What actions has Trump taken to specifically hurt / help America

Great Debates
1

With all the hype Trump gets (both positive and negative, depending on your political affiliation), it’s sometimes hard to separate his actual political actions from his rhetoric and over the top personality.

And in the past couple of years since he’s been elected, we a) haven’t gone to war b) the economy appears to not have collapsed and c) as far as I can tell, life for most people continues to go on as it always has.

So other than intangibles like appearing “disagreeable” to certain people, are there any specific laws or executive orders Trump has signed that has significantly impacted America (for good or ill)?

By “significant”, I mean actually having a real impact on a lot of people. Like Obamacare or going to war with Iraq. I don’t consider his Mexico Wall to have a "big impact, given it costs about as much as 1 to 5 Tappen Zee Bridge replacement projects (with about the same impact on commute times). Nor do I care about Trump signing some bill to create 500 jobs in a single factory.

FWIW, I’m less interested in whether it’s been a negative or positive impact and more interested in the size of the impact.

2

Realistically, the answer depends on how realistic an answer you want.

Most people, for example, would tell you that Brexit will cause the UK to implode and keel over, providing the next film location for Kurt Russell’s “Escape From…” outing. That is, realistically speaking, silly.

Moldova doesn’t have a membership in the EU nor with anyone. You know what the people there all do? They go to work every day, eat food a few times a day, have sex occasionally, and raise their families. They’re probably all mostly happy and satisfied with life. (Granted, I’ve never been there and know nothing about the country.)

There was a thread some time back where someone was asking about the population of the world through history and how China always seemed to have a lot of people. It’s just a very fertile area and rice is a good food source. And, consequently, China has dominated Southeast Asia for all of history. Sheer bulk numbers of people matters a lot when it comes to a lot of things:

  1. Being able to beat others in a war.
  2. Being able to invent new technologies.
  3. Being able to demand good prices and getting it.
  4. Being able to just make a whole bunch of shit in bulk.

The Chinese are and always have been dominant in Southeast Asia…but at the same time, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people of China are happier or more satisfied in life than the Moldovans.

Costa Rica, as example, is just some country. They don’t dominate jack doodle (no offense). Their human development index is 63 out of 189 - not very good. But they’re happier than Americans, Chinese, Moldova, and everyone in the UK. Dominance, technical innovation, etc. are different things from happiness.

Brexit, in practical effect, just turns the UK from being part of a larger body that is able to assert dominance, form better technologies, get the best deals, make shit in bulk, etc. to just being “some country”. But at the moment, they still have all of the technologies still, they still have all the money, many of the connections, etc. Mostly, they just lose membership in a group with a sheer raw number of people. Over time - maybe decades, maybe centuries - that is far more likely to see them ending up backwards and rural, undeveloped and superstitious. But, they’ll still all just be going to work every day, eating food, and making babies. They might be very happy.

It’s a slow process, though.

If the US decides to go the same way and cut itself off from the world, become self-sufficient, rely on only its own populace…again, in a sense, nothing cataclysmic happens. And there’s no reason to expect that anything will go immediately horrible.

General Motors, for example, used to be 30% of the US GDP or workforce or something (I forget the exact metric). That’s a whole lot of moolah and might. From that peak, it took them 50 years to finally go bankrupt due to forming bad deals with their employees, failing to innovate, letting their sub-businesses all compete with each other for no reason, etc.

The Roman Republic, from the time it stopped being a Republic to the time where it split into two, took about 300 years. The Republican system was better than the Imperial. Emperors are strong and able to act quickly, but the wrong guy can really set things back and it’s hard to always find the right guy. Even the right guy can sometimes make the wrong choice, and there’s no one able to check him.

It can take a long time for bad ideas to reveal themselves. Donald Trump is probably not our bad idea. We started to go downhill in the early 70s and Trump is just our Julius Nepos - some idiot who happened to fall into the job, because we allowed things to degrade that far.

While it is true that technology and financial might don’t intrinsically make people happier in life, it is correlated. The human development index is correlated to the human happiness index. It’s not 1:1 but it’s better to be in a modern, developed nation than one which isn’t, on average. If you want your children and your grandchildren to be happy, it’s better if we’re on a path that’s aimed at financial prosperity, not ruralism, and that means staying connected to the world, commanding a larger number of workers, having trade deals with everyone, etc.

Dominance doesn’t make people happier either…so long as no one is dominating them. And, for me at least, that’s the bigger issue.

If I had to choose a town to live in, I would want to live in a nice, peaceful place where I could trust everyone around me and I had freedom to live the way I wanted to live. I wouldn’t want to live in a town with Ken McElroy and always be worrying that I’d encounter him one day, at a grocery store, when he was in a bad mood and wanted to make someone dance.

For better or worse, the major force on our planet, to make sure that the aim of all countries is to stay inside their own borders and try to make their citizens happy and content in life, is the United States. We have been able to create and maintain that position for a half century, and it’s made it so that the human development index for the whole world - not just America - has gone up every year. We organized everything to kill off measles. We’re pushing countries to not consider women and wives to be property. We’re making the world a better and (on average) happier place for most of the rest of the human race.

China wouldn’t.

If the US steps down from our position, the only other game in town to try and continue pushing the world towards improved human rights, improved lawfullness, safety of travel, safety of borders, etc. would be the EU - and they’re just not structured to be able to take on that sort of role and there’s a few people out there working to make sure that it stays that way - e.g., Russia, China, and probably some others, too.

One of the emblems of the United States is a bundle of arrows. Together we are strong, apart we are weak.

One of the core strategies through all of military history is to divide and conquer.

Brexit is awesome-sauce for anyone out there in the world who is annoyed that they have to live in a world that is moving towards peace, technological development, cooperation, and lawfulness. The end of NATO, the throwing up of tariffs, the imposition of sanctions against all countries left and right… Juicy juicy goodness.

The more the world is divided and “self-sufficient” the less you have to be an 800 pound gorilla to get your way. Maybe you just have to be a 400 pound gorilla, or 300 pounds.

If the US turns away from the world and stops leading the way to the future, maybe we’ll be left alone and be allowed to peacefully meander into ruralism. But we could also end up as the 400 pound gorilla’s bitch, taking whatever it feels like dishing out on us.

I mean we may all feel a little bit bad that, as English speakers, we don’t really have to learn a second language in order to get around in the world. But learning Chinese is worse, and I would bet you anything that the number of people studying English as a second language compared to Chinese as a second language, across the planet, is a ratio that’s swinging hard towards China. All of Trump’s actions have just made that switch faster.

I don’t resent the Chinese, but Chinese politics is not based on humanistic philosophy, it’s just a system that’s figured out how to balance robber-baronism with bread-and-circus rule. They keep the people happy and improve the quality of life in the country, but there’s nothing benevolent about that, and their goals abroad don’t extend the “improve the quality of life” goal past their borders.

And this isn’t to say that Trump’s agenda isn’t bad in the short term, either. But, fairly likely, between people refusing to do what he says, the Senate stopping him, and various other mechanisms, he simply hasn’t had the chance to chuck everything into the toilet yet. As said, it took 50 years to tank GM, just because they started from such a high point. It took a year for Trump to flatline the stock market. He’s all set to send it going downhill if he enacts his emergency tariff on Mexico on Monday.

And, lest anyone complain that my post is largely related to International Affairs, I will note that the job of the Federal Government is International Affairs. If y’all are wanting it to run Domestic Affairs, then you should read the Constitution again. The States run things domestically. The Federal government represents us abroad. If Trump doesn’t like foreign affairs, he shouldn’t have run for the job. You might as well compete in an ass kicking contest when you’re a person who hates violence.

So that’s the first thing that he has done, which is bad.

3

For the second thing, I would point to some studies from a few decades ago (no link, but feel free to look it up if you doubt me) that showed that the American offices of Japanese companies - even when they had an American at the top, locally - tended to be more sexist than fully American companies.

In general, the people at the top of the ladder set the tone for everyone under them. If the boss is a tyrant, his employees are more likely to act like tyrants to those lower in the ladder. If he’s a penny pincher, everyone is going to be a penny pincher. The boss sets the culture.

When the boss is a crook, that sets the culture.

The problem with crooks is that they’re lazy. They’d rather you bribe them to do the work, rather than simply do it out of work ethic or for the sake of their job. But if they can get in and stay in, then bribery is the game, and that slows everything down. You have to negotiate with each level and no one is really very good at the job you’re bribing them to do - they’re just some lazy crook who had the right connections.

This sort of culture is what drags the most heavily on most of the economies of the world. Saudi Arabia might have a bunch of raw money, but if the oil ever runs out they go back to being a bunch of goat farmers, running from one oasis to the next, in a matter of weeks. They just haven’t established a culture of inventiveness, of hard work, of general honesty, etc. Where you are positioned, in much of the country’s workforce, is based on who you know and what your family has done for them, not how your qualifications line up and how well you interview.

Right now, it’s very likely that Donald Trump is packing the government full of useless assholes that are completely incompetent at their job. And useless assholes are damn hard to root out of a giant hierarchy. They’re going to stay there, bogging down the system for decades. You might hate regulations, and Donald Trump may say that he hates them too, but once the next President comes in and adds a few dozen, there’s going to be a few Trump hires that are going to be loving them regulations and holding out their palms to every American corporation that needs a stamp on a piece of a paper.

We don’t all work for the government, but our government will be worse for decades, because of Donald Trump, and it will make it harder to keep our GDP growing, because its been riddled with people who are incompetent, lazy, and criminal.

So that’s the second thing that he has done.

4

When you’re the President, your rhetoric is itself an action.

5

What do you consider a “real impact”? Change tends to be a gradual process. The economy hasn’t collapsed overnight, but job growth has fallen to the lowest level in nine years, the manufacturing sector is actually laying off people, farmers are getting bailed out again (although big agribusiness is taking the largest slice of that), stock market volatility has greatly increased and the deficit has massively ballooned. Some of that is affecting people now, some will affect people later as the economy continues to slow, and some will affect people indirectly. And if the US continues the trend toward isolationism - a policy that traditionally results in economic stagnation - it will eventually affect everyone.

In other areas, Trump’s anti-immigrant policies likewise have affected a lot of people - not just the treatment of asylum seekers at the border or the increasingly draconian (and illegal) tactics by ICE, but also the closing off of many avenues for legal immigration by these people, trying to deport the DREAMERS, barring immigrants serving in the US military from gaining citizenship status that way (as was previously done) and his suspiciously selective Muslim ban. That’s caused a lot of harm to individual people as well.

His administration’s trashing of environmental policies and safety regulations has harmed people - mine safety regulations were cut and mine accident deaths went up, and that recent E.coli outbreak was due to similar cuts to inspections on farm irrigation systems - not to mention the increase in water and air pollution (and not even getting into the climate change issue).

I mean, Trump hasn’t yet shot anyone on Fifth Avenue (although he’s actively encouraged others to commit violence) so one can always quibble over what he’s really “done”. That said, if you want a concrete example, consider what he’s done - or specifically not done - with regard to Puerto Rico following the hurricane damage, and tell me that isn’t harming people.

6

This one might have been a no-win, either way, but I’d like to mention something that’s not a “he did this” but instead is a “he didn’t do this”.

The world has been changing. Technology is getting to a point where things are going to start changing radically, and it has the potentially to vastly fuck the living hell out of everything, and I mean a lot more than just the Internet causing social divisiveness. Neo-fascist government (meaning, government that is nationalistic, follows single-party rule, and subjugates the corporations to the will of the government) has found a way to succeed and compete in the modern world, and they simply have more people than us. Criminal enterprise has discovered that they can take over a government, build some nukes, and they’re completely immune from law enforcement or military action by any other nation in the world.

And the US is still debating abortion, whether to lower taxes or raise the deficit, and (in recent history) spending real Congressional time investigating baseball. 99% of our politics has been locked in to such tightly defined bounds that it’s no longer politics, it’s football. Here’s the outside bounds of the field, here’s the 10 meter line, here’s how you handle a foul. The goal today is the same as the goal yesterday, get abortion 5 meters downfield. We’ll play again next Sunday.

We’re not even handling the real issues of the day, we’re spending all of our time quibbling over issues decided 40 years ago, let alone looking at the future.

And while it may be that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be dealing with the future or even - for the most part - the issues of today, she’d be doing at least a tiny amount of worrying about the issues of today.

Donald Trump loves the football field. He loves that he can tell everyone that he’s all in on abortion, and immediately get all the fans to love him. Easy money. He doesn’t have to do crap, just spout off some nonsense, and he’s king for life.

There’s real things happening in the world - not just Trump’s own stupid issues that he’s created - and those aren’t being dealt with. Puerto Rico is being left to molder. No one’s actually working on anything like a solution to our health care spending. No one’s doing crap about the opium epidemic. It’s all just sitting there with no one looking at it.

And again (unless you’re Puerto Rican) that might not affect us today and now, but the longer the goes the more it will build up and the more it will hurt.

Of the two candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Trump was the one who came in saying that he would clear up the swamp. Part of that promise - cleaning up the swamp - is, I would think, to allow the government to act rationally and according to expert advice, thinking ahead, and moving quickly, rather than being slow and only moving in the direction of whoever slips them some money under the table.

Even if neither of them would have done anything to repair Washington, to make it able to function again, not just play political football, Trump is the one who promised that he would. Of the two, he takes the blame, because Clinton at least didn’t promise to fix the problem.

7

The most scary thing that Donald Trump has done is to prove that it can happen here. And the fact that no one noticed is even scarier.

Now, Trump is not a true believer. He doesn’t hate Mexicans or really even care about illegal immigrants or anything else. His own businesses were still employing illegal immigrants until this year - firing them just after he lost the wall financing issue against Nancy Pelosi. Probably, Pelosi was going to invite a few of his illegal workers to a televised congressional inquiry and that made him buckle - the timing of the firings was damn suspicious.

Hitler, presumably, actually hated Jews and wanted them dead. Trump does not - not Jews, not Mexicans, not anyone. I have no fear that Trump is going to flip over and start ordering death squads to round people up. He’s an asshole, but he’s also too much of a wimp to go in that deep. He can’t even fire people to their face.

But, he told everyone that Hondurans were sneaking terrorists into the country. FOX news backed him, the Republicans in Congress backed him, the people believed it, and 11 people were murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue by a man who got wrapped up in the frenzy that Democratic agents were helping to move terrorists into our nation, over the Mexican border.

It was false and patently stupid, but a lot of people are stupid and if the President and the news and your elected representative are all endorsing a lie, most people are liable to fall for it.

Like I said, Trump isn’t a murderer. He doesn’t have the personality to go that far, himself. And he doesn’t have the popularity, nationally, to achieve that sort of thing even if he wanted to.

But he’s shown that the recipe works. He not only kept the Senate, they won more seats. Fear works.

It can happen here, and there’s some sick bastard out there who will have noticed it. Most didn’t, but I’m sure that I’m not the only one who saw the gap in the armor. There’s nothing about our country that makes us immune to the Great Lie, and that fact was flashed out into the sky for anyone to see. The Great Lie works.

8

To me, most of the big things he’s done have been geo-political. Almost all of them have been of the negative impact variety as well. You have the Iran nuclear deal taken out as he tries to force Iran to do a new deal with him. This has had a major impact on how the US is viewed, on further straining ties with our allies wrt trade, and inflamed the region. This segue into the next one…his NATO policies and EU sanctions. To put it simply, he’s straining our relationships with our traditional allies, and at a time when we need to bolster them, not put them in question. Which leads to the next one…North Korea. He has basically inflamed that entire situation. Now, this might be one you could list in the positive category, as, IMHO anyway, what we were doing before wasn’t working. And his ability to play North Korea and China off each other (we’ll get to the China sanctions soon) has actually worked fairly well. But…at the same time he’s pushing this stuff he’s straining our economic and military alliances with our allies and throwing everything into chaos. It’s stupid, IMHO, to try and do everything at once and push everyone’s buttons, friend, foe and neutral at the same time. Then we have China. This is, again, one I could see putting in the positive column…we’ve needed, for years now, to bring this issue to a head. I think he’s doing it for all the wrong reasons, but I think it needed to be done. Just not with everything else. China should be something we are doing by itself and with the full support of our allies. We SHOULD be using this to strengthen our ties with our allies, both military and economic, as well as forging new ties with neutral countries (TPP anyone?) and broadening our trade relations to mitigate the impact on us while maximizing it on China. But we aren’t. Then you have Mexico and his seeming obsession with Mexican immigrants pouring into the US, his wall, and his idiotic attempt to use trade and sanctions as the only hammer in the tool kit. He’s got even his own nominal allies in Congress saying they won’t support him on this, because it’s fucking stupid, especially in light of the fact that Mexico IS trying to stop the mass migration of folks fleeing the disintegration of various countries, especially Venezuela, in the region. This issue isn’t Mexico’s fault…it’s not specifically America’s fault either, but the US is the one that could do something about this by rallying support in the region, giving aid and basically helping those countries affected. Hell, we COULD be using this as a way to move US manufacturing to those areas as well as business investment that would actually be a win/win for everyone (as opposed to win/win with Chinese characteristics :p).

To cut this short, Trump is like a bull in a china shop, and a particularly stupid and stubborn one at that. Not everything he is doing is wrong, but the way he’s doing it is stupid and ham fisted. He’s also trying to do too much and with stupid timing on most of it. We won’t even get into his attempt to force the market back to coal, or the social conservative stuff he’s spewed out, how he’s hurt our image and other less tangible but real negatives he’s brought to the table.

9

The biggest damage Trump has done is to the honor and prestige of the U.S. Many people around the world who looked up to the United States as a bastion of liberty, science, safety, etc. no longer do. This may have dreadful consequences in the long term.

Major political changes DO have consequences on the economy. Britain is likely to fall into recession because of Brexit. British people are already less well-off financially because of Brexit.

The Trump tax cuts gave a big short-term boost to the economy. (There is a reason why responsible leaders wouldn’t have cut taxes on the rich so dramatically: Google “Is it better to eat protein or sugar?”) Some tariffs may also offer a short-term boost. It is unforutnate that such short-term effects may play an over-sized role in the coming elections.

I agree with much that Sage Rat wrote.

I saw this follow-the-boss tendency when I worked in Silicon Valley. The company led by hard-nosed workaholics was filled with hard-nosed workaholics. The company led by a flamboyant asshole was full of flamboyant assholes. The company led by academics was full of academic types.

So yes, the character of the U.S. government and its employees is undergoing unfortunate changes that may be hard to undo.

10

This is not how government employment works since civil service reform after President Garfield was shot by a disappointed office seeker. There are two type of government workers, political and career. Political workers are the top rungs of an agency and career workers are everyone else. Political workers are appointed by the president run the agencies according to his will. Once the president is gone the political appointees are replaced by the next president’s. The career workers are not affected by who is president.

11

You are correct, but it’s worth noting that a large number of the most qualified and competent career workers (including specialists) have left in frustration due to the appointment of blatantly incompetent (and often corrupt) people at the top who have ignored their advice. This loss will have long-term consequences unless a future president can lure back them or others of similar quality - and in the case of the Department of Energy, which looks after things like nuclear material and waste, the long-term result could literally be deadly.

12

Trump is changing the political culture of the country. He is easily one of the most corrupt presidents in the history of the country, if not the most corrupt. He is making corruption and polarization into a political norm. It’s something we simply shrug off and accept, kinda like mass shootings. It’s not what Trump is doing; it’s what Americans aren’t doing. We’re not opposing him. We’re accepting our country’s decadence.

13

But, as said, the President sets the culture. People have a way of modifying their behavior to match the head honcho. It’s not just a matter that they hire people like them, the pre-existing workers will change to match.

The President is cashing in on his office? Well hell, I may as well, too!

To a large extent that will go away when Trump goes away. But there will have been choices made by people who should have known better, during that period, that will continue to haunt us for decades.

14

Also true (and worth pointing out).

15

Sage Rat, rarely have I seen so many facile arguments piled up in a thread. I don’t even know where to begin… other than to point out perhaps the silliest stream of consciousness, along the lines of “it doesn’t really matter if anyone is prosperous or employed, people can still be happy.”

I suggest you tighten up the verbosity and just say, “If Trump fucks things up, let the people eat cake.”

16

My guess would be that most of those leaving are those near retirement age at a high enough pay scale where they will be comfortable. Most people that describes are very competent at politics and self advancement and any competence at achieving things the public is interested in would be coincidental. For most agencies in government shake ups at the top are good things.

17

I think Trump is a racist- just a rather mild sort that simply thinks he, and thus white people- are better than everyone else.

IIRC, Hitler was pretty well run of the mill anti-semitic for Germany at that time and place, but he was a “genius” that saw he could harness that hate and fear and of course the “why did we lose the war?” issue so he could blame them.

Yep, the Big Lie works well.

best thing Trump did? Gorsuch. Worst thing? Kavenaugh.

18

What I’m seeing is a huge drain of early- to mid-career professionals, mostly people in their 30s and 40s. These are the ones who are still young enough to feel comfortable switching to a different retirement system/plan. The ones who are nearing retirement mostly think they HAVE to stay until they do retire, because job opportunities dwindle once you’re past 50. Long-term, this means a hollowing-out of the professional cadres at all of the various agencies, because once the senior staff do retire, who will replace them?

19

Nope. The Civil Service chugs on, paying little or not attention to the man in the Oval office. Yes, quite a few Presidential appointees will have to be removed, and some of them, like judges- will be tough to eradicate. But most of the lower court judges likely dont even get trumps attentions, some underling brings him a list of suggested appointees, and trump ribber stamps it.

But Kavenaugh is going to be tough to get rid of.

20

The shutdown. I hold Mr. Trump personally responsible for weeks of government shutdown after he refused to endorse the compromise bill.

~Max