Trump47 Cabinet Picks & First 100 Days Agenda

[superrific]

Super said something about him being a tariff guy. I assumed Trump would pick someone who likes tariffs, but do we know what Bessent really thinks about them?

Here's his op-ed piece published a week ago. Tariffs are the greatest thing, even Hamilton loved them!

SCOTT BESSENT: Let's talk tariffs. It's time to revitalize Alexander Hamilton's favorite tool

Prior to the 16th Amendment, which authorized the individual income tax, tariffs had been one of the federal government’s chief sources of funding.

www.foxnews.com

 

[superrific]

Bolton puts his ideology over his country. I don’t think he cares about the Republican Party. He’s committed to American imperialism. If that means young men and women need to die in a war against Iran, so be it.

What are you arguing here? I don't think there's a single person on this thread who wants Bolton as part of the Dem coalition. Pubs can keep him.

The thing about him is that he's a straight shooter. Like, he gives you an honest assessment of what he thinks. That's what made him a really shitty ambassador, but it is useful as a commentator. Of course, a lot of what he thinks is messed up, but unusually for the GOP, he doesn't bullshit. He says, "this is what I think we should do" without all that much regard for whether people will like it.

That said, I can't imagine we really disagree about him in any meaningful way. I do think he should get props for shutting down Trump's Ukraine bullshit. Who else in Trump's administration would stand up to Trump like that. It's not nearly enough to make up for what he did in decades prior. And maybe he did it for bad reasons, but he still did it.

 

[donbosco]

Seb Gorka's wife is a UNC grad. She was a St. A. Class of ''82 I believe. She was part of the crowd that I hung out with back in those days. I can't say that we were friends though.

Katharine Cornell.

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

 

[DiehardHeelFan]

This.

 

[nycfan]

 

[CRHeel94]

Here's his op-ed piece published a week ago. Tariffs are the greatest thing, even Hamilton loved them!

SCOTT BESSENT: Let's talk tariffs. It's time to revitalize Alexander Hamilton's favorite tool

Prior to the 16th Amendment, which authorized the individual income tax, tariffs had been one of the federal government’s chief sources of funding.

www.foxnews.com

Reading that was hurtful to my Economist heart.

I'm glad no one has pointed out that the tariff disarmament of the past 50 years has benefitted the US as much if not more than any other nation.

 

[CRHeel94]

Trump and Trumpism didn’t happen because John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Condi Rice and others trumped up invading Iraq in 2003.

The MAGAts, including Trump, supported, overwhelmingly supported, invading Iraq in 2003 and trying to orchestrate nation-change (on the cheap) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Saxby Chambliss didn’t beat Max Cleland in the 2002 US Senate race in Georgia because Saxby opposed invading Iraq.

John Kerry wasn’t “Swift-boated” in 2004 because he was proposing escalating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

IIRC, Trump was sort of for the Iraq War early on, but became a critic pretty early on (by the second Bush term?). Think he got called out for lying (what a surprise) that he was opposed to it from early on. Don't think most MAGAts were against the war back then...though obviously now all parrot Trump's position.

 

[DiehardHeelFan]

Trump's plans to change healthcare could slash insurance for some low-income Americans and retirees

Really??

 

[superrific]

Reading that was hurtful to my Economist heart.

I'm glad no one has pointed out that the tariff disarmament of the past 50 years has benefitted the US as much if not more than any other nation.

Longer than 50 years. GATT is almost 80 years old. The big tariff reductions of the Kennedy round are 60. There are few Americans who have any memory of a world without multilateral institutions pressing free trade.

This is another area where the zombies have had incredible resilience. I had thought the issue of free trade to have been settled two decades ago. I mean, it was among serious people. There are targeted uses of tariffs that are relatively unproblematic (in part because they don't have much effect overall), and that's fine. But surely, I thought, we'd all realize that Peronism was an economic catastrophe, that tariffs never created prosperity, etc.

And it's even worse than that. Trump wasn't talking about tariffs that much until he got shot. Then he came out with his "only the greatest presidents get shot" obsession, made inconvenient by the shootings of McKinley and Harrison. So of course McKinley had to become a great president. The greatest! The US economy was the best ever under William f'n McKinley because Trump got shot in the ear.

This government-by-whim is familiar to people in many places of the world, and they might be chucking at me right now. It is shocking for it to happen here. The chuckling is justified, though it's more tragic than anything.

 

[superrific]

IIRC, Trump was sort of for the Iraq War early on, but became a critic pretty early on (by the second Bush term?). Think he got called out for lying (what a surprise) that he was opposed to it from early on. Don't think most MAGAts were against the war back then...though obviously now all parrot Trump's position.

Yes, there was a whole exchange in the first debate of 2016 when Trump was confronted with evidence that he had loved the Iraq War from the beginning. He said, no he was against it despite those tapes of him enthusiastically cheerleading for it, and if you don't believe him, ask Sean Hannity. Ah, the days in which Trump thought it necessary to at least try to provide some evidence for his totally made-up bullshit.