Orange Man (Still Mostly) Bad

There is no way Donald Trump should be winning this election. He is a blatantly narcissistic loudmouth who has zero charisma and personal appeal as a candidate. Neither has Trump offered even a semblance of a coherent program to remediate the acute economic and fiscal challenges facing the nation at home and the utter disarray of the American Empire abroad.

Even more preposterously, he poses as the savior of patriotism, motherhood, Christian piety, apple pie and the American way of life. What a joke.

The Donald was, is and always will be in the political game to gratify his own gargantuan ego. Full stop. Unlike some honest politicians we have been privileged to know starting with Ronald Reagan and Ron Paul, the Donald doesn’t give a shit about the voters and has no value compass whatsoever.

His gig is identifying the basest fears and grievances of the electorate, and then rubbing them raw with crude, reckless, incendiary oratory, as if name-calling and anger-checking amounts to a policy platform. Moreover, if the applause is tepid or dries up, he simply moves on to the next campaign hot button.

In this vein, he unveiled a plan yesterday to hammer Mexico with a 25% tariff on the $475 billion of goods it sends north each year—unless it clears our mutual border completely, presumably by arresting each and every domestic citizen or transiting foreigner heading for the Rio Grande in pursuit of a better life. And if the $124 billion tax thereby extracted from

American consumers doesn’t cause the Mexican government to shape-up, why then he promised to hammer Americans with a 50% tariff or even a 75% levy on every dollar of merchandise coming across the border.

Of course, these threatened escalations would hammer hard-pressed American consumers from Savannah Georgia to Spokane Washington with levies amounting to $240 billion and $360 billion per year, respectively. How that would cause Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and her left-wing compatriots down in Mexico City to genuflect to Washington’s commands, he doesn’t say.

Nor does he say how this mindless blunderbuss might impact the $323 billion per year of US exports to Mexico, including 1.2 million barrels per day of petroleum products, $25 billion of motor vehicle parts which largely come back to the US in finished assemblies; or $30 billion of semiconductors, computer components and equipment and other electronics, much of which also comes back in finished goods that are to be taxed at 25%, 50% or 75%, depending upon whether the Donald is satisfied with the Mexican response or has a good night’s sleep, as the case may be.

Indeed, 7.35 million cargo trucks cross the border each year, bringing a gross total of $800 billion of goods back and forth. So the Donald’s off-the-cuff immigration control plan amounts to taking hostage nearly one trillion dollars worth of two-way trade with our largest neighbor population-wise (129 million) in order, apparently, to show Mexico who’s boss.

Plain and simply, no semi-competent advisor—perhaps even one foaming at the mouth about the border “invasion”—would recommend taxing Mexican imports at such astronomical rates. And that’s especially the case because these draconian consumer taxes would monkey-hammer the Donald’s own Flyover America rural and blue collar constituencies.

That is to say, the high-end autos and designer goods purchased by the bi-coastal elites originate from Europe and don’t transit thru Mexico and therefore wouldn’t bear the Donald’s wrathful tax at all. But what would get taxed to the gills is finished products and assemblies of everyday goods and lower-end items made from components sourced from the global supply chain and assembled and packaged in Mexico.

These goods eventually end up in US Walmarts, Targets, GM dealer lots and Amazon delivery trucks. These venues, in turn, serve the middle and lower-class neighborhoods that the Donald professes to champion.

Needless to say, therefore, the Donald has the whole immigration story–like virtually all economic issues—ass-backwards. The problem doesn’t originate in Mexico City or any of the other national capitals due south of Mexico, but in Washington DC and America’s hideously obsolete and dysfunctional immigration quota system.

The plain fact is, the US economy is hungry for low and moderate-skill labor, and functions as a giant sucking sound to the north. The irresistible forces of economic gravity and capitalist supply-and-demand consequently bring migrant workers to factories, Amazon warehouses, fast food joints, construction sites and land-scaping operations from coast-to-coast.

After all, there has not been a single net hire of a native-born American worker anywhere in the USA during the last five years!

In fact, there were 131.721 million native born workers on payrolls in October 2019, which compares to just 130.546 million on October 2024. Meanwhile, foreign born employment grew by nearly +4.0 million or 14% during the same 5-year span.

To be sure, this flat-lining of native-born employment is not due to laziness or union obstacles to hiring. There have been no native hires because such workers were never born in the first place, owing to the fact that native-born birth rates have been below replacement levels for more than three decades.

That is to say, growth of the American economy is utterly and completely dependent upon migrant workers and will be as far as the eye can see because the native born population is now actually shrinking. And it is that powerful fact which is attracting the hordes to the border, not the Trumpian falsehood that foreign governments are emptying their jails or that the coyotes and cartels are literally dragooning them into the caravans heading north.

Index of Change In Native-Born and Foreign-Born Employment Since August 2019

Moreover, the actual Washington-source of the blame for the resulting chaos at the southern border is bloody simple: The EB-3 quota for low-skill workers needing less than two years of training or experience is capped at just 10,000 per year. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of unfilled openings meeting those criteria.

Since they can’t get a legal quota slot, however, work-seekers do the next best thing. They come to the border pretending they are refugees and asylum-seekers. There they are required to break the law by crossing the border in order to get in the cue for an asylum processing hearing, which cues now hold 1.5 million persons and on average take 1,750 days to complete.

That’s five years! In the meanwhile, every detainee who is apprehended at the border in this manner—work-seeker, drug-dealer, mental case, criminal escapee and terrorist alike— is paroled into the interior of the US with no vetting, background check or scrutiny. You couldn’t invent a stupider, more dysfunctional and dangerous system if you tried.

The latter is apparent when you recall one fact: If the EB-3 quota cap for unskilled workers were raised from 10,000 to say 500,000 per year, the armies of work seekers at the border or waiting in the asylum cues would not be there at all. They would go to one of the scores of US embassies and consulates in Mexico and Latin America and apply for a visa, and upon being vetted, approved and recruited by a US employer would likely buy a Delta airline ticket with the money that would otherwise go to the criminal coyotes and cartels, and head north to a city where their job was waiting.

At the same time, the drastically thinned-out crowds at the border would mainly consist of drug dealers, criminals, undesirables and persons who failed the background checks when applying for a EB-3 visa. And the Border Patrol would know exactly what to do with any and all of the residual 5% of today’s border hordes. To wit, arrest them, rough them up and send them home upon penalty of a long-prison sentence in the US for a second or third try at illegal entry.

Of course, the Donald isn’t remotely interested in any kind of constructive solution of this sort. He is far more interested, instead, in stirring up public fears and anger and posturing as a tough guy and smart negotiator.

Yet in the case of the so-called immigrant invasion and most other domestic problems the Donald’s half-assed solutions and bully-boy posturings are not remotely relevant. Indeed, contrary to the Donald’s self-serving assertions, America does not need a smart businessman or big-time negotiator in the White House.

What it does need is someone who understands the principles of free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, limited constitutional government and peaceful commerce with the rest of the world. And those are principles for which Bully Boy Trump has no affinity whatsoever.

Still, he’s heading for a second term for the most ironic of reasons. The massive economic distortions resulting from the Donald’s 2020 bacchanalia of Lockdowns, stimmies, free stuff and unprecedented money-printing triggered the surge of 40-year high inflation which materialized in 2021-2023.

Those inflationary Trumpian aftershocks are captured in the red column of the chart below. The roaring inflation depicted there is the Donald’s booby-trapped gift to Harris-Biden. And this chart is why he is winning tonight, but it is absolutely unrelated to what he will bring to the table in January and beyond.

What the Donald will actually bring to the table is another chapter of Orange Man (Still) Bad. And yet and yet. Even a second Trump term will have a redeeming virtue but not mainly in the form of anything it will actually fix.

The role the Donald has been assigned by the better angels of American history is to defeat, debunk, discredit and destroy the noxious hijacking of American democracy and free enterprise capitalism by the UniParty panjandrums ensconced on the banks of the Potomac.

That much he will surely accomplish. And, at the end of the day, destruction of the UniParty is of such imperative importance that it’s reason enough to welcome the Donald’s impending but utterly improbable election to a second term.

The Secret Sauce Of Trump’s Impending Win

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