The Weird Obsession With Russia Just Won't Go Away

A few weeks ago, when I wrote the post titled "What Is With This Weird Obsession With Russia?", I was getting the impression that all progressives, and for that matter the movement itself, had completely lost their minds.  Really, this would have to fade away in short order.  And yet here we are, most of a month later, and the narrative seems to be going as strong as ever.

And so, the day before yesterday, we had FBI Director Comey called before Congress (the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) for what was reported as over five hours of testimony.  Not that Comey himself got to say much -- it was mostly Congressmen grandstanding for as long as they could get the mic and the TV cameras focused on them.  (Don't worry, I didn't watch the whole thing, or even significant amounts; just enough to get a flavor.)  The hearing got the New York Times sufficiently excited yesterday to gin up an article in the lead position covering about a third of the front page.  According to that article, Comey confirmed the existence of an investigation into efforts by the Russians to "interfere" in the election, including contacts between Russians and members of the Trump campaign:

“The F.B.I., as part of our counterintelligence effort, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 president election,” [Comey said], adding that the investigation included looking at whether associates of Mr. Trump were in contact with Russian officials, and whether they colluded with them. 

And for how long has the investigation been going on?

Mr. Comey told lawmakers that the investigation began in July. . . . 

The guy who got to carry most of the water for the Democrats was a fellow from California that you've probably never heard of before, Adam Schiff.  Meanwhile, outside the hearing room, Senate Minority Leader Schumer took the opportunity to intone to the New York Times how really, really important this subject is:

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, responded: “The possibility of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials is a serious, serious matter. The investigation must be fair, independent, and impartial in every way, and the F.B.I. must be allowed to follow the facts wherever they may lead.”

Now, I'm just trying to imagine the most damning conversation I can think might conceivably have happened between some Trump campaign aide (or maybe Trump himself!) and either Putin or one of his right-hand men, like Ambassador Kislyak, or maybe even Dmitri Medvedev.  I'm imagining something like this:

Trump aide (or Trump):  "On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space."

(Kislyak or Medvedev): "Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…"

Trump aide (or Trump): "After my election I have more flexibility."

Kislyak or Medvedev: "I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you."

Now there's some real collusion, right?  But we know that this particular collusion was completely OK.  We know that, because this is the actual transcript of a conversation between ex-President Obama and Dmitri Medvedev on March 26, 2012.  Obama and Medvedev met in Seoul, South Korea, and Obama didn't realize that he was speaking on an open mic.  Anyway, if there were a transcript remotely this damning involving Trump or one of his aides, you can be sure that it would have been leaked by now.

And then there is the $64,000 question:  If the FBI was investigating "the possibility of coordination" between Trump campaign aides (or Trump himself) and the Russians, doesn't that necessarily mean that the FBI was wiretapping the conversations of at least some senior Trump campaign aides, if not Trump himself, during the heat of the campaign?  After all, Comey has confirmed that the investigation went back at least to July.  How could the FBI conduct such an investigation without wiretapping telephone conversations?  Or, to put it another way, if the FBI was not tapping telephone conversations of senior Trump aides and/or Trump, was it even a real investigation?

Somehow Trump himself managed give the Democratic press the chance to divert all attention away from those obvious questions with his famous March 4 tweet ("Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower . . . .")  And thus the New York Times et al. have had the opportunity to quibble over whether Obama personally gave the order for the tapping, whether it was of Trump personally, and whether it included conversations held in Trump Tower.  None of which quibbles go to the heart of the matter, which is whether the FBI -- which, like all government agencies, consists 95% of partisan Democrats -- was wiretapping senior members of the Trump campaign during the thick of the election contest.  I guess Trump has no one but himself to blame for the diversion.  But one of the senior Republican Congressmen in the investigation, Devin Nunes, confirmed the obvious in a press release today:

• I recently confirmed that, on numerous occasions, the Intelligence Community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.
• Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration  -- details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value -- were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.

Meanwhile, am I the only one who thinks that the whole "Trump is in bed with the Russians" story makes no sense?  Actually I'm not, because Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club has a post from Monday titled "Red Herring," with a roundup of many reasons why the whole thing doesn't hang together.  Fernandez's main point is that everything Putin does is for Russian domestic consumption to begin with, so he wouldn't go out of his way to help either candidate.  

But, getting to the next point, if Putin were to care about one thing in U.S. affairs, you would have to think that he would want our energy production hobbled.  I mean, the Russian government is completely dependent on revenues from oil and gas production, and our frackers are absolutely killing him, capping the world price of oil and gas at a level where he can't pay his bills.  The sustained low price of oil and gas has recently forced a massive 25% cut in Russia's defense budget.  That just has to be eating away at Putin, since using an outsize military to throw weight around on the international stage is what gives him his reason to exist.  Now, as between Clinton and Trump, which was the candidate who might conceivably get conned into hobbling U.S. energy production?

And then there's the tough talk of Nikki Haley at the UN.  And Trump's exhorting the Europeans to spend more on their own defense and on NATO.  Is any of this where Hillary would have gone?  Can Putin like any of it?

Really, I wouldn't mind a bit getting proved wrong on this subject.  But as of now, all I can see in the endless conspiracy theories about Russia is a weird obsession.

Will President Trump End The War Against The Economy?

It's far and away the biggest unknown facing the country now that Donald Trump has won the presidency:  Will he end the war against the economy?

First, we should acknowledge that the economy is not what it should be.  Certainly, that is the perception of many if not most Trump voters.  But, you say, the unemployment rate has steadily declined under President Obama, from a peak around 10% in 2009, to where it is now down under 5% (actually, it's 4.9%) in the most recent report.  Isn't that a good measure of full employment?  Not really.  As many have noted, even though what the BLS reports as the unemployment rate is in what should be "full employment" territory, something else called the "labor force participation rate" (LFPR) is telling a different story.  The LFPR (number of employed plus those seeking work divided by all population age 16 and up) was over 66% prior to the recession, and today remains below 63%, a decline of about 3.5%.  Total population 16 and up is around 240 million, so that 3.5% represents around 8 million people, a number which actually exceeds the number reported as "unemployed."  If you were to add that additional 8 million working-age people into the labor force, suddenly the unemployment rate would be right back at 10%.  So there is every reason to think that there is serious sluggishness remaining in the economy, even after what is now over seven years of the Obama "recovery."  Those 8 million people, although reported as not seeking work, are still an overhang on the labor market, and probably are the big reason why we still don't see labor force tightness forcing wages up.  (Has the Obama Labor Department been reporting the unemployment rate honestly?  I seriously doubt it, but I have no way to check.)

So why is there this significant sluggishness after seven years of a recovery?  Many progressive commentators say they have discovered a so-called "new normal" in how the economy works.  Things are just so much more complex today than they were in the innocent past!  Automation! The internet!  Or, you could buy into the Trumpian narrative:  The Chinese and Mexicans have been stealing our jobs.  It's free trade and immigration that have undermined our economy!

The problem with both of those narratives is that increasing complexity, automation, free trade and immigration have all occurred in the past and never been inconsistent with a robust economy and full employment.  Nothing about any of those things should prevent a free economy from reaching full capacity at most times.  But there is something else that can keep an economy permanently sluggish, namely the active hindering of economic activity by a predatory government.  Which we have had in spades under Obama.

I have written several posts in the past about what I have called Obama's "War Against the Economy."  For example, here is a long post from 2013.  Any one of Obama's individual initiatives might be something that you actually support.  But if you look broadly at the full range of Obama's policies that have made doing business more difficult and more costly, it kind of takes your breath away.  No wonder the economy is sluggish!

• Energy.  They have stopped pipeline construction.  The EPA has attacked the coal industry on all fronts.  Development of fossil fuel resources on federal lands is obstructed with every device they can think of.  They hand out wealth-destroying subsidies to uneconomic "renewable energy" companies.  Multiple regulations seek to intentionally drive up the price of electricity.
• Obamacare.  Obama promised that his signature act would cut the cost of health insurance, while his critics said that economics can't work that way and the cost would shoot up.  The critics have been proved right.  The Act has vastly increased federal spending, while creating powerful incentives for small companies to stay under 50 full time employees to avoid cost-prohibitive mandates.
• Regulation.  An explosion of complex and expensive regulations has made "compliance" the biggest growth industry in the U.S. -- an industry that adds exactly zero to the wealth of the people.  As the most notable example, the multi-thousand-page Dodd-Frank law to regulate the financial industry has made it next to impossible for small banks that cannot afford hundred-lawyer compliance staffs to continue to exist.  For the first time in the history of the country, banks are not lending to their full lending capacity, and sit on massive "excess reserves."
• Labor Department.  Huge numbers of employees have been added to the ranks of those covered by inflexible strictures like wage, hour and overtime rules.  The NLRB has purported to outlaw the franchise business model and make franchisors the employers of all who work for the franchisees.
• Government spending and debt accumulation.  Spending went up by about $1 trillion per year in the early years of the Obama administration, as a supposed "stimulus," and then never went back down.  Was any of the added spending productive?  Not that I noticed.  Bonded debt about doubled, from about $9 trillion to $18 trillion.  There was no effort whatsoever to reform entitlements.
• Increasing handouts.  While traditional welfare (now going by the acronym TANF) has remained fairly steady under Obama, other handouts like food stamps (SNAP) and Social Security disability have exploded.  These things come with powerful incentives to the recipients to induce them to not work, or work less, or at least not report their income to the government.

This could go on, but you get the picture.  In the aggregate, these initiatives and many others like them constitute a very major drag on economic performance.  Getting rid of all these drags on the economy is what could get the extra 8 million people employed.  Starting a trade war won't accomplish the job, and indeed would almost certainly make things worse.

Professor Richard Epstein last week published an "Open Letter to President Trump" at the Hoover Institution web site.  After recommending in the strongest terms to avoid a trade war, here are the guts of Epstein's advice:

[T]he campaign to deregulation domestically has to take place through all the government agencies, whether they deal with environmental, securities, communications, trade, or any other issue. We do not need the clean power plan in its current form, or for that matter, the clean water plan; we do not have to get detailed information, world-wide, of the wages of the median worker; we do not need programs of net neutrality; we do not have to have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (whose head, Richard Cordray, you are now entitled to sack) to run roughshod over various credit markets. There is here a relatively simple prescription: whatever the Obama administration has done by regulation, undo.

There are, of course, many issues that cannot be done by executive order, and you should not try to imitate the worst Obama abuses in unlawfully expanding your authority. But it should be painfully obvious that the two major legislative mistakes of the Obama administration have to be [un]done by ending the various mandates under the Affordable Care Act—a horrible misnomer—for the individual and employer markets. There will clearly have to be something to put in the void, for which the Healthy Indiana Plan is a good place to start. And clearly something has to be done to remove most of the key provisions of the Dodd-Frank legislation that causes far more mischief than it prevents. And we must move to follow the world-wide practice of allowing the repatriation of profits earned abroad by American firms without a new round of corporate taxes.

Anyway, with Hillary as President, none of this would have been a possibility.  With Trump as President, at least we can have some hope.

Why No One Pays Any Attention To The New York Times Any More

I will be far from the first to note that the biggest loser of the recent election has to be the liberal media, led by its flagship outlet the New York Times.  The Times went all in for Hillary, sometimes running as many as four anti-Trump front page stories in a single issue.  

Before this election the term "bias" was commonly used to describe the political coverage of the Times and other liberal media, and some even continued to use that term this cycle; but this time, the word "bias" was not an accurate description of what was occurring at the Times.  The word "bias" would connote coverage that is somewhat slanted despite an effort at balance.  For the Times and many others in this cycle, it was not a question of mere slant, and there was no effort at balance.  The Times explicitly functioned as an arm of the Clinton campaign.  By the way, in my view they are completely entitled to do that if they want.  The problem was that their idea of how to maximize their help for Hillary was to combine smug and supercilious contempt for their opponent and his supporters with a completely fake pretense of objectivity.  Was anybody fooled?  Very few, I would think.  The overall effect of the Times's efforts was almost certainly to help Trump rather than hurt him.

Anyway, now that the election is over, don't expect them to have learned anything from the disaster.  (Isn't the fundamental characteristic of the progressive the complete inability to learn from experience?)  Almost certainly, the ham-handed one-sidedness of their coverage will only get worse as they struggle to deal with the reality of a Trump presidency.  Indeed, I already have my first good example.

In Friday's edition, the lead editorial has the headline "Denounce the Hate, Mr. Trump."   Supposedly the reason for the editorial is the outpouring of "bigotry and hatred" that the Times perceives as coming from Trump's supporters in the aftermath of the election:

[Y]ou [should] immediately and unequivocally repudiate the outpouring of racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic insults, threats and attacks being associated with your name.   

Funny, but I've been reading and viewing lots about riots and violence from Trump opponents, but I hadn't seen anything at all about this so-called "outpouring" of offensive conduct from Trump supporters.  So, New York Times, can you kindly provide us with at least an example or two of these post-election "racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic insults, threats and attacks" for which you claim Trump supporters bear responsibility?  They give two.  Here they are:

Explicit expressions of bigotry and hatred by Trump supporters . . .  have become even more intense since his election. On a department-store window in Philadelphia, vandals spray-painted “Sieg Heil 2016” and Mr. Trump’s name written with a swastika. In a Minnesota high-school bathroom, vandals scrawled the Trump campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and next to it, “Go back to Africa.”

But wait -- what is the evidence that either of these acts was committed by a Trump supporter?  The Times gives no evidence whatsoever.  Moreover, these are exactly the kind of acts that Trump's opponents have been engaging in throughout the campaign in the effort to discredit him.  The famous Project Veritas videos that came out during the campaign caught Democratic Party and Clinton campaign operatives at the highest levels planning and coordinating dirty tricks to make it appear falsely that Trumps supporters were racists and bigots.  I can't say I know who did either of the particular acts mentioned in the Times editorial; nor would I say that Trump had no racists or other bad people among his supporters.  But really, given what we know, what is the chance that these acts cited by the Times were done by a Trump opponent as opposed to a Trump supporter?  Anybody who has been following this would put those odds at somewhere around 98 or 99% that Trump opponents were responsible.  But in the total absence of any evidence, the Times would pin these acts on Trump supporters -- and in sneering terms that would seek to make being a Trump supporter morally unacceptable ("expressions of bigotry and hatred by Trump supporters").  Is it any wonder that Trump supporters of good faith look on the New York Times with revulsion?  

Meanwhile, several days after the election, while one guy seems to have put an offensive allegedly-pro-Trump message on a Philadelphia store window, and another guy the same in a Minnesota bathroom, tens of thousands of Trump opponents continue their violent riots in cities including Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland, and even in New York City outside Trump's home.  As the riots have continued for days, there have been numerous reports of injuries, arrests, and extensive property damage, not to mention racist statements.  What does this editorial have to say about that?  It doesn't mention the subject.  Well, how about in the rest of this edition of the paper -- surely they have a news article or two about these widespread riots and the conduct of the rioters?  Actually, in this entire November 11 issue of the Times, there is not one single mention of these ongoing riots, whether in news, editorial, or even letters to the editor.  And how about the call to Hillary Clinton to denounce those rioting on her behalf?  Can't find that either.

Wow.  It's not just that we're getting fake and baseless accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., etc., from these guys.  It's that they systematically suppress any information that doesn't support their narrative of the moment.  You can't even find out from them what's going on out there in the world.  Is it any wonder that no one is paying attention any more?

Notes On The Election Results

Reviewing the election result maps from last night, one thing stands out above all others: the ongoing polarization of the electorate between the Democratic coasts and the Republican flyover regions.  Here is a chart from the New York Times of results by state, including the percents of the vote won by each candidate.

In the deep blue states on the coasts, it is notable that Hillary Clinton ran up very large margins.  In a number of cases those margins were even greater than the large margins by which Obama beat McCain in 2008 and/or Romney in 2012, even though Hillary well underperformed Obama nationally.  For example, in giant California, Obama beat McCain in 2008 by 61/37 (24 points) and Romney in 2012 by 60/37 (23 points).   Last night Clinton beat Trump in California by 62/33, a full 29 points.  In Massachusetts, Obama beat McCain by 26 points (62/36) in 2008, and beat Romney by 23 points (61/38) in 2012; Hillary beat Trump in Massachusetts by 27 points (61/34). 

In New York, although Hillary's margin was not as big as those of Obama in 2008 and 2012, she still trounced Trump by a full 21 points, 59/38 -- and New York really is Trump's home state, rather than his adopted state-of-convenience.  Here in Manhattan, I can report that all conversations over the last year about the election with someone who doesn't know your politics in advance have started with the presumption that of course you support Hillary and find Trump to be a buffoon.  And the closer you get to the pinnacles of elite Manhattan, the less dissent there is from the progressive political orthodoxy.

But boy is it different out in the middle of the country.  It's not just that the middle of the country is basically red.  It's that there's a massive trend of formerly blue or purple states moving toward red and then deep red.  Consider a few examples:

Arkansas.  Arkansas was the last of the deep South states to finally break from once solid Democratic control.  It's legislature flipped from Democratic control to Republican only in 2012, after being in Democratic hands since Reconstruction.  It has had two Democratic governors since Bill Clinton left office in 1992, and one of them, Jim Beebe, served into 2015.  Not to mention that Hillary Clinton was the First Lady of Arkansas from 1983 to 1992.  Last night she lost Arkansas by 26 points, 60/34.

West Virginia.  In my lifetime, West Virginia has been one of the most reliably Democratic states.  For example, West Virginia did not have a Republican U.S. Senator all the way from the 1950s until the election of current Senator Shelley Capito in 2014.  The other Senator, Joe Manchin remains a Democrat even today.  In Presidential elections, West Virginia has been reliably Democratic since the 1930s, with the scattered exceptions of the Eisenhower (1956), Nixon (1972) and Reagan (1984) landslides; but then it started to vote steadily Republican in the Presidential races in 2000.  Then, of course, there's Obama's "War on Coal," and Hillary's war on coal miners.  Yesterday Trump won West Virginia by 42 points, 69/27.  Whew! 

Missouri.  Missouri has been the classic swing state for as long as human memory goes back.  Its voters voted for the winning Presidential candidate, whether Democrat or Republican, in every election from 1904 to 2004, with only one exception (1956).  They called Missouri the "bellwether," because it was thought that you would know how the race would finish once Missouri had come in.  Well, no more.  Obama lost Missouri in both 2008 and 2012.  In this election, Missouri was never in question.  Trump won it by 19 points, 57/38.

Minnesota.  As of this writing, it looks like Hillary has finally squeaked out a win in Minnesota, by two points, 47/45.  It was one of the last states to be called.  But this was never supposed to be remotely close.  Minnesota has been literally the most reliable Democratic state since FDR first got elected in 1932, breaking ranks only in the 1952 and 56 Eisenhower elections and Nixon's 1972 landslide.  In 1984 Minnesota had the distinction of being the only state to award electoral votes to Democrat Walter Mondale in Reagan's second-term landslide.  Late polls in this election had Clinton up by from 6 to 11 points.  Oops!

Obviously, comparable stories could be told for several more states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

Now, what is the explanation for these dramatic ongoing shifts?  One piece may be that many voters in these states engage in magical thinking that the government can somehow "bring the jobs back" by some kind of trade deals or tariffs -- not so different from the progressive's magical thinking that all human problems can be solved by government spending.  Another piece may be that these voters mostly have formed the perfectly sensible view that many new jobs would emerge in their states if only the Obama "War Against the Economy" could be ended.  

But here's what I think is a big and under appreciated piece of the explanation:  The voters in these states have a deep revulsion for the smug elites in places like Washington and New York, who purport to run their lives and impose taxes and regulations on them and have no idea about their struggles.  In this revulsion, the red state voters are absolutely right.  

Will "Trumpism" Split Or Transform The Republican Party?

I'm writing this before any meaningful election results are in.  My view is that there is no likely good result from today's election.  We are probably in for four years of pain, not to mention any longer term damage that might be inflicted by one of these flawed candidates.  The best result we can hope for will be keeping the execrable Schumer from becoming Majority Leader of the Senate.    

But this is as good a time as any to look forward on a few issues.  

Number one is the future of the Republican Party.  Many have predicted that the rise of Trumpism will mean the demise of the Republican Party, particularly that it will splinter into two or more pieces.  I don't buy it.  The party will likely evolve some, but even there, my prediction is, not much.  Here's why.  Our system of popular election of the President essentially forces us into a two-major-party system.  In a parliamentary system like they have in most European countries, multiple minor parties can elect a few deputies each; and then, if no major party gets a full majority in the parliament, the major parties must go shopping to buy minor party support.  The result is that minor parties frequently can demand policy concessions or cabinet positions, and can end up with influence in running the government well beyond the numbers of their supporters.  This gives the minor parties an ongoing reason for existence; and then, sometimes, one of them will start growing until it overtakes one of the formerly major parties.  In the U.S., by contrast, the President, once elected, has the full executive authority, and doesn't need ongoing support from anybody outside his party.  Minor parties who can't hope to elect a President have zero influence on the running of the government.  To be a party that can elect a President, you need to be a broad-based coalition that aspires to 50+% support of the entire population.  By the very math of the situation, it's highly unlikely to have more than two of those at any one time.  Yes, in a year when a minor-party candidate gets some traction (think Ross Perot in 1992 or 1996), you can become President with support perhaps in the low 40s of percent.  Still, a party that actually aspires to elect Presidents regularly must be constantly working to build that 50% coalition.  If the Republicans break into two or three pieces, now no one of the pieces will have more than about 25 - 30% support.  If that happens, the Republicans will be in the wilderness essentially forever until they figure out how to re-coalesce.  The forces pushing them back together would be almost irresistible.  I literally can't imagine that it wouldn't happen. 

But how about Trump's big issues of trade and immigration?  If anything defines "Trumpism," it is his positions on these two issues.  Will the Republican Party be transformed by adopting those positions, or some variant of them?  Again, I don't buy it, except maybe a little around the edges.  Sorry, Donald, but your positions represent dead ends for the country and indeed for your most fervent supporters.  You have run further with these issues than their previous champions, like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan; but these issues will fade away again, as they have in the past, because they are dead ends.

Trade.  If there is one major theme of this blog, it is that the fundamental driving principle of the progressive left -- which is the idea that all human problems can be solved with more government spending -- is a delusion that can't possibly work.  Here's something else in the same delusional category:  the idea that some form of trade protectionism, or "better trade deals," or punishment of American companies for having foreign affiliates, can prevent the internationalization of the world economy and thereby "bring the jobs back."  

Yes, a not small number of Americans have lost jobs in manufacturing when foreign producers figure out how to produce and deliver the same products for less.  The government cannot solve this problem with trade restrictions.  Indeed, there is no solution to the problem other than the creation of new private companies and new jobs for the displaced workers.  Trying to solve the problem with tariffs or import quotas is a total dead end for the American economy and even particularly for the blue collar workers who seem to be Trump's strongest supporters.  Tariffs act as a regressive tax that hits lower-middle-income workers the hardest.  Meanwhile, a tariff only postpones the inevitable:  sooner or later every factory will be put out of business by some form of competition, which could just as well be domestic as foreign.  And if tariffs are high enough to cut off American producers from the best international technologies and supply chains, then we get a second-rate American economy.  Today, our economy is the world's strongest, and our wages the world's highest, precisely because we are constantly exposed to the best that the world has to throw at us.

And then there is Trump's concept of "better trade deals."  I have no idea what he is even talking about there.  By a "better trade deal," does he mean a deal that makes foreign products more expensive for Americans to buy?  How exactly is that "better"?  Even to state it that way shows how crazy it is.  In fact, existing trade deals like NAFTA or the pending TPP have essentially nothing to do with setting the terms of trade.  (Those are set by private agreements between buyers and sellers.)  The trade deals do lower tariffs, which makes foreign products cheaper for Americans to buy.  Sorry, but that's a good thing for Americans.  Going forward, the Republican Party is going to have to decide whether it wants to be in favor of making the things that Americans buy cheaper or more expensive.  There's only one right way to go.  Besides, the Democrats -- because of their ties to unions and crony capitalists, let alone environmentalists -- are already the party in favor of making the things Americans buy more expensive.  

My prediction is that, even if Trump becomes President, his trade agenda will largely fade away.  OK, TPP may die (although it also might get approved in the lame duck session of the Senate).  But I can't imagine a major general tariff increase getting approved by Congress, let alone the repudiation of NAFTA, which is deeply baked into our economy at this point.  Most likely if Trump is elected:  Trump makes a few proposals, they sit in Congress without action, and then everybody moves on to other things.  If Hillary gets elected, TPP likely also gets stalled, but she is more likely to revive it a year or two down the road.  Probably, she gets some modifications and re-submits it.  Her best hope to get it approved will be in the next Congress.  Of course, that's because there will be more Republicans then.

Immigration.  The immigration issue is subject to far more complexities and ambiguities than the trade issue.  With trade, while there are clearly some losers among American workers, trade overall is a huge net plus for the American economy.  With immigration, it's much less clear.  And also, the political divide over immigration is so stark that the chances for a meaningful reform that actually improves things are not good.  As I have written before, as bad as our immigration system is, almost any reform that might get passed is likely to make things worse.

Meanwhile, how big a problem is immigration?  Many sources have reported that net illegal immigration has been negative for many years, basically since the big recession.  Here is a report on the subject from Pew.  There just aren't that many poor Mexicans looking to get into the U.S. any more.  Of course, the biggest factor contributing to the waning of the illegal immigration problem with Mexico has been -- you guessed it -- NAFTA!  And anyway, for all the talk of the problem of illegal immigration, somehow nobody seems to mention that the big numbers are in legal immigration.  The Pew report just cited has a figure for illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 2015 of 11.1 million.  According to migrationsource.org here, the number of legal immigrants in the U.S. exceeds 40 million, almost half of whom are already citizens.  And new legal immigrants continue to arrive in the U.S. at a rate of about 1 million per year.  One could debate whether that number is too high -- or, maybe, too low.  I haven't really heard much if any debate over that subject.  Have you?  And nobody really says that the U.S. should dramatically lower that number, let alone cut it off entirely.  After all, we are a nation of immigrants.  In my view, given that it's just not possible to take in everybody in the troubled world, a smart reform would be seeking to get the highest quality and best educated immigrants we can find to fill our limited quotas.  As sensible as that would be, I don't think that the Democrats would agree to it.  To put it cynically, they want to import people who will become dependent on government.  So the law will likely not change.  

That means that the difference between the candidates going forward will be in the enforcement of existing law, rather than the likelihood of any new laws.  Hillary is on record (at fundraisers, or course, not campaign rallies) as being in favor of open borders, at least within the Americas.  That really means that she represents no change from the intentionally lax enforcement regime of Obama. Trump promises stricter enforcement and a wall.  OK, but net illegal immigration is already negative.  In a Trump administration, I would expect immigration to fade as an issue, as would trade.  There are far more important things to focus on.  The pain will be in other areas, and on other issues, of which there are plenty.

So will "Trumpism" transform the Republican Party?  Not likely.

UPDATE, November 9:  In Trump's short victory speech late last night, suddenly the issues he's talking about are infrastructure spending and "taking care of our vets."  What happened to trade and immigration?  That was fast!  Meanwhile, with solid Republican control of both houses of Congress, I really should be more optimistic than indicated at the beginning of this post.  Hey, will they actually roll back some of Obama's War Against the Economy?  It's entirely possible that that could give the economy a real boost.

The Election: #nevertrump versus #neverhillary

Really, it's very difficult to find anything good to say about this election.  But I'll try.

Somewhere even before the candidates were finally chosen, the hashtags #nevertrump and #neverhillary appeared on social media.  The hashtags are headings to collect in one place the writings of people who refuse to support the candidate in question, and who advocate that others should do the same.  But if you take a look at the discussions aggregated under the two hashtags, you quickly realize that the two represent very different phenomena.

First, the #nevertrump phenomenon.  It very substantially consists of Republicans and conservatives, including prominent ones, who find either Mr. Trump's character, or his positions on certain issues, or both, to be disqualifying from the Presidency.  The Hill back in August published a long list of over one hundred prominent Republicans who had stated a "never Trump" position.  The list included presidential candidates (Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush), numerous Senators and Congressmen, Governors, top-ranking pundits (e.g., columnist George Will, editors Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard), major Republican donors (e.g., Paul Singer of Elliott Management), and others.

One might agree or disagree with these people on whether their position constitutes a good political tactic that would lead to a superior outcome for the country.  (After all, the most likely result of many Republicans repudiating Trump will be the election of Hillary.)  But clearly these are serious people who are genuinely concerned about getting the best outcome for the country and its people.

And #neverhillary?  Almost everything you can find about that phenomenon consists of Trump supporters advocating that people should not support the Democratic candidate.  How about the reciprocal of #nevertrump?  Is there such a thing as a group of prominent Democrats -- or even one prominent Democrat -- publicly saying that they just can't support Mrs. Clinton?  If there is, I can't find it.  Back on August 29, Marc Thiessen wrote a column in the Washington Post asking "Where Are The #NeverHillary Democrats?" and noting that he couldn't find any.  The intervening two months haven't caused any to turn up.

Now, that's rather remarkable.  I mean, as bad as Trump's flaws are, are Hillary's any less so?  Compromising national security to that your emails will be inaccessible to FOIA requests -- emails that will then reveal the workings of the pay-to-play Clinton Foundation?  Destroying documents after the Congressional subpoena has been served?  (No client I ever had would have survived in his or her job after doing that.)  Using a "foundation" to support a personal lifestyle of private planes and top hotels, let alone to arrange tens of millions of dollars of supposedly "independent" personal income from donors with a clear interest in influencing a Secretary of State/soon-to-be presidential candidate?  And not one prominent Democrat is sufficiently troubled by any of it to publicly proclaim an inability to support this person?  

It does turn out that there is at least one group of Democrats in the #neverhillary camp.  Of course, this is the unreconstructed Bernie supporters.  Here is a letter from a Harvard freshman to that group of #neverhillary Democrats.  It seems that most of the people in this group are young "millennials," and probably their biggest issue is ballooning college debt and Bernie's promise of free college for all.  Perhaps in their minds they have convinced themselves that in advocating for this issue they are looking out for the good of the country and its people.  A more honest way of looking at it is that they just want to get in on the infinite pile of free government handout money before it all gets handed out to somebody else.

Well, from this we learn something.  After all, Hillary has no particular political vision that anyone can perceive.  What she stands for is continuation and ongoing growth of all government spending and support with taxpayer money of all Democratic lobby groups.  So what we learn is that, for the left-leaning voters in general and all prominent Democrats in particular, far and away the over-riding value is protecting the continuation of the government gravy train for themselves and their crowd.  OK, it's demoralizing.  But if this election has accomplished on useful thing, it is to make that conclusion abundantly clear.