How easy will it be to reverse the damage Trump is doing under this optimistic scenario?

Politics & Elections
1

With what seems to me the likely passage of tax cuts for the wealthy coming up soon, and a long list of other things from how he has handled appointments to federal agencies, his irresponsible tweets, racial politics, etc. I think Trump is doing significant damage* to the nation. Let’s make the following assumptions about the 2018 and 2020 elections which are optimistic but don’t seem totally unreasonable.

  1. The Democrats win the house in 2018 but not the senate.

  2. Democrats keep the house and win the presidency and senate in 2020 with a center left presidential candidate whose politics are closer to Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders.

Under this scenario, will any of the things Trump is doing likely be permanent? How difficult would they be to reverse? I’m thinking of the tax bill in particular, but feel free to address any of the other disasters Trump is causing or likely to cause in the next few years.

  • If you happen to think that what Trump is doing is good for the country and that the above scenario is a bad thing, feel free to addresbhow likely you think that Trump’s “victories” will be rolled back.
2

I forgot to add one other assumption. Let’s assume the Supreme Court has no additional vacancies in the the next three years and that Gorsuch remains his only SCOTUS pick.

3

Trump hasn’t done anything yet. Are you assuming a 60+ majority for progressives in the Senate? Not Dems, progressives. Otherwise they aren’t going to raise taxes.

Regards,
Shodan

4

Undoing things is a lot harder than people think. Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay. Trump has both sides of Congress and still hasn’t managed to repeal Obamacare. I doubt undoing whatever Trump does is going to turn out to be any easier.

5

Clinton raised taxes in 1993 with 50 votes in the senate. Using reconciliation, taxes can be raised.

As to op, the real damage Trump is doing is social and cultural. The world has lost a ton of respect for us and knows we are too dysfunctional to be trusted to sign and uphold treaties or lead on major problems. The world knew we were fucked up, stupid people before this but electing Trump really cemented how deranged America is. The world is going to turn more and more to China and Europe to lead. Other nations won’t trust us to be reliable, mature or intelligent over the long haul.

Plus Trump opens the door to other white nationalist authoritarian politicians, who in the future may not be severely incompetent and mentally ill the way Trump is. He is the Rosa parks of scum, his behavior makes it easier for other people to do the same thing. We’re already seeing more open neo nazis and white nationalist.

6

The biggest problem I see is that the Pubbies, after obstructing Obama’s judicial appointments the last few years of his term, are now appointing scads of unqualified young right-wing extremists to Federal judiciary positions. That will be hard to undo. I’ve argued in other threads that court-packing might not be as frowned upon in today’s highly partisan environment as it was in 1937; failing that, the Dems would need to get a two-thirds majority in the Senate at some point to impeach them all. Of course, it goes without saying that if the Dems do take the Senate next year, all judicial confirmations should stop immediately.

7

I agree that this is going to be the most lasting legacy of the Trump administration. We can say goodbye to civil rights, separation of church and state, and consumer and environmental protection for a generation. Read more here

8

Death is irreversible. So everyone who dies as a result of cutbacks to Obamacare, Medicaid, safety regulations isn’t coming back.

9

There are about ~900 federal judges, of them about 329 were appointed by Obama. That should keep the court going our way for a while assuming the gop doesn’t find a way to create new judges positions (can they do that without the filibuster)? If the dems win the senate in 2018 (unlikely but still) all judge nominations need to stop.

Keep in mind I think judges usually serve 15-30 years, so there are possibly still a bunch of bill Clinton’s judges on the bench.I’d assume most of Reagan and Bush sr judges are gone now. There are obviously outliers but I’d guess most are dead or retired now.

The fact that there are so many Clinton and Obama judges is probably in part why the judiciary keeps hamstringing Trump.

10

This.

I would add also that the damage done to our State Department is a serious, serious wound we’ve suffered by Trump, from which it will be very difficult to recover. Roughly 2,000 State Department employees have been forced out since Trump took office. They take with them literally decades of hard-won experience and skills learned in the field about the art of diplomacy. This alone is going to leave us at a severe disadvantage on the world stage for a very long time.

11

Guantanamo and ObamaCare, while unpalatable to many, are still basically in the range of “things required by the reality we live in to exist”. Getting rid of things that fall into that bucket is sort of like fighting gravity. It’s really hard to do to begin with, and even if you succeed, everything is going to go right back to there in the end anyways. The only real hope that you have is to find a betterlocal (or hopefully global) optimum to replace it with.

These were solutions that were found as the least-horrible compromise to a problem that had to be dealt with, by a panel of experts.

Most of the things that Trump wants, like his wall, are the dumbass desires of a single man, in opposition to basically everyone who knows anything. They serve no purpose, aren’t the product of any reasoning, and (if undertaken at all) probably won’t be executed with much care (because they’ll give him just enough budget to build the thing as they can possibly get away with, and the people building it will slack while doing so, because they’ll know that it’s all pointless labor anyways).

He can’t actually leave the Paris Accord, so if we get a Democratic president in 3 years, that’ll be quick to hook back up. (Though, if a Republican comes in, that will become a rather painful one where the person will probably recognize that we should be in it, but because of the beliefs of the electorate, he might need to continue backing out of the agreement. The Paris Accord doesn’t quite fall into the heading of “things required by the reality we live in to exist”, and things that a single man can fully control aren’t governed by that rule.)

Trump did cost us the TPP, and that’s probably never coming back. But we also never started it.

I think that he’s been prevented from taking us out of NAFTA by saner heads. That would be hard to get back, but (at least as of yet) it doesn’t seem to be at risk.

Tillerson has currently made the State Department into a mess, and that could take some time to correct. But I think that the issue was that he appointed someone to review and make changes, while he himself focused on being lead ambassador to the world and trying to babysit Trump, just to finally be called back in for a review when the person he’d left in charge still didn’t have a great plan, and ultimately didn’t have the power to make the changes that are needed, because it would need to be Tillerson, himself, that would have to go to Congress and commission the requisite legislation. And while that’s unfortunate, and has caused some of the better staff to leave, it’s worth remembering that overall the goal was to streamline the department, and success at that could set it up for better future gains, even if there’s a temporary loss at the moment. (With Trump as President, it may well be that there’s no temporary loss because of Tillerson anyways. Our diplomacy was going to be in ass-nowhereland no matter what.)

Overall, Trump hasn’t yet changed much. Yanking NAFTA may be the only big thing that he could do on his own that would be hard to repair in a reasonable amount of time. Most of the things he wants to do will probably be trivially easy to undo, if he ever even gets a chance to do them.

12

The underlying reason for the destruction of the state department is the determination of this administration to destroy political order and the institutions that support it. The dismantling of the Department of State is one example of this, but it’s only the beginning. NATO, too, will probably fall in time, as Trump sees no value in global relationships and seems to take pleasure in trolling foreign heads of state. After the Dept of State and NATO, maybe the CIA and NSA are next. Maybe intelligence gathering is turned over to private enterprises that he can manipulate.

Sure, all of these predictions seem outrageously hyperbolic, but so does firing the head of the FBI in the middle of an investigation. So does retweeting inflammatory and debunked anti-Muslim videos. So does making up a gigantic lie that the previous president committed a felony in bugging his phones. So does using the power of the presidency to block a media merger in an attempt to silence a news gathering organization. So does using the FCC licensing power to threaten another news gathering organization. Any of these would represent a serious breach for any of the past presidents, yet we’re by now used to daily outrage. Our standards for democracy have been severely lowered and they keep getting lower. As I mentioned in another thread, we’re disoriented. Like passengers in a plane that’s beginning to roll violently from left to right, we know that this is not normal and that something’s terribly wrong, but our brains are trying to process what’s happening and how serious it is.

13

Addendum to my previous post, but one thought that I just had is that there could be one area where Trump’s impact could linger for quite some time: Corruption

There’s a thing with any sort of hierarchy where the norms and ethics of the leaders tends to trickle down and affect the thinking of those below them (I believe). This happens through the leader hiring people who tend to think in a similar fashion, through people seeing the leader getting away with bad things and figuring that they can do it too, and through your average person’s simple desire to conform. Ultimately, it means that you have a good opportunity for four years (or more!) for people to get used to breaking all of the various ethics norms and policies that are usually in place. Trump didn’t divorce from his business interests, why should you step away from that financial commitment that you had back at Goldman Sachs? Trump didn’t mind bringing in his family members directly into a position of authority, why shouldn’t you? Trump seems to be selling out the country for material gain, so I may as well do that too!

And that’s all the sort of stuff where, once you start, it’s hard to stop what you’re doing even if the culture shifts back. Once you’ve started taking bribes from foreign officials, you’re already on the hook. The crime doesn’t disappear all of a sudden, so you may as well keep doing it. And if the head of that department is doing that sort of thing, then all of his employees will keep doing it.

With cabinet level appointments, those guys will all be kicked to the curb in three years. But most of the people below them are still going to be there. If they all start getting into shenanigans because of lax oversight, disregard for ethics violations, and norms violations, then that’s a hard job to go in and change the culture back to something positive. Most likely, you will need to go in and start charging people with crimes, not just firing them, and that’s a problem in and of itself since morale is going to go to hell either way.

It took probably 7-12 years to change the FBI from what Hoover set it up as, from being a domestic espionage outfit to something that was real good at basic law-and-order. (It looks like this process was started under Clarence Kelley [73-78] and wrapped up sometime during the administration of William Webster [78-87].)

Now, granted, Trump won’t have nearly the power over the Executive branch in his 4 years that Hoover had over the FBI, as its quasi-creator and ultimate leader for 48 years, but I would still expect that he’s going to plant a few bad eggs in the Executive branch that will lie hidden like mines for years and decades, until one day we find out that X person who was hired in as Trump’s personal coffee boy and has now become the Secretary of State, has sold the crown jewels to our ultimate nemesis, Brazil.

14

As a side note, I’d like to make the observation that a lasting legacy of the past 8 years (not just the Trump debacle) is the politicization of institutions that we used to think of as non-political…like the judiciary. The press. The NFL, for chrissake. Everything is either red or blue.

15

I think it started under Bill Clinton. I’m not sure. But ever since Bill Clinton, both sides have wanted the president on the other side to go to prison.

I wasn’t politically aware under Reagan or Bush Sr, but I’m assuming they had some bipartisanship and institutions were left non partisan.

Maybe it’s also the 24 hour news cycle.

16

During the Obama Presidency, everyone still wanted Clinton in prison. Obama, himself, everyone was fine with (yes, yes, I’m sure that there’s some conspiracy theory or another that’s believed by a few people, in regards to Obama, that would be criminal, but the largest conspiracy theory was around his country of birth, which is not a locking-up offense.)

17

Shouldn’t some of us be past this disorientation? Historians at least have seen dictators before.

It’s not that hard to figure out Trump’s major problem for those of us who studied the GWB administration: DJT’s in over his head and flailing, because he came in ignorant and unprepared. The GOP Congress will let him draw attention while they pursue their own corrupt deals.

There are, admittedly, a lot of different parts to this:
[ul]
[li]The USA’s political system is deliberately designed and refined to keep the populace from removing politicians for alleged corruption or alleged incompetence.[/li][li]The populace has a hatred and distrust of the government itself that would seem in some eyes to justify tying the common people’s ignoramus hands.[/li][li]But there is a history of the government using American lives as cannon fodder in the 1960’s, which explains that hatred and disgust at the government.[/li][li]The chief executive literally got into the White House to avoid prosecution and other legal consequences, being in violation of various federal laws at the time and only a little ahead of Treasury and FBI.[/li][li]That chief executive owes a lot of money to some unnamed ‘Russians’ and hoping that being President will…[/li][LIST]
[li]protect him from the ‘Russians,’ between the high profile and the bodyguards other people are paying for,[/li][li]give him access to new resources with which to placate his creditors at least for a while,[/li][li]when all else fails, give him access to a superpower-level military with which to murder his creditors.[/li][/ul]
[li]Such an ornate gambit makes sense mainly when you understand that DJT does not repay creditors. He won’t just pay them back, apparently because in his diseased brain, an investor is a sucker to swindle.[/li][li]Meanwhile, the GOP are still run by crooks. They may recognize that DJT is dangerous, but there is public money to be embezzled and there are taxes to be cut for their private-sector bosses, clients, and donors.[/li][/LIST]

Huh. I guess it is hard to figure out Trump. Some of us have been working on it for the last year, though. I’m not disoriented anymore. But I guess other people are, and it would be useful to get him out before he starts a war.

I may even know how to remove him. In theory.

18

Unless your “how” includes the word “peach” or “25”, I’m going to vote against.

19

How about paying him to leave?

20

Dems made the Bush tax cuts permanent, so I don’t see why this would be different. In the future the parties will use the resulting deficit as an excuse for why New Deal programs need to be reformed, AKA cut. This has been a multi-generational effort by the business community, so that must be exciting. This is an example of why demsoc policies are a band-aid. They don’t change underlying social relations and can always be reversed once the popular movements that enacted them are beaten down.

American elites have wanted to return Iran to the U.S. orbit since the revolution, and with Cotton and Pompeo maybe it’ll finally happen. If such a clusterfuck of a war goes poorly, like maybe a couple carriers get sunk, or the military gets stuck in the mother of all guerrilla wars while the continental U.S. is wracked by terrorist attacks and cyber warfare, it could deal a major blow to American hegemony.

I wouldn’t expect things to get better after Trump, absent some major pushback by the general population. The elites are brazen and smell blood in the water.