I agree it is time to end this discussion. If the trade deals do not work out and we head to a recession, then there is no denying that I was wrong. But if the trade deals fall into place and we get continued GDP growth greater than 3%, then you have to admit that he is better than what you have given him credit for.
The economy is in the process of turning south now. The trade war has hit the ag business very hard already. Many companies that require steel to make things in the US are hurting or have already gone out of business.
Trump had to dig very, very deep into the economist community to find anyone who agreed with him. Peter Navarro is the economists' equivalent of a flat earther among Physicists.
As for shady practices, Trump went way over the line and he's going to start paying for it. Mueller had made it pretty clear that Trump broke some pretty serious laws, he just can't charge him because he's the president.
I think Tucker Carlson said it perfectly.
"I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration before Trump arrived in Washington. People were bothered about it in different places in the country. It's a huge country, but that was not a staple of political debate at all. Trump asked basic questions like' "Why don't our borders work?" “Why should we sign a trade agreement and let the other side cheat?” Or my favorite of all, "What's the point of NATO?" The point of NATO was to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but they haven't existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions that no one could answer."
It's just human nature that any country that has any degree of desirableness next to one or more countries where life is much more difficult, there will be immigration from the less desirable to the desirable. Many people in the UK who voted for Brexit did so because Europeans from less well off European countries were immigrating to the UK. In the US many of the scut jobs like picking crops or cleaning are done by low skilled immigrant labor. In the UK a lot of that work is done by poor people from parts of the former British empire or from eastern Europe.
The patterns are almost exactly the same for illegal drugs. When a country has any woes at all, a certain percentage are going to turn to illegal drugs to escape. And every country has woes because that's part of human existence. The measure is how big the problem is.
When these drugs are freely available and the police look the other way, there is still an illegal drug trade, just nobody gets caught. When a country creates draconian laws to stop illegal drugs, it swells up the prisons, but does very little to stop the drugs coming in. As long as there is a demand, someone will figure out how to provide a supply, even if they are risking everything to do it.
The patterns for immigration, especially illegal immigration are almost identical to the drug trade. Though the draw is getting to a country where the immigrant is safer and might be able to make more money than their home country where life is more dangerous and economically poor.
In both cases the "cure" is to deal with the reasons the draw is happening in the first place. In the case of drugs, deal with treating users and figuring out why they are using. In the case of illegal immigration, help solve the problems in their home country as well as getting getting the native born to do the work the illegals do and the immigration problem decreases dramatically. Just like illegal drug use, you can never stop illegal immigration completely, but you can reduce it dramatically.
Many news reports have pointed out that illegal immigration during the Obama administration dropped to a point where the net flow of immigrants across the Mexico border was negative. ie more people moving to Mexico than moving to the US. The reason is Mexico's economy has grown significantly and they have a growing middle class. Drug related violence between the cartels feeding the US drug market is still a big problem, but otherwise life in Mexico is a lot better than it was 20 years ago. As a result, US illegals are moving to Mexico.
Most of the people Trump is trying to keep out today are Central Americans who have become displaced from their home country due to the violence created by the US bound drug business with no other economic outlet. In Mexico there are many legal ways to make a decent living now other than the drug trade, but not so in many Central American countries. Some of these Central Americans are settling in Mexico, but many are passing through Mexico to settle in the US.
If the US ended the war on drugs, then made all the recreational drugs legal but heavily regulated (and taxed), the illegal drug trade in Central America would dry up and the gangs would starve for lack of income. That's what happened when prohibition ended in the US. The criminal gangs involved in the alcohol trade remained for a few years trying other lines of business, but eventually starved out.
Politicians have avoided dealing with many of the world's problems because they are too complicated, but when someone comes along who thinks there is a simple solution and tries it, it usually just gets dramatically worse.
A case in point was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Bush I did not try regime change in 1991 because he recognized there was not good alternative who could hold the country together. Bush I and his advisors understood the consequences of all courses of action. Bill Clinton's people similarly understood there was no solution for Saddam Hussein than to bottle him up and leave him to rot. Then came along GW Bush advised by people from the Project for a New American Century who advocated a more 19th century foreign policy where the US, as the world's only super power, does what it wants on the world stage and everyone else will just have to live with it.
The problem with Saddam Hussein was not that anyone felt we couldn't easily take him out militarily with little effort, the problem those who thought ahead saw was what comes next? Nobody had a good solution that any expert worth their salt thought could work, so two administrations of adults left him to rot. Then GW thought he was smarter than his father and went in guns blazing. The US won the invasion, which was the easy part, but let an insurrection get going and the US eventually had to leave with its tail between its legs.
There is no good answer to North Korea, the best answers to the trade imbalances with China will take decades to pull off, the issue of Chinese intellectual property theft is only going to get lip service from the Chinese, and many of the other foreign policy issues Trump's people think are easy are in fact very difficult and past administrations didn't do anything harsh because all of them could easily turn into a situation as bad as Iraq or worse.
The foreign policy with China for the last 20-30 years had been to do everything possible to make life as difficult as possible for China (like raise oil prices), and hope that China's internal cracks get worse. China is too big and too strong to take on directly. They have 3-4X the population of the US and an economy that is now larger. They also have the largest manufacturing base in the world. US exports are much more intellectual property and services now rather than manufactured goods. To fight China in the arena of manufactured goods is 19th century thinking and it's fighting them on their home turf. And the US is bringing a spoon to a gun fight.
I have thought a good slogan for the Trump administration is "19th century solutions for 21st century problems". GW Bush's incompetence thinking a horribly complex problem was really simple in Iraq resulted in the destabilization of Iraq and helped fuel the Syrian civil war. It made the entire region less stable. Now Trump has come in and tried overly simple ideas in many places and we're likely going to be living with the consequences for the next 100 years or more.
There are two reasons politicians don't tackle difficult problems:
1) The problem is so complex that nobody has a great idea how to deal with it, so people kick the can down the road and hope for the best.
2) It's politically not feasible because at least two factions have very different ideas about it and there is not enough political consensus to move forward.
With the major rifts in the US right now, the smallest problems are falling into #2.
