Much greater damage is being done
If there is anything we have learned about this president it is that he doesn't like to be confronted with facts. Frustrated by the Playboy reporter who threw him a hardball, Trump demanded that he sit down but Brian Karem held his ground. This seemed to throw the president off his stride, riffing on his chances of getting the Nobel Peace Prize, which Shinzo Abe nominated him for last year, saying he has done much more than Obama ever did for his prize. All this points to an incredibly insecure man, but we all know this as well.
Trump may have finally buried himself in declaring a national emergency, especially when he freely admitted there is no national emergency. He just wants to speed things along given he didn't make much effort to push the wall his first two years in office. Why wasn't he attaching the wall to the Republican tax cut package if it was so important to him. Republicans were literally giving away trillions of dollar, surely they could have added a rider for $25 billion to fund his beautiful wall?
However, this tax bill is coming back to haunt him as well. Instead of much anticipated refunds this tax season, Americans are finding themselves able to claim fewer deductions and as a result paying additional income tax. Meanwhile, the National Debt topped $22 trillion last week, as the Trump administration has added $2.1 trillion in his first two years in office. Remember, this president vowed to eliminate the national debt in two terms.
Like so many of his 2016 campaign promises, they have turned to dust. While he may be able to negotiate some funding for the wall by tapping into the defense budget, much of his funding will be held up in court as 16 states filed lawsuits against him this week. Trump's reaction was to pat himself on the back for predicting this.
All this tough talk didn't seem to satisfy his formerly ardent supports. Ann Coulter called Trump the real national emergency, a sentiment shared by many Democrats right now. Odd to see Ann Coulter and Nancy Pelosi on the same page. Whether he knows it or not, Trump opened a Pandora's box by declaring a fake emergency. Nancy noted that a Democratic president could one day do the same on guns. What then?
To hear Stephen Miller, the President's remarks were taken out of context. The President waited for Congress to act and failing to do so did what he should have done much earlier, call the border crisis a national emergency. Miller was a little better at handling Wallace's facts, but nonetheless calling this a national emergency is quite a stretch, and will be seen as imperial overreach on the part of the president.
It is important to note that Trump is not calling the shots here. His advisers are. They probably watched Vice and learned about this little thing called the unitary executive theory that allows the executive branch extraordinary powers in times of crisis and war. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld used this effectively in the aftermath of 911, pushing through wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that greatly extended executive powers.
The president already enjoys more power than he deserves thanks to our ongoing military efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, but these are subject to Congressional oversight. By declaring a national emergency on the border, Trump essentially gave himself carte blanche to raid the coffers to come up with as much as he needs to get the border wall and there is nothing Congress can really do to stop him.
However, this White House wants much more power than this. They want to gain complete control over the budget so that they can redirect money where they see fit. We are literally one step away from the autocracy Dick Cheney played with back in 2001. With a full budget now approved by Congress and signed by the President, the White House has trillions to work with. They're flush!
The wall has never been anything more than a diversion. Those behind Trump are looking to raid the budget for huge sums of money after all their years of backing Republican administrations. We've already seen quite a bit of this in the first two years, particularly in the Dept. of Interior where Ryan Zinke presided over one of the biggest private land grabs in history. Similarly, the Dept. of Education has been diverting money toward charter and private schools, where Betsy DeVos and others have vested interests. Basically, this administration wants to gut the budget so that many of these social programs wither up and die on the vine, as Newt Gingrich proposed more than 20 years ago.
Trump is just a front man, as was Ronnie back in the 80s or W at the start of this millennium. He may be more crass but he is furthering the same agenda laid out by Nixon's acolytes many years ago. Probably the best thing you can say for the recent movie, Vice, is that it charts this course of action through Dick Cheney, as well as Sam Rockwell's pitch perfect portrayal of W.
The problem is that we are spending way too much energy arguing over the wall when there are far greater crimes being committed by this administration. The new Democratic House can rein in some of the administration's actions, especially in regard to deregulation, but they can't stop the Trump White House completely. We've seen whopping deficits in each of the past two budgets and can expect even higher deficits in the next two years, thanks to the enormous tax cuts. The National Debt may swell to $25 trillion by 2021 when the next president steps into the White House with very little in the way of revenue to overcome this enormous deficit, at which point the federal government may indeed go bankrupt.
This has been the Republican strategy all along. They never cared about fiscal responsibility. St. Ronnie presided over the largest percentage increase to the national debt - a whopping 186% - since the Depression. Each Republican president in turn has added substantially to that debt. Obama was left with an annual budget already $1 trillion in the hole when he pushed for a stimulus bill to try to stem the spiraling unemployment left by W. At best, Obama was able to bring the annual deficit back down to around $400 billion, which the Trump administration has blown back up to over a trillion.
By bankrupting federal government, all government for that matter, Republicans can return monetary and regulatory control back over to the private sector, essentially re-creating the oligarchy of the 1920s, which they see as the Golden Days of America, before there were any marginal tax rates on the rich or a vast public education, welfare and health care sector like we have today, not to mention banking and environmental regulation.
It's not just the usual suspects -- the Waltons, Murdoch, and the Koch Brothers. Other seemingly progressive corporate barons will greatly benefit too. Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos enjoy the low tax rates and monopolistic holds they have over their markets as well.
Who better to preside over the bankruptcy of the United States of America than Donald J. Trump, famous for all the bankruptcies he presided over in the private sector. There will be no more talk about the wall at that point. The federal government will be little more than an empty shell.
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