RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Trump team is probably not going to seek to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. To do so would be to provoke Trump’s crucial supporters in Congress. Instead, they seem to be seeking to discredit him and his investigation. This is apparently designed to achieve two possible results: the first is to put pressure on the Special Prosecutor to lean over backwards in order to avoid any accusation of bias against Trump and his team. Mueller cares deeply about his reputation for integrity and will want to emerge from this process with that reputation intact. Accordingly, he may err – consciously or unconsciously – in favor of Trump in close cases so that the public will regard him as unbiased and fair-minded.

This is a classic tactic used by lawyers, athletic coaches, business people and others in how they deal with decision makers. The great Red Auerbach, former coach of the Boston Celtics, once told me that when he screams loudly at officials, he generally gets the next close call in his favor. I have heard the same from baseball managers regarding balls and strikes.

This is a somewhat risky strategy in the context of law, because attacking the decision maker could also backfire. Whoever thinks about using this tactic should understand the particular decision maker against whom it is directed. Mueller seems like an appropriate target because of his concern for his reputation for fairness.

Even if this tactic were not to work, the attack on Mueller gives the Trump team some legal weaponry in the event of an indictment or a recommendation for impeachment. If a significant portion of the country believes that the Special Counsel was unfair, this could help in legal proceedings before judges or jurors.

So attacking Mueller may appear to be a win-win tactic for the team – certainly a lot better than firing Mueller. Fortunately for the Trump team, Mueller has played into their hands by his sloppiness in conducting the investigation. He has been incautious with his choice of personnel – too many of them seem biased against Trump, not only by their backgrounds, but by their tweets and messages. When you go after a President, you must be Caesar’s wife – above suspicion or reproach. Mueller seems to be failing the Caesar’s wife test. Moreover, the manner by which he acquired emails and other documents from the Trump transition team may raise some legal questions. The same may be true if he used the questionable dossier against Trump as a basis for securing warrants.

It says much about the state of America that the fatal train derailment in Tacoma, Washington virtually overshadowed the unveiling of President Donald Trump’s “America First” national security strategy in Washington, D.C. Trump opened his speech with condolences to the families of the three people killed and dozens wounded in the Amtrak crash. “It is all the more reason why we must first start by repairing the infrastructure of the United States,” Trump said, referring to the devastating crash.

Indeed, a “complete rebuilding of America’s infrastructure” is a key ingredient of one of his new strategy’s four pillars—“promoting American prosperity.” As Trump spoke, firefighters in California were battling blazes in Ventura and Santa Barbara. In Atlanta, at the world’s busiest airport, hundreds of stranded passengers were struggling to reschedule flights after a total power outage grounded flights and plunged the airport into darkness for hours. Large sections of Puerto Rico remained without reliable power months after a deadly hurricane. And federal officials from the National Transportation Safety Board were en route to Tacoma to investigate the cause of the crash of the Amtrak train on its inaugural trip.

President Trump’s remarks contained few specifics about how he intends to pay for his total infrastructure rebuilding, or implement his other three national security pillars—protecting the American people and homeland (by building a wall and restricting immigration); preserving peace through strength (by rebuilding the military and constructing a missile defense system); and advancing American influence abroad (through economic growth via creative diplomacy, using “all tools of statecraft”). But the president’s 55-page national strategy document, at least ten pages longer than President Obama’s 2010 opus, reads in many ways like a document that most of his predecessors could have written.

That came as a relief to foreign policy guru Peter Feaver, among others. “One of the major concerns about President Trump is that he has at times seemed so bent on breaking with establishment precedent that he has failed to appreciate just how much of what has made American great has been the produce of these core establishment ideas and institutions,” wrote Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke and coeditor of Foreign Policy’s “Elephants in the Room” blog.

In some ways, Trump’s speech, and especially the administration’s first strategy document, seem to backpedal from some of his earlier, more abrasive policies and utterances. The policy statement and especially the speech introducing it reflect the Trump foreign policy’s inward, sometimes isolationist focus and the importance it places on projecting power by rebuilding economic strength at home and defending the nation’s physical, intellectual, and cyber property and borders. The document calls Russia and China “rival nations” that “seek to challenge American influence, values and wealth.” While neither Trump’s speech nor his national security plan mentions alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, the strategy document accuses Russia of “using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies.” This criticism was only partially undercut by Trump’s reference to a call that he received Sunday from Russian president Vladimir Putin to thank him for having shared CIA intelligence that Trump said helped Russia foil a terrorist attack in St. Petersburg. “That’s a great thing,” the president said, “and the way it’s supposed to work.”

The tax reform that will pass Congress Wednesday fulfills a major Republican campaign promise, but more important is that it marks a return to the politics of growth after many lean years of envy and income redistribution. It offers hope of broader prosperity after a decade of slow growth and rising inequality.

On the merits, the bill is the most pro-growth tax policy since the Reagan reforms of 1981 and 1986. We should add that it is not as good for individual taxpayers as those two acts. The bill cuts marginal tax rates only a little for individuals, and that will temper its growth impact. The politics of envy that has dominated American politics since the mid-2000s has also infected many Republicans, especially its Beltway intellectual class.

This reform will rise or fall on its business tax changes, and those are arguably superior to the 1986 act. The corporate rate cut to 21% from 35% solves a core problem of U.S. economic and business competitiveness. Along with 100% expensing, the rate cut slashes the cost of capital enough to cause CEOs to think again about America as a place to invest. Sweeping away many (alas, not all) special tax breaks means fewer incentives to misallocate capital.

The timing may also be right in giving this already long expansion a second wind. The Obama expansion has been so tepid in part due to historically slow capital investment, and deregulation and tax reform are policy levers designed to revive it.

The economists who gave us the slow Obama economy now say this reform is ill-timed, but they look only at the demand side of the economy. They ignore the bill’s supply-side incentives to increase the economy’s productive capacity. These incentives will be all the more important as the Federal Reserve moves to normalize the monetary policies that lifted stocks and other asset prices during the Obama years. The Obama policy mix helped the affluent who had assets, while faster growth should spread prosperity more broadly.

Will it work? There are wild cards to watch like the Fed, national security shocks and Donald Trump’s trade policy. But measured by business sentiment, the portents are good. The National Federation of Independent Business confidence index hit an all-time record in November, while optimism among manufacturers hit an unprecedented high in the fourth quarter. Mr. Trump is mistaken to focus so much on the stock market, since corrections are inevitable. But the market’s rise since Election Day in 2016 isn’t a political levitation act. It’s an omen of confidence in higher earnings and faster growth.

As for the politics, reform’s passage shows the GOP’s growth wing is still prominent. This was no sure thing as conservative wonks fell for policy fads and sneered at pro-growth reform as irrelevant to the needs of the working class. In the end they watered down the reform but couldn’t hijack it.

This is a credit in particular to the successive House Ways and Means Chairmen who negotiated the reform tradeoffs. Dave Camp, Paul Ryan and Kevin Brady persisted through years of political setbacks for this moment, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell shrewdly tapped Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania to maneuver the bill through the Budget and (with Orrin Hatch ) Finance committees. These are examples of how individual legislators make a difference.

The victory is also a vindication for these and other Republicans who resisted the advice not to work with President Trump. The GOP is supposedly forever morally tainted by trying to pass the agenda it ran on because Mr. Trump is, well, you know. But voters who elected a Republican Congress want results that are good for the country, and Americans shouldn’t suffer for four years because voters preferred Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump deserves credit for selling reform and working with Congress to pass it.

Republicans succeeded despite a narrow Senate majority, no help from Democrats, and the near-universal hostility of the Beltway press. They also had to overcome the Keynesian bias embedded in such institutions as the Congressional Budget Office and Tax Policy Center that are treated as policy oracles when they merely offer guesses about policy outcomes that are often wrong. At least growth conservatives had the Tax Foundation as a counter-weight, but sooner or later they need to repeal the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

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The media are now chortling with Democrat Chuck Schumer that Republicans will “rue the day” they passed this. Actual CNN headline: “Public opposition to tax bill grows as vote approaches.”

But we’d dislike this bill too if all we knew was what the media reported. The polls show that most Americans don’t even think they’ll get a tax cut, when nearly all taxpayers will. Perhaps voters will find that irrelevant in 2018, but the result is certainly better for Republicans than explaining another legislative failure. The far more important payoff will be for the country if the result is a return to faster growth that lifts wages and American confidence.

There is a profound difference between (i) the soap-opera charges now being leveled by some opportunistic women against President Donald Trump and leveraged for cheap political gain by the Gillibrand Hypocrites within the Democrat Party and (ii) the pants-dropping of The Icon, John Conyers, and the butt-squeezing, tongue-slithering obscenities of Sen. Al Franken (who now indeed will have to leave the upper chamber, with no Roy Moore to counterbalance). Conyers and Franken have lost all legitimacy. By contrast, the American people elected President Trump with full transparent cognition of his public and private portfolio, thereby validating his office.
https://spectator.org/keep-your-hypocrisy-stained-hands-off-our-president/

1. Personal Character Allegations Were Litigated Fully with Transparency in 2016, and the Voters Acted as Jury.

The difference between the President and Disgraced Franken-Conyers is that the charges against President Trump fully were litigated before the voters during the 2016 Presidential election. We heard the Billy Bush trailer tape. We read the New York Times front-page stories quoting former beauty contestants — some of whom rebutted the allegations and quotes ascribed to them. The voters knew all about it. And, fully apprised, the American people elected Donald Trump to be President.

That is how democracy works. Each side sets forth its best case — which, unfortunately, consists mostly of setting forth the other candidate’s worst case. There are ads, robocalls, newsmedia exposés and dirt-excavations, and finally debates during which each side gets to throw at the opponent all the dirt, mud, slime, grime, feces, and other schmutz their advisers can get their hands on. Before the debate they shake hands and promise to come out fighting clean. By the end, they not only need to soak their limbs with hand sanitizer but also to drink half a bottle of the stuff.