Diary

I've sort of been waiting for the election season to end. But now it looks as if we're going to be hearing about politics nonstop for several years. For me this is about as much fun as being forced to watch Roseanne reruns every night. That is a sitcom that I permanently gave up on after less than one episode. Since I'd prefer not to think about Donald Trump, I'll just make a few comments now so that I can move on to more interesting topics. 

At this point, since everything that Trump says is a form of hype, and his worldview is comparable to that of a character in a low-grade sitcom, it isn't clear where things will go from here. He doesn't have the slightest idea how to fix anything, but he always tries, unconvincingly, to appear knowledgeable and in control. The worst-case scenario might be his immediate transformation of the country into a fascist state, but I don't think that he is competent enough to pull that off. This is an ironic situation, because he won by convincing lower- and middle-income people that he will improve their economic prospects, and most of his career has been devoted to abusing ordinary workers either financially or sexually and then protecting himself by making litigation prohibitively expensive for them. If his father hadn't handed him $500 million, he would have been in jail decades ago. The evolution of his career consisted of starting as the front man for his father's unscrupulous real estate business and then becoming the front man for miscellaneous unscrupulous billionaires. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos do not want a federal government that increases their personal or business taxes, and they want as little regulation as possible for their corporations. If Trump accommodates them, the federal deficit will skyrocket, since he has promised his supporters lower taxes. He has also boxed himself into a corner on higher tariffs on foreign goods, since that would cause inflation. What Trump, like most crooked politicians, will probably do is raise the deficit as much as he can in the short term to create an illusion of prosperity and time his inflationary policies so that inflation remains relatively low until the end of his term. He is too stupid to do this on his own, but he has hordes of political lackeys dying to help him.

Besides Trump's avoidance of appropriate tax-based wealth redistribution that would benefit his voters, some of his appointees could be dangerous. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could potentially open the floodgates to pandemics that kill millions of people. Ironically, if Trump's administration adopts a global-warming-denial policy, many of his supporters, who are located in the South, will face the direst consequences. Then you have to consider Trump's membership to the international kleptocracy, which may prompt him to withdraw aid to Ukraine, which is what his master, Vladimir Putin, would prefer. This could add a few thousand more deaths to Trump's account. As far as the Israel-Hamas war is concerned, that is completely over his head, and Trump has little incentive to get involved.

On a more positive note, it is worth mentioning that civil war is probably off the table. That is because the federal government is now under de facto corporate control, and civil wars are bad for business. That could hurt Tesla and Amazon sales!

As for me, I am staying in place. In my neighborhood I could pass for a Republican, and if things got really bad, I could put a bomb shelter in the back yard. 

In other news, though it is currently unseasonably warm, I'm all prepared for snow. I just made a rare family road trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This was my first road trip to a city in ten years. I thought that it was a good museum, but not as good as the ones, collectively, in Manhattan, London or Paris.