and he bragged (again) about his electoral win. They picked another pointless fight with Mexico, mostly because Trump can’t admit what is obvious to all: If that stupid wall ever gets built, Americans will have to pay for it. The White House announced an unlawful ban on Muslim immigrants, and rolled the new policy out as ineptly as possible. I mean, seriously: They shut the door on hundreds of extensively vetted refugees on Holocaust Remembrance Day (thereby invoking memories of the country’s callous response to Nazi persecution in the 1930s), and then they doubled-down by deliberately excluding any mention of Jews from the official statement on the day itself.”

The question is not if, but when and where will Trump’s first serious conflict strike?

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s democracy and voting rights.

IMAGE: President Trump, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, at the Homeland Security headquarters.  REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst