Coyne: The recession, if it comes, will have Trump's fingerprints all over it
Coyne: The recession, if it comes, will have Trump's fingerprints all over it
BY ANDREW COYNE at the National Post
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-the-recession-it-if-comes-will-have-trumps-fingerprints-all-over-it/amp
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For make no mistake, the recession, if it comes, will have Donald Trump’s stubby fingerprints all over it. There may be, as Adam Smith said, a “great deal of ruin” in a nation, but confidence cannot long be sustained in the face of a really determined attempt by those in power to undermine it. And nothing is better calculated to unnerve investors than the sense that the man at the helm of the world economy is on a suicide mission. If only this were just a metaphor.
The evidence that there is something very wrong with the president’s mental state has been available from the start, for those who bothered to pay attention. But so long as the economy was on a roll — a roll that began under his predecessor — it was possible to pretend it did not matter. After all, were taxes not being cut, regulation not unwound, whether in spite of the president or because of him?
But eventually the constant drumbeat of official insanity takes its toll. Indeed, the president’s condition appears to be deteriorating. In the past week alone Trump could be heard and seen refusing to visit Denmark because it would not let him buy Greenland, quoting with approval a right-wing radio host’s claim that Israelis love him as if he were “the second coming of God,” and proclaiming himself, in similarly messianic vein, the “chosen one” to lead America into its increasingly apocalyptic economic war with China.
As James Fallows notes in The Atlantic, if Trump were an airline pilot, or a submarine commander, or “in virtually any other position of responsibility,” he would already have been removed, or in the process of being so. But because he is in a position of total responsibility, “in charge not of one nuclear-missile submarine but all of them,” he remains untouchable.
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