Glimmers of a Post-Trump World
Photo by Rob Wicks
Trump 2.0 continually impresses everyone for its craziness. The latest venture into the absurd was Trump’s preemptive pardon of Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar, who had been indicted on charges for accepting bribes from foreign actors.
The pardon is not especially surprising, since Donald Trump finds a corrupt politician as irresistible as he might have found an attractive woman in his younger days. The Trumpian absurdity part of the story is that Cuellar immediately turned around and said that he wants the prosecutors investigated. In Donald Trump’s America the greatest crime is enforcing the law against a Donald Trump ally.
Who knows where Cuellar’s request will end up. Most immediately, he apparently went to Jim Jordan, the head of the House Judiciary Committee with his case. This likely means some serious hyperventilation and screaming, but not much else.
It’s not clear that anyone in the Justice Department will pick up on Cuellar’s insistence that prosecuting him should be a crime and start investigating their colleagues. The refusal of Justice Department lawyers to carry through blatantly political prosecutions has been a source of encouragement. This shows both that they have a bit of a moral compass, and also that they are thinking of a post-Trump world, where a clown show prosecution of a Trump enemy is not something good to have on your resume.
The refusal to prosecute was very public when Trump’s pick for acting United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, could not get any of the career lawyers in the Justice Department to sign off on the prosecutions of former FBI director Jame Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. She had to take up the task herself even though she had never prosecuted a case before. Such refusals are likely playing a role in the Justice Department’s refusal to date to press an antisemitic prosecution of liberal billionaire George Soros or whack job conspiracy indictments of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Reason to Believe
It’s not just Justice Department lawyers who can give us some hope of a post-Trump world where democracy survives. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, recently said that he was refusing to make a contribution to Trump’s ballroom monstrosity because he was concerned how a post-Trump Justice Department might view it.
This comment should be taken very seriously. JP Morgan is by far the largest bank in the country, which Dimon has run for two decades. Also, Mr. Dimon is an astute businessman who clearly puts business above politics. Early in 2024 he gave Trump a pseudo-endorsement when he famously said that he thought the economy would do fine regardless of whether Trump or Biden won. That he is now thinking of a world with a normal Justice Department is huge.
Rats Leaving the Ship
It’s not just Dimon who is thinking about a world beyond Trump. A near recordnumber of Republican members of Congress have announced their retirement. Some, most notably Marjorie Taylor Greene, are not even finishing out their terms.
It’s understandable that many would be unhappy with their jobs. Most of them are not morons. They know they are being asked to repeat inane lies in support of Donald Trump and whatever whack job thing he says or does. That can’t be lots of fun.
On top of this, politicians do understand election results. They see a shift of double-digits away from Republicans in elections across the country. They also see the polls showing Trump’s popularity going through the floor. That does not sound like a good environment to seek re-election even when Trump has gerrymandered districts to favor Republicans.
Collapsing Conspiracy Theories
Trump also has the problem that many of the MAGA team’s guiding lies are coming undone. The most notable one is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Many Trump backers really believed that Donald Trump was the white knight who was going to smash the child trafficking pedophile ring being run by Hillary Clinton and other evil Democrats.
Now that he is sitting in the White House, he is doing everything possible to keep secret the files related to the country’s most notorious child sex trafficker. Trump’s denials of his ties to Epstein are becoming ever more absurd. Only the most extreme cult members can find them credible at this point. Trump was clearly a close friend of Epstein’s and likely partner in at least some of his activities.
And it’s not just the child sex trafficking conspiracy that’s sinking under the weight of reality. Trump’s FBI team managed to finally nail down a suspect in the January 6th Capitol pipe bomb case. (Congrats to them, seriously.)
The top levels of the MAGA cult, including current deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, had been pushing whack job conspiracies about how the pipe bombs were part of an FBI inside job. Now it seems that the suspect was just another January 6thinsurrectionist supporting the stolen election story. The big question now is whether he qualifies for Donald Trump’s blanket pardon of his mob.
The other Trump conspiracy at risk is the story of Jack Smith’s weaponization of the Justice Department. The Republicans are boasting about how they have subpoenaed Smith to testify in secret hearings where they can then publish selected excerpts from his testimony.
Smith has volunteered to testify in public. Republicans are scared to death to let Smith speak in public and let everyone hear about his by the book investigation of Donald Trump’s effort to overthrow the government. For the moment, Smith’s public testimony has not been a major demand from Democrats, but there is always the possibility some members of the party could wake up.
Healthcare and Affordability: Reality Still Matters
Finally, the Trump gang does have to deal with some real-world problems that are not going away. Health insurance premiums are about to rise a lot for tens of millions of people, unless Trump and the Republicans in Congress do a 180 and agree to extend the subsidies for the exchanges under Obamacare.
Wages for millions of workers, especially low-paid ones, are also not keeping pace with inflation. Trump might insist that tariffs don’t affect prices, but they do. We just got new data on import prices for September, showing again that exporters are not eating the tariffs. The labor market has also weakened substantially, with the unemployment rate for disadvantaged groups like Black workers and young people rising sharply.
And even Trump’s big issue, immigration, is not going well for him these days. While most Americans might have been happy to see the pet-eating rapists and murderers sent back to where they came from, it’s clear that violent criminals are a tiny fraction of the people being nabbed by ICE. The overwhelming majority are people who have committed no criminal offense whatsoever or a minor offense like shoplifting.
No one thinks we are safer as a country when they see ununiformed masked men grabbing gardeners and food truck operators off the streets. The hardcore racists might applaud this sort of crackdown on people guilty of not being white, but thankfully, even a majority of Trump voters don’t fall into this category.
Trump’s Caribbean war crimes are also not playing well. Using advanced weaponry to blow up small boats that are thousands of miles from the U.S. does not make sense as a drug interdiction strategy. Killing survivors from the initial strikes makes even less sense. The whole thing becomes even more absurd when Trump issues a pardon to a notorious drug trafficker who the Justice Department spent years investigating and convicting.
MAGA Is Melting Down
It’s too early for big celebrations, but it does look like the wheels are coming off the Trump juggernaut. When the AI bubble bursts, likely taking crypto with it, and Trump’s rich buddies become considerably less rich, the rats will all start fleeing.
But we can’t sit around and wait for the big crash, which could still be some time in coming and likely won’t be all at once. We need to bolster the forces of democracy every way we can. That means supporting defectors, even if they might be awful people, and doing whatever we can to resist. Look forward to seeing everyone at No Kings III.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
New York Times Gets the Story on Prescription Drug Prices Wrong
Photo by Wonderlane
A friend correctly harangued me about this New York Times piece on Donald Trump’s deal on prescription drugs with the United Kingdom. According to the article, the UK has agreed to pay 25 percent more for new drugs than it would otherwise, in exchange for relief from tariffs Trump threatened to impose.
The article includes several assertions that are either misleading or false. First, it told readers:
“President Trump and top officials in his administration have complained that wealthy European countries like Britain pay too little for medicines, forcing the United States to pay what they believe is an unfair share of the costs of drugs [emphasis added]. American consumers ultimately bear some of those costs when they pay health insurance premiums and taxes.”
The New York Times reporters have no idea what President Trump and his top officials actually believe about the fairness of drug prices. They know what they say. That is all the paper should report rather than speculating on thoughts.
As a practical matter, people in the United States will pay over $720 billion this year for drugs that would likely sell in a free market for around $150 billion. The industry spends around $150 billion on research. If European countries paid half of what people in the United States paid, and people in the US did as well, it could easily cover the industry’s research spending. The higher prices in the US go to profits, marketing, and highly paid top executives.
New York Times reporters are apparently prohibited from raising the issue, but we could turn to alternative mechanisms for funding the development of new drugs, such as direct public funding, which we already do the tune of more than $50 billion a year through the NIH and other government agencies. If we tripled or quadrupled this funding, all research could be open-source, and all new drugs could be sold as cheap generics. This would also largely eliminate the incentive to lie about the safety and effectiveness of drugs, which we saw most dramatically with the opioid crisis.
The NYT piece also includes the bizarre assertion:
“Pharmaceutical companies stand to profit from the change. They share Mr. Trump’s view that European countries like Britain are paying too little for medicines.”
This is basically saying that pharmaceutical companies think they should make higher profits. That is surely true, but not exactly news.
The piece also is somewhat misleading when it discusses the industry’s decisions about investing in the UK.
“This year, several major companies have pulled back on investments in Britain, arguing that the country has become a less lucrative place to do business.
“In September, Merck said it would abandon plans to build a new lab in London, which was already under construction. Dave Ricks, chief executive of Eli Lilly, told The Financial Times that ‘Britain was “probably the worst country in Europe ‘ for drug prices, from the perspective of pharmaceutical companies. AstraZeneca has scrapped plans to upgrade a vaccine manufacturing site in Liverpool and a research lab in Cambridge and instead emphasized large investments in the United States.”
There is no direct connection between a country’s desirability as a place to locate a lab and its drug pricing policy. Under numerous treaties, governments are prohibited from showing favorable treatment to their own companies in pharmaceutical pricing. What the NY Times is describing is effectively extortion, where drug companies are using investment decisions to force governments into allowing them to charge higher prices.
There is one other important issue that this piece neglects to mention. The higher prices only apply to new drugs, not ones currently on the market. Donald Trump will be out of office in three years. The UK may reasonably be making a bet that the higher prices on new drugs will not have too much impact on their spending over the next three years, after which point they will have a more normal president in the White House who will not try to interfere with their domestic pricing policy.
As it is, Trump is threatening to raise prices for patients in the United States to increase the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. That position would likely not be very popular here if the UK were to refuse this deal from Trump or a successor.
There would also likely be zero consequence to breaking a deal signed with Donald Trump. Everyone knows Donald Trump doesn’t honor his side of deals, there is zero reason to expect his partners to either.
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