The View from Right Field

Does Donald Trump Have to Be So Obnoxious and Such a Bully?

I wonder what the reaction would be to what Donald Trump is doing if he were not so obnoxious and such a bully.  Is he antagonizing people, at home and abroad, by the way he is saying things more than the policies themselves would upset people?  At times, it seems, at least to me, that President Trump’s way of talking and acting unnecessarily irritates people and makes some of his policies seem worse than they are. 

It’s sort of the opposite of Barack Obama: some of his policies were worse than his way of talking about them.¹  On the other hand, maybe President Trump’s way of talking appeals to some of his supporters.  Certainly, President Obama’s way of talking appealed to many of his supporters.  In any case, President Trump is not going to change.  He is what he is.

Just Because I Disagree With Trump Doesn’t Mean I Agree With the Democrats

I have been complaining a lot about Donald Trump.  He has been worse than I expected, especially on foreign affairs.  But that doesn’t mean I have any confidence in today’s Democratic Party or want them to win either.

For example, when I see how bad President Trump is doing in Ukraine, I think that all, or at least much, of this could have been avoided if Joe Biden had delivered more weapons sooner and had allowed them be fully used, instead of limiting how Ukraine could use them.

But more importantly, there is the Democratic Party itself.  Until the night of the Biden-Trump debate in June of last year, all of the leading Democrats, except that one guy from North Dakota, told us President Biden was in fine shape, fully capable of doing his job, and fully capable of doing it for four more years.  And then we saw the debate, and we realized that wasn’t true.  President Biden wasn’t up to doing the job for four more years.  We couldn’t even tell if he was up to doing his job until January.

Trump Is an Embarrassment on Ukraine – And Potentially Dangerous Beyond That

I don’t know what Donald Trump is doing with respect to Ukraine.  This afternoon, in the United Nations General Assembly, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Nicaragua against a resolution condemning Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and supporting Ukraine's territorial integrity.

Then, this evening, the United States sided with Russia to get the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution that called for an end to the war in Ukraine but without any criticism of Russia for starting the war.

Is Trump Trying To Do a “Reverse Nixon” With Putin?

In trying to explain why Donald Trump is sudden ripping on Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and siding with Vladimir Putin and Russia, some people are asking whether President Trump and his people might be trying to do a “reverse Nixon”, i.e., trying to separate Russia and China, though in this case befriending Russia, as opposed to China as Richard Nixon did.

The Wall Street Journal‘s chief foreign correspondent, Yaroslav Trofimov, does an excellent job here of explaining why the two situations, Russia and Ukraine today as opposed to the Soviet Union and China back then, are very different.  There is no need for me to repeat what he says, though I do note there is another article, also in yesterday’s Journal, that talks about the increasing number of joint military exercises between Russia and China.  Which is different than the late 1960s/early 1970s, when the only joint military exercise the Soviets and the Chinese held was a border war between each other in 1969.

The Problems With Trump: #3 – Ukraine

With Donald Trump calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator, I worry President Trump will negotiate a deal with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine as bad as the deal he negotiated with the Taliban on Afghanistan in 2020.  While Joe Biden was the President who followed through on the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was then-President Trump who negotiated the surrender agreement in the first place.

Is President Trump going to do the same thing in Ukraine?  I am increasingly worried that he might.  It he does, the questions then will be: (i) to what extent can Ukraine can continue to fight if the United States abandons them; and (ii) whether “Europe” will (and actually can) offer enough support to allow Ukraine to effectively continue to fight.

The Problems With Trump: #2 – Foreign Policy

Parts of Donald Trump’s foreign policy are unclear; other parts seem to be in conflict with each other.  Sometimes he seems mainly focused on eliminating our trade deficit; he appears to think we are losing (and for President Trump, “losing” is never good) when countries sell more stuff to us than they buy from us.¹  Other times he complains that the US is being taken advantage of when we spend more on defense than countries we are helping to protect spend on themselves.

Also, a thread goes through the thinking of many of President Trump’s appointees that we can’t afford to deal with all of the problems in the world.  We have to focus on our most important problems.  In this regard and to these appointees, China is our main adversary, so we have focus on them and let other countries deal with other problems.  For example, Europe should deal with Ukraine.² 

The Problems With Trump: #1 – The Economy

I left on a two-week vacation on January 23.  It was hard to miss what President Trump was doing even while gone, and since we’ve been back, it’s been impossible – even with pitchers and catchers reporting.  So, I will be posting a few thoughts on Trump 2.0 in the next couple of weeks.  First, the economy.

Donald Trump got elected, in part, because some voters thought Joe Biden and the Democrats weren’t doing a good job on the economy.  The question is whether President Trump is going to do any better.  Which brings up one of my favorite quotes about the role of government and the economy.  It’s from Sir Bill English, then Finance Minister of New Zealand.  In 2014, he said: “Governments need to create an environment of stability and good incentives for [businesses] to grow the economy.  Businesses need confidence the rules will not shift and the Government is not one of the risks they have to manage.”