Mr. Baron is an attorney who has represented many institutions involved in the international markets and advised various parts of the federal government on economic issues.
It took the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, to prevent then-President Donald Trump from misusing the country’s nuclear arsenal during the last month of his presidency, presumingly out of anger at losing the 2020 election and to manufacture a crises that would keep him in office. Milley received intelligence that China believed the U.S. was going to attack. He called the head of China’s military and assured him there was no such plan and prevented a crises. There will be no Milley there to stop Trump next time.
Trump had a pattern of making decisions that triggered by anger regarding events unrelated to America’s needs. For example, against advice from nearly all economists, he sprung his 2017 tariffs on our allies out of outrage over Hope Hicks’ testimony regarding Russia’s election interference and the treatment of his son-in-law by his chief of staff. He gave no vetted explanations, had no plan to alert foreign trade partners or Congress. No one at the State, Treasury or Defense Departments were told that a new policy was about to be announced.
The tariff’s results were, predictably, higher cost of imported components, lower profit margins, weaker wage growth and greater job loss. China found companies in Europe, Canada and South America to replace commodity sales from U.S. farmers, including soy beans. And two thousand U.S. pecan growers saw their sales hit hard by Chinese retaliatory tariffs which also cut pork sales by 65%.
To punish Barak Obama for mocking him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ dinner, Trump criticized and abandoned Obama’s multi-country agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear progress. Before abandoning it, Iran was many years away from developing enough fuel for a bomb, now it’s only months away, which gives them the leverage to incite and support terrorists in the Middle East. Without that nuclear threat, the middle East would be a more stable region today.
In another move to erase Obama’s accomplishments, Trump exited the Transpacific Partnership (TPP), an agreement with eleven Pacific rim countries that excluded China and would have eliminated 18,000 tariffs on American exports and established stronger labor standards and environmental protections that would have put state-owned enterprises on a level playing field with U.S. businesses. After Trump pulled out, China stepped in and took our place. The result: Trump gifted one-third of global trade to China. Again, the decision had nothing to do with what was best for America. It was motivated solely by anger from being mocked by Obama.
Trump also tried to overturn Obamacare, which would have lost 23.1 million Americans their health insurance and no one would be covered for preexisting conditions. Because he didn’t have the votes in Congress, he sabotaged it by cancelling a provision that lowered premiums and halved its enrollment period, and more than 2 million people including 700 children lost their insurance.
Add to Trump’s aberrant motivations that he’s less coherent and far from the same Trump who seduced his base in 2016. His narrative has plunged to new depths of absurdity and incoherence. He increasingly slurs or stumbles over his words, signaling cognitive decline and the inability to reason or process reality, leaving him controlled by random anger and self-aggrandizement.
Donald Trump is not a person we want anywhere the nuclear button.
