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The Perils Of Megalomania In The White House

The Perils Of Megalomania In The White House

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

I spent last week at a conference in South Korea, during which time Trump went from seeking a meeting with Kim Jong un to cancelling it, then suggesting it might be back on.

“What does Trump want?” South Korean officials at the conference kept asking me. Notably, no one asked what the United States wants. They knew it was all about Trump.

Trump’s goal has nothing to do with peace on the Korean peninsula, or even with making America great again. It’s all about making Trump feel great.

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“They are respecting us again,” Trump exulted to graduating cadets at the Naval Academy last Friday. “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Nothing like winning. You got to win.”

In truth, the United States hasn’t won anything, in Korea or anywhere else. After fifteen months of Trump at the helm, America is far less respected around the world than it was before.

The only thing that’s happened is Trump is now making foreign policy on his own – without America’s allies, without Congress, even without the State Department. Trump may consider this a personal win but it hardly makes America safer.

Some earnest foreign policy experts are seeking to discover some bargaining strategy behind Trump’s moves on North Korea. Hint: There’s no strategy. Only a thin-skinned narcissist needing flattery and fearing ridicule.

Trump got excited about a summit with Kim when he thought it might win him praise, even possibly a Nobel Peace Prize. He got cold feet when he feared Kim might be setting Trump up for humiliating failure. Now he’s back to dreaming about the Prize.

The delicate balance in Trump’s brain between glorification and mortification can tip either way at any moment, depending on his hunches. All international relations become contests of personal dominance.

He rejected the 2015 Iran treaty for no apparent reason other than Obama had entered into it. Trump couldn’t care less that by doing so he has harmed relations with our traditional allies, who pleaded with him to stay in. And he’s undermined America’s future credibility. Why would any nation (including North Korea) enter into a treaty with the United States if it can break it on the whim of a president who wants to one-up his predecessor?

Ditto with the Paris climate accord. Obama got credit for it, so Trump wants credit for unilaterally sinking it.

Trump has demanded that America’s nuclear arsenal be upgraded. Why? Since 1970, the United States has been committed to nuclear nonproliferation. What changed? Trump. A more powerful arsenal makes him feel more powerful – “respected again.”

It’s not about American interests in the world. It’s about Trump’s interests.

Wonder why Trump promised to lift trade sanctions on ZTE, China’s giant telecom company? ZTE has been trading with North Korea and Iran, in violation of American policy. Everyone around Trump advised against lifting the sanctions.

Look no further than Trump’s personal needs. ZTE is important to China, and China recently pledged a half-billion-dollar loan to Trump’s family business.

While we’re on the subject of high tech, why has Trump pushed the Postal Service to double the shipping rate it charges Amazon? I mean, isn’t Amazon important to America’s high-tech race with the rest of the world?

The most likely explanation is that the CEO of Amazon is Jeff Bezos, who’s also far richer than Trump. Bezos also owns The Washington Post, and the Post has been critical of Trump.

As you may have noticed, the man doesn’t like to be criticized. As Trump recently explained to Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes,” his aim is “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

Any halfway responsible president of the United States would be worried about Russian meddling in U.S. elections. Protecting American democracy is just about the most important thing a president does.

But Trump has turned the inquiry about the Russians into a “dark state” conspiracy against him. And he’s demanded that the Justice Department investigate the people who are investigating him.

With Trump, there’s no longer American foreign policy. There’s only Trump’s ego.

If peace is truly advanced on the Korean peninsula, the Prize shouldn’t go to Trump. It should go to South Korean president Moon Jae-in, who has tirelessly courted the world’s two most dangerous megalomaniacs.

 

Robert Reich is the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Reich’s documentary, “Saving Capitalism,” is streaming on Netflix. His latest book, “The Common Good,” is available in bookstores now.

The Huckster Populist

The Huckster Populist

The tectonic plates of American politics are no longer moving along the old fault lines of “left vs. right” or even Democrat versus Republican.

As we’ve seen this bizarre political year, the biggest force welling up is rage against insider elites in both parties and against the American establishment as a whole — including the denizens of Wall Street, large corporations and the mainstream media.

Now, with Bernie Sanders essentially out of the race, Donald Trump wants Americans to believe he’s the remaining anti-establishment candidate.

It’s smart politics, but it’s a hoax.

Trump is even more of an establishment figure than Hillary Clinton — inheriting a fortune from his father, spending years bribing politicians to subsidize his hotels and casinos, and repeatedly using bankruptcy to shield his money while leaving creditors and workers holding the bag.

But Trump is also a brilliant huckster who knows his mark.

“There is one thing that Bernie Sanders and I are in complete accord with and that’s trade,” Trump said last week. “[Sanders] said we’re being ripped off, and I say with being ripped off. I’ve been saying it for years, he’s been saying it for years. I think I am saying it even louder. … Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.”

By putting opposition to trade at the center of his economic agenda, Trump gets a twofer — landing blows against big American corporations and Wall Street, and also against the Clintons. (He traces America’s economic problems to the North American Free Trade Agreement that Bill Clinton signed in 1993 and to the entry of China into the World Trade Organization, which Bill Clinton supported, and says Hillary Clinton “voted for virtually every trade agreement.”)

It’s pure demagoguery. Trade isn’t to blame for the declining wages and job security of most Americans.

The real problem has been the unwillingness of the biggest beneficiaries of trade (and also of job-displacing technologies) to share the gains with the rest of America through larger wage subsidies, stronger safety nets, better schools and easier access to higher education. Trump’s Republican Party has been the main culprit.

Trump has vowed to withdraw from the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership — “another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country,” he said recently — which Hillary Clinton praised in 2012 as “set[ting] the gold standard in trade agreements” before later reversing herself after Sanders came out strongly against it.

Too bad Clinton delegates on the Democratic Party’s platform committee muddied the waters last week by voting down a proposal by Sanders delegates to put the party on record as opposing the TPP, noting instead that “there are a diversity of views in the party” on this matter.

The central problem with the TPP is it would penalize member nations for raising health, safety, environmental and labor standards. But this aspect of the TPP doesn’t trouble Trump, who calls America “overregulated.”

Trump’s faux populism extends to “powerful corporations, media elites and powerful dynasties,” who, he said last week in Pennsylvania, again echoing Sanders, have “rigged the system for their benefit [and] will do anything and say anything to keep things exactly as they are.”

Unwittingly, the GOP establishment seems intent on proving Trump’s point. Mitt Romney condemns him, conservative media pundit George Will is deserting the Republican Party because of him, big business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers blast him, Republican mega-donors like Paul Singer rebuke him, and Wall Street Republicans such as former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W. Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (who initiated the Wall Street bailout) announce they’re voting for Hillary Clinton.

“It’s almost, in some ways, like I’m running against two parties,” Trump crowed recently. He has also said, “The people who rigged the system are supporting Hillary Clinton.”

It’s all an act. The real Donald Trump thinks U.S. wages are too high and has fought against the unionization of his hotel employees.

His businesses outsource abroad like mad. Most of the suits, ties and cufflinks he peddles are made in China. His luxury line of furniture comes from Turkey. The crystal for his Trump Home line is produced in Slovenia.

And the real Trump is on the side of the super-wealthy. He proposes to cut taxes on the rich from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, and to reduce taxes on all business income to 15 percent (thereby slashing the top tax rate of hedge fund and private-equity managers from the current 23.8 percent).

The real Trump isn’t a populist. He’s a plutocrat. Above all, he’s a con man. And the people being conned are average working Americans who are buying Trump’s ruse of being a man of the people.

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. His new book, “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few,” is now in bookstores. His film “Inequality for All” is now available on iTunes and Amazon streaming.

(c) 2016 By Robert Reich; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado, U.S., July 1, 2016. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

Robert Reich: Dear Bernie, A Note Of Thanks

Robert Reich: Dear Bernie, A Note Of Thanks

Published with permission from Alternet.

Dear Bernie,

I don’t know what you’re going to do from here on, and I’m not going to advise you. You’ve earned the right to figure out the next steps for your campaign and the movement you have launched.

But let me tell you this: You’ve already succeeded.

At the start they labeled you a “fringe” candidate—a 74-year-old, political Independent, Jewish, self-described democratic socialist, who stood zero chance against the Democratic political establishment, the mainstream media, and the moneyed interests.

Then you won 22 states.

And in almost every state—even in those you lost—you won vast majorities of voters under 30, including a majority of young women and Latinos. And most voters under 45.

You have helped shape the next generation.

You’ve done it without super PACs or big money from corporations, Wall Street, and billionaires. You did it with small contributions from millions of us. You’ve shown it can be done without selling your soul or compromising your conviction.

You’ve also inspired millions of us to get involved in politics—and to fight the most important and basic of all fights on which all else depends: to reclaim our economy and democracy from the moneyed interests.

Your message—about the necessity of single-payer health care, free tuition at public universities, a $15 minimum wage, busting up the biggest Wall Street banks, taxing the financial speculation, expanding Social Security, imposing a tax on carbon, and getting big money out of politics—will shape the progressive agenda from here on.

Your courage in taking on the political establishment has emboldened millions of us to stand up and demand our voices be heard.

Regardless of what you decide to do now, you have ignited a movement that will fight onward. We will fight to put more progressives into the House and Senate. We will fight at the state level. We will organize for the 2020 presidential election.

We will not succumb to cynicism. We are in it for the long haul. We will never give up.

Thank you, Bernie.

Bob

 

Photo: Bernie Sanders artwork by Amanda Burkman is displayed during the candidate’s campaign rally at Colton Hall in Monterey, California, May 31, 2016. REUTERS/Michael Fiala