The Donald Trump Score Card

Trump administration announces $12 billion "bailout" for farmers hit by tariffs
CBS News
July 24, 2018, 1:25 PM

Trump administration announces $12 billion "bailout" for farmers hit by tariffs - CBS News

excerpt:

"This turmoil over tariffs is just the latest to hit struggling American farmers. Since 2013, overall annual net farm income has decreased by 50 percent, and the USDA predicts it will drop to negative $1,300 this year. Debt-to-income ratios for farmers are at a 34-year high.

About one out of every three rows of U.S. soybeans is shipped to China, according to estimates. Farmers in Iowa alone could lose as much as $624 million on soybean shipments to China, Donnelle Eller, an agriculture reporter with the Des Moines Register, told CBSN last month.

There's no sign of a quick resolution to the trade dispute. The U.S. and China have threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs next week on $16 billion of each other's goods. And on Tuesday, Trump announced plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese imports by the end of August. China said it would retaliate, leaving even more U.S. farm products at risk."

 

For some reason you left out the Muslims?

 

Oh Yes! The children do not deserve a school lunch, the poor don't deserve subsidized housing, the sick don't deserve health care: but, Trump's Republican millionaire farmers are to get government help!

 

So much winning.


Key GOP senators rip Trump's farm bailout: 'America’s farmers don’t want to be paid to lose'
Kevin Breuninger
July 24, 2018

Key GOP senators rip Trump's farm bailout: 'America’s farmers don’t want to be paid to lose'

excerpt:

"Other Republican senators criticized the bailout plan in remarks to reporters.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., lamented the Trump administration's increasing interference in the economy.

"This is becoming more and more like a Soviet-type of economy here," Johnson reportedly said, with "commissars" providing benefits."

 

Trump merchandise for sale.

A $15 trinket dish made in China. A Trump hat made in Bangladesh.


Made in America: A look at Trump company products made at home and abroad
by Karolina Rivas
Jul 24, 2018, 11:42 AM ET

Made in America: A look at Trump company products made at home and abroad

excerpt:

"At the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a few gift shop items were made in multiple countries. Items including a circle trinket dish bearing the Trump name was made in China, a pastel red Trump hat made in Bangladesh and a Trump mug made in Thailand."

 

If anyone for some reason required further proof that we are actually living in an absurdist comedy (or is it a tragedy), look no further -

Jeff Sessions led a chant of "lock her up" in a speech he gave to high schoolers today.

lord help us.

Jeff Sessions Laughs and Echoes ‘Lock Her Up’ Chant With Conservative High Schoolers

 

these are interesting times to say the least

 

I didn’t think it was necessary.

The Muslim travel ban is no different than Executive Order 9066 or the Korematsu decision which upheld the decision that endorsed the detention of Japanese Americans,
Germans, and Italian Americans during World War II

 

How can the law uphold illegal detention. What a strange country.

 

True in part. But, the Trump discrimination against Muslims today is all over the place. Trump has promoted mistreatment of Muslims in America. Today, lots of Republican talk show hosts like Cunningham, BonGeno, Hannity, etc. tell the Trump base that Muslims cross the RIO GRANDE right along with the Mexicans because they too have brown skin.

 

How can they put babies under the age of ONE in detention?

 

Mel, we have to tell people...tell as many as we can tell...this is an emergency! Something big is going on behind the scene. The Trump administration is refusing to tell the American people what they do during secretive meeting. They instructed government employees not to speak with the press or US citizens. They refuse to give the Democrat members of congress any information. The refuse Democrat requests for congressional hearings. They hold secret EPA meetings with corporation which pollute. They hold secret meeting with Russians in the oval office. They hold secret meetings with Putin. They even commit the nation's military to deals which the US military knows nothing about. They even considered turning over American officials to the Russians. They let nearly twenty Russians attend the inauguration of Trump. They let the son of a Russian business man close to Putin work on the Trump campaign. They took Russian money from the NRA which had come from Russia! Please tell others!

 

Inside the Minds of Hardcore Trump Supporters
New research finds the president's earliest and strongest followers embody a particularly belligerent strain of authoritarian thinking.
by Tom Jacobs
Feb 15, 2018

Inside the Minds of Hardcore Trump Supporters

excerpts:

"A second recently published study provides an answer: There are different strains of authoritarian thinking. And support for Trump is associated with what is arguably the most toxic type: authoritarian aggression.

The study suggests the bulk of his supporters, at least in the Republican primaries, were not old-fashioned conservatives who preach obedience and respect for authority. Rather, they were people who take a belligerent, combative approach toward people they find threatening."


"A research team led by psychologist Steven Ludeke of the University of Southern Denmark used those scales to try to tease out why some studies link Trump support to authoritarianism, while others do not.

It discovered the problem with the latter is they tend to either heavily or exclusively focus on the "submission" dimension, which has traditionally been studied in the context of child-rearing (as in, "Do you expect your children to unquestioningly obey their elders?").

As it turns out, that's the facet of authoritarianism that has the least to do with support for Trump.

Ludeke's study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, featured 1,444 participants recruited online in April of 2016. They responded to 18 authoritarianism-focused statements—six for each facet—and indicated who, among the presidential candidates remaining in the race at that point, they supported.

"Consistent with Trump's representation of the world as a dangerous place requiring harsh treatment of deviant minorities," they write, "Trump supporters were high on authoritarian aggression."

Strong support for conventionalism/traditionalism was also linked to support for Trump, but high scores on the submission category—that is, respect for authority, and obedience to superiors—was not."

 

The Politics of Hope: Donald Trump as an Entrepreneur of Identity
The president-elect won the election by artfully shaping and responding to his supporters’ views
by Stephen Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam
November 19, 2016

The Politics of Hope: Donald Trump as an Entrepreneur of Identity

excerpt:

"As we have seen, Donald Trump made much of his economic entrepreneurial skills and his ability to make deals—although these claims have come under some critical scrutiny. Indeed, Tony Schwartz, the ghost-writer of Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal, has described them as a work of fiction and said, “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” And a report in Fortune on August 20, 2015 suggests that Trump would have made more than four times as much money if he had simply invested his money in an index fund. Whatever the truth of the matter, our argument is that Trump’s political success derives not primarily from his acumen as a business entrepreneur but rather from his skills as an entrepreneur of identity—in essence, his ability to represent himself and his platform in ways that resonate with his would-be followers’ experience of their world.

There has been much controversy over the demographics of Trump’s followers. For instance, it has often been asserted that they are uneducated, white and poor. Certainly, the percentage of Trump supporters with college degrees (around 20 percent) is much lower than the percentage of Americans with college degrees (roughly 40 percent), but in many primaries, most Republicans with college degrees did vote for Trump. Equally, it is true that, on average, Trump supporters earn less than those who backed his main rivals in the primaries and general election ($72,000 versus $91,000 for Kasich), but at the same time, they earn considerably more than the median wage ($56,000) and supporters of both Clinton and Sanders ($61,000 each). What does seem to hold, however, is that Trump supporters are primarily white and, as Neil Irwin and Josh Katz reported in The New York Times, they live in areas of "long simmering economic dysfunctions" even if they themselves are not poor. To quote further from Irwin and Katz: “One element common to a significant share of his supporters is that they have largely missed out on the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economydeeply intertwined with the rest of the world.” That is, Trump’s constituency consists largely of people who are part of a declining sector of an economy which is, at best, stagnating and who have been hit particularly hard by trade deals that have opened the U.S. to competition from low-cost manufacturing elsewhere in the world."

 

yet, they bemoan the fact
trump supporters are whites who don't value education. yet, they bemoan the fact they can't get ahead.

 

As the late conservative Republican senator Everett Dirksen used to say: "A billion here, a billion there soon adds up to big money." Problem is, Trump is circumventing Congress in doing this by using a pool of money intended to promote trade. Question: What would the response have been by the MAGA group if Obama had tried something like this? There's $30 billion altogether. Trump is spending it now before the election. When the election is over and the money runs out, what then? Bread and circuses? After several promising years of profits, GM is now in trouble because the tariffs have raised the cost of its raw materials. The saying used to be "What's good for General Motors is good for the nation" (Eisenhower's Sec. of Defense Charlie Wilson). Will we soon be subsidizing GM. Will the U.S. become a welfare state for ailing industries? Republican heresy!

 

Trump Administration Plans $12 Billion In Farm Aid To Offset Tariffs
Heard on All Things Considered
Brian Naylor
July 24, 20184:06 PM ET

Trump Administration Plans $12 Billion In Farm Aid To Offset Tariffs

excerpt:

"Officials say they will be using a Depression-era program, the Commodity Credit Corporation, to secure money from the U.S. Treasury and will not need to ask Congress for the funds."

 

Commodity Credit Corporation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Commodity Credit Corporation - Wikipedia

The Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) is a wholly owned United States government corporation that was created in 1933 to "stabilize, support, and protect farm income and prices" (federally chartered by the CCC Charter Act of 1948 (P.L. 80-806)). The CCC is authorized to buy, sell, lend, make payments, and engage in other activities for the purpose of increasing production, stabilizing prices, assuring adequate supplies, and facilitating the efficient marketing of agricultural commodities.

The CCC, which has no staff, is essentially a financing institution for the USDA's farm price and income support commodity programs, commodity export credit guarantees, and agricultural export subsidies. The programs funded through CCC are administered by employees of the Farm Service Agency and the Foreign Agricultural Service.

The CCC has the authority to borrow up to $30 billion from the US Treasury to carry out its obligations. Net losses from its operations subsequently are restored by the Congressional appropriations process. It issues payments in the form of commodity certificates.

 

The Trump adminstration is probably scouring the books now looking for depression-era programs that can be used without Congressional approval to prop up the automotive, washing machine, refrigerator, and other U.S. industries being damaged by his tariff war that he invoked without Congressional approval by using obscure Congressional acts that precipitated from the onset of WWII and the Cold War scare in the early 60's.

 

Trump and his old school commerce and trade people like Navarro, Ross, and Lighthizer are like dogs from the WWII era chasing their own tails in slow motion. This is the best of the batch that supposedly will lead the left-behinders through the valley of darkness and into the promised land.