It seems to me that people are too depressed by Trump.  Yes, he’s far and away the most appalling individual ever to achieve high political office in the US, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get some enjoyment out of the spectacle.  Think about the amusement that Trump provides in a typical day. Just yesterday he said (regarding Kim):

He really wants to do something I think terrific for their country. . .

I do trust him, yeah.

When Bush said something similar about Putin he could be forgiven on several grounds.  First, we hadn’t seen this sort of presidential naiveté toward a Russian leader since the days of FDR. And second, Putin wasn’t yet anywhere near the brutal dictator he is today.

With Trump there’s no such extenuating circumstances to prevent us from falling on the floor laughing.

Then we wake up this morning to find Trump proclaiming that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat, and Sean Hannity believes him.  How is that not funny?

And this tweet is just to, to, to funny to pass up:

Just to be clear, I’m not one of those grammar snobs.  I think good grammar is overrated and of course I make lots of mistakes here. But while I occasionally mix up ‘to’ and ‘too’, I’ve never done so in a tweet accusing a Hollywood actor of having a low IQ.  Come on Trumpistas, even you guys have to find that a little bit amusing.

I don’t doubt for a moment that David Brooks is a far better person that HL Mencken.  But Mencken was funnier.  You can’t go through your entire life in just one mode, even a wholesome mode.  Sometimes you just have to indulge your inner cynic and enjoy the crazy spectacle.

Yes, it’s appalling to have an ignorant, bigoted, misogynistic president.  But tens of millions of women and Hispanics voted for him and if they can survive 8 years of Trump you should be able to as well.  For some reason that I cannot fathom, God has favored and protected this crazy country for more than 240 years, and I think he’ll do so for 6 more years.  Remember, as bad as Trump is, presidents just don’t have much influence over the course of events.

So relax and enjoy the spectacle.

PS.   And speaking of enjoying life, don’t get too upset about poor Anthony Bourdain.  I miss him as much as any of his other fans, but he packed more into his 61 years than you or I could do in 600 years. Tony would be appalled by all this handwringing in the media. He had a good run.

In a book on Korea, Simon Winchester made this observation:

A sixtieth birthday is a special thing in all those countries that have come under the maternal influence of old China, Korea very much included. The body is then deemed to have passed through the five twelve-year zodiacal cycles — the yukgap, as the sixty-year period is known — that constitute the proper life span of the human being.  Once someone has successfully completed the span — as old mother Hwang had done three years before — then all time beyond is regarded as a marvellous bonus: you retire from active life, take your respected ease as an elder, let your children make you as comfortable as they can, and let filial piety take over the reins of your life.

Don’t be like me, planning to do all sorts of wonderful things when you retire, and then finding out that past age 60 your body and mind are too broken down to do the things you planned to do.  Plan your life as if you will die at age 60.  That’s enough time.

PPS.  While I’m not a grammar snob, if I ever reach the point of my commenters who think that any sentence containing the word “insult” is ipso facto an insult, please tell me to just stop.

Update:  The North Korean state media is now more accurate than the White House:

North Korean state media lauded the summit as a resounding success, saying Trump expressed his intention to halt U.S.-South Korea military exercises, offer security guarantees to the North and lift sanctions against it as relations improve.

Yup, Kim won.

Update:  There is a new podcast online where I’m interviewed on neoliberalism.

Jim Geraghty of the National Review is usually somewhat more sympathetic to Trump than I am, but raised his eyebrows a bit after Trump’s recent antics:

Trump and his fans believe he’s demonstrating “toughness” in ways that previous presidents couldn’t. Perhaps. The question is, what happens after you’ve demonstrated your toughness? Does the other side capitulate, or does the other side dig in? No doubt it’s cathartic to visibly rage at the other side, but does it get you where you want to go?

Trump now interacts with the prime minister of Canada the same way he lashes out at Rosie O’Donnell, Mika Brzezinski, or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, by ripping into him on Twitter: “PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our @g7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that, ‘US Tariffs were kind of insulting’ and he ‘will not b- pushed around.’ Very dishonest & weak. Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy!”

Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, raged on Fox News Sunday: “There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door . . . that’s what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference.”

Talk about turning it up to eleven. When U.S. policymakers tell a foreign leader that there’s a special place in hell waiting for him, it’s usually a brutal dictator who’s committed atrocities and human-rights abuses.

[Actually, the Trump administration reserves phrases like “very honorable” for brutal dictators who imprison hundreds of thousands of people in Nazi-like concentration camps, where women are brutally raped, tortured and starved and children born there have to live out their entire lives in prison.  Hell is reserved for Trudeau, who expressed displeasure with US steel tariffs that treat Canada as an enemy, not Kim (or Putin or Duterte or any of the other thugs that Trump likes.)]

It’s not clear to me if Trump is very bad at making deals, or is simply not interested.  Maybe he thinks his fans just want to see 8 years of trolling, with nothing substantive accomplished.  But there is one overlooked side effect of all this—it severely undercuts international Trumpism.  Consider the plight of poor Doug Ford, who had been gaining on Trudeau in recent months:

“We will stand shoulder to shoulder with the prime minister and the people of Canada,” Doug Ford, the Trump-like renegade who was recently elected premier of Ontario, wrote on Twitter.

That’s sort of like if in 2016 Trump had been forced to say he was standing shoulder to shoulder with Obama.  By making the attacks on Canada so over the top and absurd, the Canadian populist right is humiliated, and virtually forced to rally around the despised Trudeau.

When a small country is next to a very big country, the citizens of the small country usually know far more about the big country than vice versa.  Americans may not know that Trump lies about trade with Canada (and even admits doing so), they probably don’t even care.  But I’m pretty sure that a lot of Canadians know that the US runs a trade surplus with Canada, and that Trump is lying when he claims that Canada and the EU have much higher tariff rates than the US, and do care about the attacks.  That’s the nature of small countries.

If your nationalism is based on unfairly demonizing foreigners, then it will inevitably run up against the nationalism of foreign countries.  Thus while leftists like Sanders and Corbyn might view themselves as allies, two similarly placed nationalists will eventually be at each others throats.  People with similar interests often become friends.  But if your similar views are “everyone else is inferior to me”, that’s not much of a basis for friendship, even with someone with similar views.  That’s why global nationalism will burn about, just as the earlier version in the 1930s was eventually discredited.

PS.  Predictions for the Korea summit:

Back in 2016, the Trumpistas told us that the economy was a disaster.  Trump himself talked of economic “carnage” in his inaugural address.  When people pointed out that unemployment had recently fallen from 10% to 4.6%, they said those numbers were meaningless, and that the actual unemployment rate was as high as 30% or more.  We were told that the real issue was the huge trade deficit, which was decimating the American economy.  Those who pointed to “phony unemployment data” and ignored the trade deficit were nothing more than apologists for global neoliberalism.

Today the Trumpistas insist that the economy is in superb shape even though, as Tyler Cowen points out in a recent post, imports are surging and the trade deficit is getting larger.

I actually don’t have any big problem with Trumpistas saying the economy is in good shape, as long as they acknowledge that they have become the loudest apologists for global neoliberalism.  If they aren’t willing to acknowledge that fact, then what basis do they have to insist that the economy is in great shape?  RGDP growth?  It was just as fast around 2014-15.  Unemployment?  It fell from 10% to 4.6% even before Trump was elected.  Stocks?  They soared dramatically higher under Obama.  The big Trump issue is and always has been the trade deficit.  That’s how he wants to be judged, and that’s how I’ll judge him.

So Trumpistas should either take credit for continuing Obama’s policy of selling out to global neoliberalism with a policy of big trade deficits, falling unemployment, and soaring stock prices, or else keep their mouths shut.

PS.  The Financial Times makes the following claim:

Even if Mr Trump were gone tomorrow, nobody today in the US could run for president and win on a “let’s go back to the 1990s” platform. Laissez-faire trade and globalisation in general are under fire in the US (as well as in Europe and any number of developing countries).

Where is the evidence for this claim?  Why can’t we go back to the 1990s?  Polls show that support for free trade agreements is stable over time, and that young people and minorities are far more supportive of free trade than older people.  Why is it assumed that our future is inevitably more protectionist?  Aren’t the young and minorities our future?

Update:  This Dean Baker post suggests the WSJ article is highly misleading, in which case I was too hard on Obama.

The WSJ has an article discussing some comments made by President Obama, back in February 2009.  While speaking to Senator Reid, he indicated that the next day’s jobs report would be bad.  It was bad, unemployed rose to 7.6%.  Reid later mentioned these comments on the Senate floor.

That’s clearly something that Obama should not have done.  So why do I think Trump’s actions were worse?

If you go back to that period, everyone knew the jobs number was going to be horrific.  We’d recently been losing a massive number of jobs every month.  No, that doesn’t excuse the action; the leak did remove a tiny tail risk that the numbers would be OK.  But basically it would be pretty hard to profitably trade on the Obama leak.  If you could go back in a time machine, how would you trade on that inside information?  Sell stocks and buy Treasuries?  Sorry, but stocks soared dramatically higher after the jobs report, and Treasuries fell as bond yields rose strongly.  So Obama wasn’t really giving away any useful information:

Analysts said they were cheered that financial markets seemed to shrug off a government report showing that unemployment climbed to 7.6 percent in January as the recession deepened, a sign the job market was still far from hitting bottom.

“It’s a good sign that we’re trading up in the face of bad news,” said Ed Hyland, global investment specialist at JPMorgan Private Bank. “That’s one of the signs that you look for in the bottoming of a bear market.”

Although the statistics were grim, the so-called whisper numbers representing the most pessimistic estimates on Wall Street guessed that unemployment could have spiked to 8 percent last month, given the mass layoffs announced by employers.

Basically, Obama was leaking common knowledge that the jobs market sucked in January 2009.

Again, that’s not to defend his action; he should have kept his mouth shut.  But Trump’s action was worse.  Anyone who knows how Trump thinks would have interpreted his comment as an indication that a pretty decent jobs number was likely to occur.  Why would Trump do that tweet if the number was going to come in worse than expected?  Unlike with the Obama leak, traders who were lucky enough to see his tweet at 7:21am could have profited from the leak.

Of course the WSJ knows all of this, but chose not to publish the information.  To use David Henderson’s terminology, that’s “unforgivable“.

PS.  With Trump there are two types of people, those who see the elephant in the room, and those that cannot see it.  Almost every day there is a new Trump outrage.  When it occurs, some people dig up some sort of similar event with one of America’s previous 44 presidents.  They fail to see the pattern here, the uniquely outrageous nature of Trump.  It’s like a dot picture of an elephant:

Some people see the elephant, while others just see a bunch of individual dots–none of which look like an elephant.

None of Trump’s individual outrages make him look particularly awful.  It’s the daily drumbeat that paints the true picture.  You either see it or you don’t.  For those who cannot, I can’t help you.

Interestingly, America’s white nationalists do see the picture accurately.  They get it.  They see how all the points fit together.  That’s why they love Trump.

HT:  Viking

I was pleased when Larry Kudlow was picked as head of the CEA.  I don’t agree with him on everything, but his heart is in the right place.  Unlike Trump, he’s a strong advocate of free markets.  Thus I was quite disappointed by this:

Kudlow added that the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers usually gets the jobs numbers late in the afternoon or the evening before jobs Friday. He then shares them with the NEC director, who decides whether to forward them to the president.

“His tweet basically said, like everybody else, we wait [sic] the jobs report,” Kudlow said. “You can read into that 10 different things if you want to read into it … I don’t think he gave anything away.”

That’s just absurd, as even many of Trump’s defenders admit.  (Most of Trump’s defenders argue there was no harm in the information coming out early.)

Unfortunately, government officials are almost forced into making these sorts of statements.  This is what happens when a good man like Larry Kudlow is put in a difficult position.  It’s also the likely reason that Gary Cohn left the Trump administration.

One thing that advisors can do is try to prevent the president from making a fool of himself, by controlling the information that he has access to.  Sometimes that’s impossible, as Trump watches a lot of Fox News.  Recall their recent (misleading) photo supposedly showing a Philadelphia Eagles player kneeling during the national anthem, which may have influenced Trump’s decision to disinvite the team to the White House.  But in other cases this sort of control is more effective, as when Gary Cohn denied sensitive information to Trump, knowing that he could not be trusted to keep it secret:

The former National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn kept the monthly jobs report away from President Donald Trump, worried he would be compelled to comment on them early, Politico’s Ben White and Aubree Eliza Weaver reported Monday.

As far as the “no harm, no foul” claim, consider this:

Current NEC Director Larry Kudlow followed the usual protocol in calling Trump on Air Force One on Thursday and gave him Friday’s figures. Kudlow did nothing wrong here. But Trump did, even if it wasn’t a direct disclosure of the numbers.

He’s now created a scenario in which traders will be looking for Trump tweets each jobs Friday. Does no tweet mean a bad number is coming? He’s inserted a new variable where none should exist.

And he’s raised the question of whether he’s dishing on the numbers in his regular late night calls to friends from the White House. And if he is, what are those friends doing with the numbers?

Must be nice to be one of Trump’s friends.  I wish I got late night calls from a man with sensitive market information, who is unable to keep his mouth shut.

PS.  I always wondered why so many anti-Trump pundits suddenly switched to support for Trump during 2016.  Now I know:

One high-profile Salem talker did a dramatic about-face on Trump in June 2016 after being schooled by Salem management. Hugh Hewitt said on his radio show on June 8, 2016 that the GOP had to dump Trump at the convention, arguing: “It’s like ignoring stage-four cancer. You can’t do it, you gotta go attack it.” But within a week, on June 15, Hewitt had penned a pro-Trump op-ed in the Washington Post, saying: “For the good of the country, Republicans have to be clear about the binary choice in front of us [and] close ranks around Trump.” What on Earth just happened? people wondered. Hewitt says he changed his mind independently, but emails from a Salem executive boasted that the CEO had written Hewitt and Michael Medved with “a very well stated case for supporting the GOP nominee because we have to beat Hillary.” After Hewitt’s op-ed appeared, the executive quoted Salem’s CEO as saying: “Wow he took a lot from my email to him and turned it into an article.”

Medved, for his part, didn’t take the hint. And he suffered for it, said CNN: “Medved’s time slot in several major markets—including Washington D.C., Dallas and Chicago—was changed from the prime afternoon hours to the late evening.”

Personally, I’d rather quit my job.

PPS.  I avoid blogging on the Russia collusion story, mostly because I find it boring.  Why is it even being debated, given that the collusion was completely open and public?  This is what it’s like living in a banana republic.  If the president says the sky is green, his supporters fall right into line.

PPPS.  The official policy of the US government is that there is only one China, and Taiwan is a part of China.  Given this official Trump administration policy, this demand takes a lot of chutzpah.