A Few Random Thoughts on Donald Trump – And Others

• Perhaps the thing that most explains the difference between how Donald Trump views the world, the economy, etc., and how I view them, is that President Trump thinks of pretty much everything as a zero sum game.  In every deal, maybe even in every interaction, there is a winner and a loser; and the amount the winner gains is pretty much equal to what the other side loses.  I don’t believe that.  President Trump does.
• If you are in a fight, it’s nice to have friends.  The United States no longer has as many friends it can count on in a fight – because if they can’t count on us, we can’t count on them.  We used to have lots of those kinds of friends, and we were safer because of it.  Now we don’t, so in order to have even close to the same level of safety, we are going to have to spend more money on defense, and we still may not be as safe.
• To the extent Americans, and some of our leaders, think (and have thought) we have been getting taken advantage of because we were spending a lot of money on defense, which allowed other countries to not spend their fair share on defense, some part of the blame for that rests on those other countries and their leaders for not spending on their own defense.  Here’s looking, for example, at you, Angela Merkel.¹  Even Barack Obama, the U.S. president that Chancellor Merkel liked the most, thought allies were free-riding on America and American defense expenditures.  Germany was happy to rely on America for defense and not spend much itself.  That has not worked out well for either of us.
  Germany was also willing to rely on Vladimir Putin not being Vladimir Putin.  That has not worked out well, either.
• Tariffs are a bad idea.  But then so are other trade barriers.  If we would all get rid of trade barriers, we would all be richer.  Unfortunately, American leaders have not believed in getting rid of trade barriers, i.e., free trade, for a long time.  It is a bipartisan problem.  But President Trump is making it worse.  Wars are bad; so are trade wars.
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  ¹ There are lots of others, too.