Trump Wins! The first 100 days

Exciting and scary change.

Let's start with a few presumptions.  If Trump wins then it is nearly certain that Republicans will hold majorities in the House and Senate.  Trump will have the power to form an administration and presumably the power to move legislation.

Immediately after the election.  The news will be full of talk of the massive, extraordinary changes coming and the rejection of bi-partisan assumptions about the country.   Expectations will be high.   Both parties will be in flux, considering major re-alignments.  Cable news will be in daily high alert.  Ratings will skyrocket.

 Mitch McConnell will confirm with President Obama that no appointments will be considered in the lame duck session, including for the Supreme Court. He will say "the people have spoken" and the Senate has a sacred duty to allow the new president to choose the person to fill the Supreme Court vacancy.  It is a matter of principle, he will say.

Trump will make some announcements about changes on Day One:

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  ****The federal government will inform sanctuary cities that federal law enforcement personal will enforce the laws aggressively, and that all people anywhere in America here illegally should expect active enforcement of the immigration laws.  Leave now, he urges.

  

 ****He announces there will be "fresh blood" in the national security command in the US because the former generals and admirals had been weak and infected by Obama group think.   General Michael Flynn--a surrogate and spokesman for Trump--will be heading up his national security team.  Flynn:  "We are tired of Obama’s empty speeches and his misguided rhetoric. This has caused the world to have no respect for America’s word, nor does it fear our might."

  ****He announces that he he will consider the Iran nuclear deal "open for renegotiation" on Day One, that he will be appointing trade negotiators to end the "catastrophe of American job losses", and that he will impose a ban on all entry of refugees and travel visas from "countries infected by jihad" until we are able to vet these people properly.

  ****The media and Hillary voters will be apoplectic.  What has America done???

First 100 days.    Trump will confront the legislative reality of gridlock. 

Trump will be able to appoint a conservative Supreme Court Justice.  Democrats will have 40 votes in the Senate but he will nominate a Justice Roberts style pragmatist, not a Scalia clone, and this will go quickly.   But nothing else will.

Repealing Obama-care will prove harder than Trump expected, since "repeal and replace" requires some consensus on how to replace it, and there is no consensus.   The result is health care chaos and multiple examples of people losing coverage and not being able to get new coverage.  The media will be full of horror stories of people unable to get care and chaos at clinics and hospitals.

There will be pressure from the Christian right to de-fund Planned Parenthood, but that will get stopped in the Senate.   There will be pressure to allow Churches to make political contributions, passing through tax deductible contributions, but the implications of this will be evident to everyone.  Political money gets washed through friendly tax except groups of every political bent, meaning yet more money in politics.

The House of Representatives will take up a Trump-style tax cut, but in the cold light of comments from the Congressional Budget Office and the political attacks from Democrats saying the plan is a boon to the very wealthy there will be no consensus.   The deficit-minded traditional Republicans (Ryan-Pence conservatives) will see that it will increase deficits beyond Obama's, the opposite of what they have been calling for.  It would not simply be surrender; they would be turn-coats.   Meanwhile, tax cuts to the top tenth of one percent will give Democrats cover for opposing it.  Republicans are split; Democrats oppose.  Nothing will happen.

Gridlock is real

There will be no immigration reform beyond executive actions--the same position that Obama found himself.   Why?  There is no consensus.  Legislators of both parties see that the majority of Americans want some kind of shift to a tougher stance on immigration, but there was no consensus on how to do this.  Republicans  are split, and Democrats want to accommodate Hispanics. There is a political safe spot in rhetoric in saying anodyne things like "America should be safe" and "the laws should be enforced" and "we need both fairness and compassion and "our borders must be recognized" but there is no consensus on actual policy.  America is split.  Nothing will happen.

Trump will confront the great reality of the American system of checks and balances in a world that has become more polarized by the separate silos of media consumption and by the end of "earmarks" and other legislative methods for getting bipartisan votes.  Legislation can be stopped but it cannot be passed.  Trump policy will confront reality.  It will be noisy but little will change legislatively.

What Trump will change, nearly immediately: Foreign policy.  Ambassadors and foreign ministries across the globe will buzz with excitement and dread.  The new American president is prickly and quick to take offense.  The incident in China, where a security snafu forced Obama to leave from the belly of the plane rather than the side door has bounced around diplomatic circles.  Trump said it was an insult and he would have abandoned the G-20 meeting rather than accept this insult.   Trump's comments on the Iranian sailors who gestured at Americans ("I'd blow them out of the water.") was heard and noted.  Obama stayed silent when Bebe Netanyahu came to America at the invitation of the opposition party and spoke against the president's Iran policy, an astonishing public show of disrespect.   Such a thing would never happen with Trump.  Trump would go ballistic.

 Trump: Crimean people OK with it so let Russia have it

Foreign leaders observe Putin.  Putin praised Trump personally and Trump stayed silent--indeed possibly oblivious and certainly unopposed--to Russia's re-annexation of Crimea and their current occupation of eastern Ukraine.   The message is out there: show Trump personal respect.  Foreign policy in the Trump era will be less the predictable balance of national interest versus national interest.   It will be personal, harkening back to an era of monarchs and empires, but apparently predictable as well.  

Trump is not a bull in a china shop.   He wants what he wants--praise and public respect--and if he gets it he is a predictable friend in a negotiation.  Make nice with Trump personally and, as Putin has shown, 70 years of cold war policy dissolves.  Whatever else, make Trump look good.

Summary and Conclusion:  Trump's effect on general policy on taxes and immigration and on social issues will be muted and filtered and sanitized by the Constitutional system of checks and balances.   Trump will change the public tone and he will give the media new things to talk and worry about, but the great demographic and economic trend toward automation of jobs, toward global supply chains, and toward American manufacturing being in competition with lower wage countries will continue because those forces are bigger than politics.  They are as powerful and inevitable as gravity.

"Yankee, go home" plays well for domestic voters

But America will enter a period of higher international risk.  Not every foreign leader will be as skilled and prescient as Putin.  Angry populist nationalists get into power around the world and they keep power by showing themselves to be unafraid of insulting America in the manner of the Philippine president Détente.  (He called Obama the son of a whore on local TV.)

Trump has an instinct for counter-punching and he cannot resist it.   If elected, the counter-punch becomes mandatory, not optional.  The Trump doctrine of counter-punch when insulted will be the new de-facto policy and if Trump fails to do it then it is either "weakness" or a change in policy to be dissected.   

Some countries are in a position to tiptoe around the prickly giant (Western European countries and Canada) but others have their own internal requirements to be prickly and proud on their own.  China, Latin America, Muslim majority countries, North Korea are countries with a colonial past and a memory of being humiliated by the great Western powers.  Their own populations are quick to see that their own greatness and exceptionalism is respected.   They must stand tall and proud.  So must Trump.  It is a dangerous situation.

Foreign policy and military action is where--in the modern presidency--the checks and balances of the Constitutional system have withered.  Trump can be Trump, without the advice and consent of anyone.  There is where Trump's temperament is not simply a campaign talking point.  It is a matter of war and peace.

Yes, there is even more!   

Attorney Thad Guyer and I do a podcast that shares our take on the election.

October 2 Podcast: The Truths that Hillary and Trump know full well, but must not say

This October 2 podcast talks about the polls, about Trump's self-inflicted wounds, and about the things that Trump and Hillary know full well to be true, but must not admit.   The podcast is a spirited conversation between me and Thad Guyer, an attorney who represents whistleblowing employees, with an international practice.   He watches the election from home base in Saigon.