Will Reality Bite Trump Before It Bites Us All?

The Washington Monthly carries a headline that will surprise no one with a functioning brain: "Trump's Campaign Pledges Are on a Collision Course With Reality."

The real question on everyone's minds outside MAGA is when? and this piece argues that the answer is already, and that Team Trump will be walking back its promises while pretending not to.

This has already happened with grocery prices, and I would say that the most likely correct argument the piece makes regarding the others is for mass deportations:

They've seen the budget numbers showing that his deportation will be $100 billion-plus yearly throughout his term. The economists in the group presumably know that 7 million of those immigrants hold down jobs, so deporting them will disrupt many labor markets. The dose of economic reality here is that pulling millions of people from the workforce will create temporary shortages in the products they produce, temporarily pushing up their prices. Replacing them will force their employers to pay higher wages, pushing up prices for the long term.

So, the word from Mar-a-Lago is that Trump's immigration promises will be downsized into a plan to kick out those charged or convicted of serious crimes or links to foreign terrorism. The embarrassing part is that this will affect only 4 to 5 percent of those Trump promised to deport and was already U.S. policy under Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Good news if true, and not just because of how expensive this would be in taxes or economic impacts. Misusing the military this way would be a horrendous precedent, and I can't imagine how to carry this out absent numerous other abuses of the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike.

I am less optimistic about tariffs: If a bad idea can be someone's Svengali, tariffs are Trump's.

On this, the piece summarizes what seemingly everyone but Trump knows about tariffs. (The length and incompleteness of said summary should show why Trump doesn't understand the issue like he presumably does the mass deportation, which has the more easily-graspable flaw of super expensive.) To support its case, it cites anonymous sources from his inner circle to the effect that they're exploring less-draconian, but still-destructive policies -- rumors which Trump has already denigrated as fake news.

My take is that reality hasn't bitten Trump hard enough to keep it from also biting the rest of us regarding tariffs, but at least it seems we have a reasonable chance of being spared the disaster of an anti-immigration police state.

-- CAV