this from Dr. Paul Krugman in The New York Times -- please follow link to original: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/opinion/donald-trump-health-care-bill.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
After
Donald Trump’s surprise election victory, many people on the right and
even in the center tried to make the case that he wouldn’t really be
that bad. Every time he showed a hint of self-restraint — even if it
amounted to nothing more than reading his lines without ad-libbing and
laying off Twitter for a day or two — pundits rushed to declare that he
had just “become president.”
But
can we now admit that he really is as bad as — or worse than — his
harshest critics predicted he would be? And it’s not just his contempt
for the rule of law, which came through so clearly in the James Comey
testimony: As the legal scholar Jeffrey Toobin says,
if this isn’t obstruction of justice, what is? There’s also the way
Trump’s character, his combination of petty vindictiveness with sheer
laziness, leaves him clearly not up to doing the job.
And
that’s a huge problem. Think, for a minute, of just how much damage
this man has done on multiple fronts in just five months.
Take
health care. It’s still unclear whether Republicans will ever be able
to pass a replacement for Obamacare (although it is clear that if they
do, it will take coverage away from tens of millions). But whatever
happens on the legislative front, there are big problems developing in
the insurance markets as we speak: companies pulling out, leaving some
parts of the country unserved, or asking for large increases in
premiums.
Why?
It’s not, whatever Republicans may say, because Obamacare is an
unworkable system; insurance markets were clearly stabilizing last fall.
Instead, as insurers themselves have been explaining,
the problem is the uncertainty created by Trump and company, especially
the failure to make clear whether crucial subsidies will be maintained.
In North Carolina,
for example, Blue Cross Blue Shield has filed for a 23 percent rise in
premiums, but declared that it would have asked for only 9 percent if it
were sure that cost-sharing subsidies would continue.
So
why hasn’t it received that assurance? Is it because Trump believes his
own assertions that he can cause Obamacare to collapse, then get voters
to blame Democrats?
Or is it because he’s too busy rage-tweeting and golfing to deal with
the issue? It’s hard to tell, but either way, it’s no way to make
policy.
Or take the remarkable decision to take Saudi Arabia’s side
in its dispute with Qatar, a small nation that houses a huge U.S.
military base. There are no good guys in this quarrel, but every reason
for the U.S. to stay out of the middle.
The
most likely explanation of his actions, which have provoked a crisis in
the region (and pushed Qatar into the arms of Iran) is that the Saudis
flattered him — the Ritz-Carlton projected a five-story image of his face on the side of its Riyadh property — and their lobbyists spent large sums at the Trump Washington hotel.
Normally,
we would consider it ridiculous to suggest that an American president
could be so ignorant of crucial issues, and be led to take dangerous
foreign policy moves with such crude inducements. But can we believe
this about a man who can’t accept the truth about the size of his
inauguration crowds, who boasts about his election victory in the most
inappropriate circumstances? Yes.
And consider his refusal to endorse
the central principle of NATO, the obligation to come to our allies’
defense — a refusal that came as a shock and surprise to his own foreign
policy team. What was that about? Nobody knows, but it’s worth
considering that Trump apparently ranted to European Union leaders about the difficulty of setting up golf courses in their nations. So maybe it was sheer petulance.
The
point, again, is that everything suggests that Trump is neither up to
the job of being president nor willing to step aside and let others do
the work right. And this is already starting to have real consequences,
from disrupted health coverage to ruined alliances to lost credibility
on the world stage.
But,
you say, stocks are up, so how bad can it be? And it’s true that while
Wall Street has lost some of its initial enthusiasm for Trumponomics —
the dollar is back down to pre-election levels — investors and businesses don’t seem to be pricing in the risk of really disastrous policy.
That
risk is, however, all too real — and one suspects that the big money,
which tends to equate wealth with virtue, will be the last to realize
just how big that risk really is. The American presidency is, in many
ways, sort of an elected monarchy, in which a temperamentally and
intellectually unqualified leader can do immense damage.
That’s
what’s happening now. And we’re barely one-tenth of the way through
Trump’s first term. The worst, almost surely, is yet to come.
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