The Day After

Looking over the burning wreckage of the American political landscape this morning I take some solace in three thoughts.

1) Trump is going to find out very quickly that being President is very different from running for President and it is nothing like being the CEO of a real estate development company.  The President of the United States is a very powerful person but he is still strongly hemmed in  by law and precedent.  In most cases he cannot simply say "Make it so" and have something automatically done.  He has to work through and with a government bureaucracy that does things their own way and in their own time.

He's also going to find that he has to deal with Congress and that is not going to be as easy as he thinks.  Sure the Republicans are in control of both Houses now but the vast majority of them are doctrinaire conservatives who neither like nor trust Trump and don't really believe (correctly) he is one of them.  His attitude is going to be like they are junior executives in his company who have to do what he says but they are going to be like "Sorry, we are members of a co-equal branch of government so if you want to do some of the things you say you do the negotiate with us, Mr. Negotiator."

The practical upshot of this is that Trump is going to get very frustrated, very quickly and I would not be surprised that if after about a year he pulls a Palin.  Sure, that leaves us with Pence who is a anti-LGBT religious zealot, but that's a separate issue and at least he has a vague understanding how government works.

2) I think I can safely predict that even if he does quit after a year, Trump will have done so much damage to the economy that the voters may finally realize that no, the cause of their problems are not immigrants or Hispanics or blacks but the very Republican policies that have been keeping them down since the Nineties.  The result will be Democrats finally getting control of both Houses of Congress in 2018.

3) The campaign for Elizabeth Warren in 2020 starts today!