Donald Strangelove

PUTTING TRUMP ‘IN CHARGE’ OF THE ECONOMY IS ONE THING. THE NUCLEAR ARSENAL IS QUITE ANOTHER.

When word came down of Anthony Scaramucci’s firing, just 12 days after his hiring, a close acquaintance of mine, an accountant, laughed out loud for fully 15 seconds. I don’t want to engage in systemic profession-ism, but to get an accountant laughing raucously is an impressive achievement in humour. (I say this as an economist, i.e., someone who wanted to be an accountant but failed the charisma test.)

Under Donald Trump, the U.S. government has reached levels of comical ineffectiveness heretofore displayed only by Italy’s, whether under its revolving governments-of-the month in the last century or more recently Silvio Berlusconi, a beta version of Trump. The number of appointees the new president so far has got through Congress is only slightly greater than the number he has now fired. And Congress itself, even more than normally, seems an exercise in opera bouffe futility. For seven years Republican leaders vowed to repeal Obamacare. Dozens of times they passed bills and resolutions to that effect. But with Barack Obama no longer available to veto their output, they can’t pass even one repeal.

Half a year into the new presidency and its major legislative achievements are one Supreme Court appointment and one overwhelming vote for sanctions against Russia, sanctions the new president finds mystifying and unconstitutional but which, because he is so vulnerable on the Putin file, both houses of Congress passed with veto-proof majorities. The opportunities for satire are now so rich and plentiful that, even in the depths of August, Saturday Night Live feels obliged to come back on the air to frack them. “They don’t have to love you so long as they respect you,” is the motto of unlovable politicians everywhere (e.g., Nixon, Thatcher, Mulroney). But when voters neither love nor respect you, but mainly laugh at you, you’re done, or may as well be.

Does it matter if the U.S. government becomes a laughingstock, as for decades Italy’s was? In one respect, maybe not. Last week’s unemployment numbers, a 17-year low, together with the continuing post-election climb in the stock market, which may not be over yet, suggest government has less effect, in this instrumentalist age, than we usually presume. The United States is not Washington (thank goodness!). The American economy sails along oblivious to the follies on the Potomac. Yes, we can all imagine legislative changes that would make both life and the economy better. But a Congress that does nothing at least does no harm. And it may even deserve a little credit. The hundreds of millions of Americans who make up the economy may have no idea what kind of tax cut, if any, Congress and the president will produce. (Congress and the president may have no idea, either.) But they can be reasonably sure taxes won’t be going up, as they would have done had Hillary Clinton won the White House.

That the economy could perform well even as the country’s politicians behaved ignominiously would not have surprised Adam Smith, who wrote in The Wealth of Nations that: “The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things towards improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government and of the greatest errors of administration.”

Italy’s recent history provides confirmation. Despite the hilarity of its politics and the preposterousness of Prime Minister Berlusconi, since 1990 Italy’s score on the UN Human Development Index has risen 15 per cent. Over the same quarter century, ours is up only eight per cent, the U.S.’s just seven.

One way the United States is not like Italy, of course, is that it is a nuclear power, the biggest nuclear power of all, as President Trump reminded the world in his Kim Jong Un-like “fire and fury” pronunciamento. Comic opera with nuclear weapons is not so funny. Putting a shallow, blustering narcissist “in charge” of the U.S. economy is one thing. The economy, per Smith, robustly resists having anyone in charge of it. Putting such a person in charge of the American nuclear arsenal, with hundreds of millions of lives potentially at stake, is quite another. Dr. Strangelove did have its moments of high comedy, but everyone watching knew it was made up. What we’re seeing now — two of the planet’s least stable, most bombastic leaders threatening each other’s populations with various degrees of incineration — you couldn’t make up. Or if you could, you shouldn’t. But there it is: actually happening. And not in the least amusing.