Today at 8:28 am, Dumb Don bragged on Twitter about how he keeps his administration alive: he rides the Obama Boom. For once Don is right. The Obama Boom is the ONLY thing keeping Don’s fast-failing, three-party Trumpista Coalition alive.
There is no doubt, of course, that Obama was one of the all-time greats among U.S. presidents. His accomplishments continue to astonish. (See Publius on Obama The Great.) But even the Obama Boom must end. What then?
The three-party Trumpista Coalition limped into power in 2016, losing six House seats and two in the Senate and giving Dumb Don the Electoral College by a miserly 75,000 votes after he lost the popular vote by three million.
To everyone’s utter astonishment, the three-party Trumpista Coalition did not iron out a common policy that would enable it to legislate effectively. (See Publius on Our Four Party System.) The Trumpistas running the coalition in the House and Senate, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, did just about the stupidest thing in the history of democracies. Without a coalition policy to manage their legislative agenda, they tried to force through a money bill—healthcare—which failed exactly as their numbers told them that it would. Several times.
Worse, this money bill did not fail because of opposition from the Democrats. It failed because Trump’s coalition fell apart. Repeatedly. All the opposition was inside the Trumpista Coalition. The Demos just showed up and voted with whoever in the Trumpista Coalition abandoned Trump. Not exactly hard duty.
In most democracies, failure on a money bill means that Trump must dissolve both houses and “go to the country” in a snap election. Let the people decide.
Here, by contrast, we are stuck with Trump’s failed coalition until at least the fall of 2018. (See Publius on Our Constitutional Crisis.)
This is the problem. The Obama Boom is ending. U.S. auto sales more than doubled from 9.05 million a month when Obama took office, racing up to a record 18.43 million when he left. But, in a nation-wide vote of non-confidence in the three-party Trumpista Coalition, U.S. car sales started to fall immediately on Trump’s inauguration and are well into a half-year downturn. In 2017, car sales are off more than 10%, telling us that a strong economic reversal is underway.
So, after nearly nine years, the long Obama Boom is ending. With nothing left to ride, what happens to the Trumpistas now?
Don studied economics—well, he claims to have studied economics—at the University of Pennsylvania. So, he is supposed to understand leading and lagging economic indicators and what they tell him about how long he can continue to ride the Obama Boom.
Sadly, Publius has published a year and a half’s worth of evidence that Don Trump cannot possibly have sat an exam, even a test, at Penn. Asserting that Don studied economics at Penn is an alternative fact in a fake history. Penn has serious forensic work to do.
As the Obama Boom ends in the next few months, expect the Dumb Dude to go ballistic. On North Korea. With no Obama Boom to ride, a Korean War is the only thing that can save his self-image.
Have a lovely summer.