Transcription
I think what you're seeing is an increasingly desperate presidency. I mean, Mr. Trump's polling is bad news for him. He's losing support among the people he needs to have to keep going as the kind of president he has chosen to be. So, he's getting desperate, doing all kinds of things that he didn't do before, and that he obviously isn't thinking through. And I'm going to give you some examples because I think it sets a context for them talking about ICE, Minnesota, and so on. So, here's some things to think about.
Over the last 10 days or so, he has proposed to put a cap on interest rates of 10% for credit cards. For those who don't know, credit cards currently on average charge an annual rate of 22.8%. Which means that he is proposing to cut the income of the banks who make credit cards available to the public from 22.8% on what they have invested in credit cards to 10%. That is a very nice thing to do for people on credit cards who are people he wants to get to vote for him. And he is letting the business community know that if they want him to continue to give them the enormous tax cuts he did in his first presidency and then again in his second. If they want the goodies, he can deal out to them, then they have to let him do stuff for the other part of the coalition without which he can't be president. So, in a sense, he's saying to them, I have to do enough for the mass of people to keep them from deserting me, and it's in your interest to let me do that. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. We'll time will tell. He's crossing his fingers.
But that's not all he did. Then he did that, you know, macho move of grabbing the president of a sovereign country with whom there is no war and from whom there is not the slightest endangerment of the United States. This act criticized virtually in every country on earth by the leaders in those countries. Some who couldn't speak very freely sadly, that's most of Europe, and those who could. Um, but I see it as desperate. It's a desperate act so he can show I'm doing something. He can't land troops there. It would be a war for the next 10 years just like Ukraine, only probably worse because the Europeans wouldn't participate. All alone, the United States would be occupying a country. The impact on Latin America beyond words in terms of the history we're living through.
And then another one he says is I'm going to pay for all of this since it's very expensive. What he's already done and a limitless expense in quote unquote running Venezuela, which the president says he's going to do. How's that going to be paid for? His answer, oil. Exxon Corporation explains to the president publicly, you are a We're not going to invest in that country. It's an uninvestable, that's a quote, an uninvestable situation, which makes the president look like the hamfisted opportunist that he was and is, but that he does not like to be treated that way. And so immediately threatened Exxon that he won't let them participate in the oil business. He'll give it all to Chevron. A president who plays favorites in that all or no make or break way is going to be making catastrophic enemies among the biggest and richest people in the United States. You've got to be desperate to do anything like that. I could go on, but I want to get the sense of a desperate effort to hold together a coalition.
Now, we come to Minnesota. Well, what has the president done? He's created a new and special police force in the United States. It's not the Army or the Navy or the Air Force. It's not the State Police. It's not even the National Guard. It's a unique police under the authority of the executive through, you know, because of the way the cabinet is set up. Okay. We've not seen that, as you rightly point out. This is a federal police under the jurisdiction of the executive. This is extraordinary. It means, for example, that he could not or chose not to ask the army to do this work, which is what one would expect if you really believe that the crime wave, and there's no evidence for it, but if the crime wave is beyond the control of the local police, the National Guard under the authority of a governor, then you send in the army. Now, maybe he doesn't want the way that looks, a government using the army against its own people. He doesn't know what to do. So he's doubling down, which is typically what he has done. And he uses that stupid slogan. You know, it's interesting to use a slogan of the Nazis. I want to remind people the Nazis lost that great tactic, one of ours, all of yours. You know what that did? That mobilized the Czech people to mount a resistance that cost the Germans an enormity, as that kind of behavior did in France, in Denmark, and in all the other countries that the Nazis occupied before they were driven out. So if you want to make the parallel, then it's a choice that is doubly stupid. Why raise a banner of the losers? It is extraordinarily narrow-minded.
But I agree with you, Brian. What's going on here is the logic of where Mr. Trump is taking the country. I have no idea what was in his mind when he decided to scapegoat immigrants. I do know that the crime rate among immigrants is lower than that among native-born Americans. I know that that's a phony excuse. I know as an economist that the immigrant problem has never been a basic problem of the American economy. It has been a political scapegoat of which we will become ashamed, rather like what we did to the Japanese in California in World War II, etc., etc. And therefore, I see this as a kind of horrible phenomenon, a little bit like a loose train heading towards a stone wall, and we're all watching it and we're screaming at the people on the train, get off, jump off, don't stay on a train that's going to do unspeakable damage. But they are busy drinking and they don't hear us.
A general strike would be a logical next step in this process. It is a little bit of a tit for tat. It was when the Nazis did this kind of thing in Europe. It helped build the resistance which in the end destroyed their project from top to bottom and totally changed German society even to this point. And, you know, there is the talk of a general strike that was led by the head of the United Auto Workers Union in his proposal that all other unions make their contracts end on the last day of April of the year 2028, so that on Mayday of 2028, everybody's on strike is sort of an indirect way to organize a general strike. This would be more on the scope of it, but I think the reason to take it seriously is because of the effect it will have. And let me sketch that for people so they understand.
The people who run this country, who run the businesses, who sit at the top of the pyramids of economic and political power, who know each other, who are often the same individuals as they move from a CEO of a huge company to head of a governmental agency and then back again, etc., etc. The people who run this country have had a wait and see attitude. They like Mr. Trump because of his tax cuts. Please notice that the first thing Mr. Trump did when he won the presidency at the beginning was a huge tax cut, the one in 2017. And the first thing he did in his second presidency was a huge tax cut passed last year. That's not an accident. That's not a coincidence. He's letting everybody know, you big donors who give me the money, I'm going to take care of you. Subsidies he's dishing out to high-tech companies, he's delivering. He's taking our tax money and giving it to them. Oh, yes. It's for to compete with the Chinese and for national security. Of course, it is.
Now, here comes the punchline. Those people want the tax cuts and they will support Mr. Trump as long as he delivers them. And there's no, here we go, no rising dangerous collateral cost to his doing that. What do I mean by cost? I mean the resistance of people to ICE, the blaming, the fact that over the last 6 months ICE, which was looked upon as the muscle needed to enforce deportation, now is a threat to everybody who disagrees with the policy. And the country has reacted and ICE now looks like an ugly occupation force, which is how it is being increasingly viewed, and it has only itself to blame given what it's doing. Okay.
At this point, the people at the top have to reckon with a cost because, and here I say this not as a warning, but as an analysis, if you have a general strike or anything like it that changes the government, that's a pendulum that's going to swing very far the other way. And the people who will displace ICE will be looking to square some debts to offset a pendulum that went way too far to the right. It's now going to go to the left. Leading me to conclude. Beware you people because what's what's unfolding threatens you in a way you have not been threatened for a hundred years.