It is tempting to say Donald Trump is a lucky politician. And there is some truth in this. His margin of victory in the 2016 presidential election was so slender in the critical midwest states he won that no one could have predicted it. And no one did, including Trump’s own campaign.
Like most lucky generals Trump also has a big hand in making his own luck. He and his campaign chose the key battleground states that could just conceivably deliver him the presidency and he out-campaigned Hillary Clinton in all of them. To win all of them so narrowly is statistically astonishingly improbable, but Trump is the master of the improbable.
Similarly, one reason Trump has an excellent chance of re-election is that the recession the US seems to be heading for could come after the 2020 presidential election. In any event it should be quite mild. The yield curve inversion indicates it’s coming but there are no massive structural imbalances in the US economy.
Here again, Trump has made a lot of his own luck. I don’t mean the tax cuts and business deregulation that have helped spur the US economy on. They are big policy commitments and should yield long-term growth dividends. I mean instead the way Trump has bullied the Federal Reserve into keeping interest rates low. He is not the first political leader to make cyclical economic policy serve political timetables.
But nothing so perfectly embodies the fusion of Trump’s luck with the undeniable trace of political genius — it’s not too strong a word — that is emerging in Trump as the report of the independent counsel Robert Mueller into allegations of criminal collusion during the 2016 campaign between Trump and Russia.
The element of luck is not Mueller finding no collusion. That, presumably, just reflects reality. The element of luck is the way most of Trump’s enemies, in the Democratic Party and in large slabs of the media, so wildly, insanely, overhyped everything to do with the Russia collusion idea.
Trump is immensely lucky in his enemies. But he creates his own fortune because he drives his enemies crazy. As a result they exercise appalling judgment in their attacks.
I think as President, Trump is a mixed grill. He is a better president than I thought he would be. During the election campaign I followed the debate about whether they should support Trump in a number of US Christian journals. It was a conscientious and serious debate. They recognised Trump was not one of them and would certainly not lead America’s moral revival. But they faced a binary choice: Trump or Clinton. Clinton, they felt, would appoint Supreme Court judges who would abridge their religious freedom and she would support social programs and values they opposed. So most backed Trump, with reservations.
He has delivered good outcomes and bad outcomes. Among the good are four of particular consequence. One is excellent Supreme Court justices and similarly good choices across all the federal courts to which the president can appoint judges. Two is tax cuts and business deregulation. Three is increased defence spending. Four is calling out China on trade and other malpractice, though this could have a bad effect on Australia if a US-China deal results in Beijing buying commodities from the US it would otherwise buy from us.
Democrats, and Trump’s opponents generally, have had relatively little to say on these issues. Instead they’ve concentrated on Trump’s obvious character flaws and the equally obviously seedy nature of some of his associates. Because Trump’s very existence as President contradicts everything they think and, more importantly, feel, they have invested in and created all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories against Trump.
I have come to the view that the independent counsel institution is a corruption of due process that almost always does more harm than good. The Mueller investigation was set up in the hysterical atmosphere that followed Trump’s sacking of James Comey as FBI director. The instant conspiracy interpretation was that Trump sacked Comey because Comey was too vigorously investigating allegations of collusion between Trump and Russia.
It turns out, according to Mueller, there was no such collusion. This takes the wind out of the sails of all Trump’s critics. And because so much of what the Trump critics said was so overblown, so ridiculous, so extravagant and now we can say plainly so wrong, even the credible criticisms they make of him can now be discredited.
This was already so for Trump’s supporters, who won’t hear a word against him. But Mueller had a lot of credibility with independent voters. In his re-election bid, Trump will need some independent voters to add to his base. The Mueller exoneration means it should be much easier for Trump to sell his re-election message to those independents.
Those who think independent counsels are a good thing in general, and Mueller was especially good, will point to the numerous convictions or confessions Mueller obtained. But these fall entirely into two categories. The first, and most pernicious, are process convictions. Mueller has convicted some people and charged others with lying to him. In other words these are alleged crimes that would not have been committed if Mueller’s inquiry had not been called into existence.
The second category of convictions are for tax avoidance and the like among Trump associates, at times when they had nothing to do with Trump’s presidency.
There are some allegations against Trump, such as his paying hush money to a woman he had an affair with, that are simply not grave enough to threaten any presidency. This precedent was established when Democrats forgave Bill Clinton for lying under oath because he was “only” lying about an affair.
Bob Woodward’s book Fear is much more balanced about Trump than its critics allow and is sharply critical of the disrespectful, clumsy and partisan way some of the intelligence agencies dealt with Trump. A former CIA boss, John Brennan, accused Trump of “treason”. Brennan now looks a complete fool. Polls do not show these collusion issues rank seriously with voters. If Democrats focus on them they will strengthen Trump. That Mueller could not find sufficient evidence for even so elastic a charge as obstruction of justice, but nonetheless apparently makes some negative comments about Trump anyway, just shows how dysfunctional the independent counsel mechanism is. If it’s not indictable, it’s up to the political system to sort out, not unelected officials.
This is an enormous win for Trump. The next election is unpredictable, but I put Trump slightly better than even-money odds.
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Burger me, some Texan hacker ate my credit card
A few Sunday mornings ago I woke to some disturbing news; the previous evening, while drinking with friends at The Palace Hotel in Broken Hill, I had purchased $1263.73 worth of fast food. How far had my drunken wanderings taken me?