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american politics is the best reality show, I totally thought I would have to retire this after the election, ozy blog post
[Epistemic status: I know nothing about politics. This post written in the spirit of being wrong loudly.]
Here is my understanding of possible situations in which Trump could be significantly worse than Generic Republican President.
Depicted: generic Republican president.
I think Trump is extremely high variance: I think possible outcomes from his presidency range from “better president than Obama or Hillary Clinton” to “nuclear war”. Needless to say, this is a very safe thing to say as a predictor, because if he turns out to be a great president I can say “look! I said he was high-variance!” and all I have to do is give up I-told-you-so points that won’t matter all that much anyway if we’re scavenging in a nuclear wasteland.
Trump is high variance for a couple of different reasons. First, he has not held any political office; this means that we don’t have any sense of how he governs (whether he will listen to advisors, whether he will try to keep his campaign promises, whether his impulsive behavior will be sobered by the power he holds, etc.). Second, he doesn’t know anything about governing, which increases the likelihood that he will make totally random and ill-informed decisions out of ignorance. Third, over the course of his campaign, he has often been extremely vague about his preferred policies beyond “terrific” and “the best.” He has regularly gone back and forth about what his positions are. When he does express policy positions, they are often more symbolic than literal. That is, “I want to register all the Muslims” may mean “I take the threat of Islamic terrorism seriously”, not “I want to create a large database of every Muslim”. All this makes a bit hard to tell what he will actually do.
That said, I think it’s worth trying to figure out what the most likely worst-case scenarios are so we can plan ahead.
Since I’m comparing Trump to the generic Republican president, I am not including policies where I also expect the generic Republican president to be horrible, such as not allowing refugees into the country.
There are several things that people are worried about that I am explicitly not worried about. For instance, Trump is relatively pro-LGBT for a Republican (his Ballotpedia entry has a pretty good overview). While Pence is fairly anti-LGBT, I would view Pence being able to pass anti-gay policies as a positive sign, because it would suggest that Pence has actual power and Pence is way lower-variance than Trump. While anti-LGBT laws are awful, we’re only like four percent of the population, and I would much rather have federally funded conversion therapy than a trade war, which hurts everyone, queer and not queer. (In the long run, of course, Supreme Court justices have effects; we can only hope that Pence will follow in Eisenhower’s footsteps and accidentally nominate Earl Warren.)
I do not care about the president’s personal virtue. I do not think it is particularly important for my assessment of his presidency that Trump has committed repeated sexual assaults; Bill Clinton is a rapist, but I think he did a decent job as president. I also am uninterested in questions about Trump’s personal feelings of racism. I don’t think it would be a whole lot of comfort to a Latino deported from the only country he’s ever known that Trump harbors no personal feelings of animosity to him in his heart.
So here are the scenarios I can think of for Trump being a really bad president:
Trump is incompetent at his job. Several aspects of being president are very complicated and tend to break a lot of things if you do a bad job at them. I’m thinking in particular of international relations and macroeconomics. Macroeconomic policy is fairly complicated and has a large effect on people’s wealth and quality of life. In addition to mismanagement due to incompetence, Trump might mismanage the economy for his short-term political benefit at the expense of long-term fiscal health.
My understanding of diplomacy is that it is extremely important to be predictable and to send clear messages to avoid misunderstandings that could lead to wars; Trump neither has political experience in which he has developed these skills nor has he shown a great ability to be predictable and a clear communicator on the campaign trail. I also worry about Trump being rash and easily offended, which leads to him escalating tense situations. This is where Trump’s largest chance of being an existential risk comes from, I think.
Positive signs: Trump appoints to his cabinet competent people who are not sycophants, preferably including at least one #NeverTrumper; Trump appoints qualified people to the Fed; over his first year in office, Trump has a cool-headed and moderate foreign policy.
(This, incidentally, is why I do not think we should nominate Oprah, or Kanye, or Bruce Springsteen, or the Rock, or any other celebrity. An unqualified Democrat is as much of an existential risk as an unqualified Republican.)
Trump has bad policies. My primary concerns are about immigration, climate change, prisons, and trade.
I think it would be bad if he made a serious attempt to deport a large percentage of undocumented immigrants. Given that undocumented immigrants are three percent of the US population, I’m not sure that deporting more than a small minority of them could be done without serious human rights violations. I also think it would be bad to sharply reduce the number of immigrants the US takes in, because immigration benefits migrants a lot.
I am worried about Trump ending trade deals which benefit people in developing countries. I am particularly worried about Trump’s anti-trade stances and poor diplomacy skills precipitating a trade war, because trade wars hurt everyone but particularly the poorest, and this would lead to an increase in international tension that may lead to a real war.
The United States has about a fifth of the world’s prisoners, which makes our prison policy unusually important. Trump has nominated Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Senator Sessions was one of only a handful of senators who voted against an amendment banning torture of prisoners; while that amendment applied primarily to the Department of Defense, I think it speaks to his respect for the humanity of people who might have done something wrong. He is also well-known for being against marijuana use, going so far as to say last April that good people do not smoke marijuana. I am afraid that Senator Sessions will not pay an adequate amount of attention to the human rights of prisoners and drug users, that he will expand the drug war, and that he may seek to imprison consumers of legal marijuana.
I am also concerned about Trump radically cutting back or even eliminating US policy that is intended to prevent or reduce the harm of climate change, because climate change is predicted to kill lots of people, especially the global poor.
Sessions was a bit of a surprise to me, so I am also worried about Trump choosing other advisors that have remarkably awful positions on important issues.
Positive signs: Trump shows a willingness to break campaign promises; Trump implements some of his campaign promises in a less extreme form (e.g. expanding the border fence somewhat and then claiming that’s a “wall”); Trump appears to focus on relatively innocuous policy positions (e.g. building a lot of infrastructure and naming it after himself); Sessions is not appointed Attorney General; the rest of Trump’s cabinet is non-awful.
Trump is an autocrat. This is the “Trump as Juan Peron” theory, as written about eloquently in this article. In this scenario, Trump causes a good deal of harm to America’s institutions. We might expect jailing of political opponents, punishment of protestors, firing of advisors who disagree with him, disrespect of the free press, and general silencing of dissent. He might be unlikely to give up power once his two turns are up and continue to rule through proxies. An autocratic Trump administration would also likely have batshit economic policy, because autocrats usually do. The autocrat scenario leads to a good deal of harm to America’s institutions, possibly leading to the fall of America as a great power.
Even if Trump’s autocracy is successfully contained by the strength of America’s institutions– for instance, if he tries to interfere with the freedom of the press, but the Supreme Court slaps him down– he may inspire authoritarian and autocratic movements in other countries.
Positive signs: A year into his presidency, Trump continues to be no more prone to jailing political opponents or punishing protestors than the average American president (note that early positive signs may simply be Trump biding his time); early attempts to gain power are met with strong opposition from Republicans.
Thing of Things 
>”While anti-LGBT laws are awful, we’re only like four percent of the population, and I would much rather have federally funded conversion therapy than a trade war, which hurts everyone, queer and not queer
This is heartening. I tend to think of leftists as being deontologically in favor of the interests of minorities, such that they would rather kill a majority of the population than allow the corresponding minority to suffer a symbolic harm. Seeing you explicitly contradict that raises my assessment of you and people who agree with you.
>”disrespect of the free press”
This, on the other hand, is disheartening. We need to be worried about Trump *censoring* the free press, not *disrespecting* it. This is a pattern I see all the time, where someone claims to be anti-authoritarian, but they’ve cargo-culted “the free press” – ie, the left-wing media companies, these people never think of fucking Fox News and shit as the free press – to be a good thing in and of themselves. So they want to dump power on an institution and forbid people from insulting it – how is that the anti-authoritarian position?
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I predict that federally funded conversion therapy will cause grave harm to LGBT people. I strongly object to the implication that it is a “symbolic harm”. But I am also capable of multiplication.
I was attempting to think of a way to describe a category that includes censorship but would also include, say, ending press briefings, which is not censorship but is also not the attitude one would hope the government would have towards the Fourth Estate. Do you have any suggestions about how I could phrase what I mean better?
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Maybe “bad relations” with the press? I have to admit, I have to stretch really hard to see how bad relations with the press are an actual bad thing. It seems like we would massively benefit from an official source like the government admitting that old media is now totally irrelevant and does not deserve special institutional privilege over, say, no-name bloggers.
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@ozymandias
Can you explain why you believe that there will huge harm due to federally funded conversion therapy?
AFAIK it’s currently not illegal in the US to do that therapy and conservative parents can’t legally force their children to undergo it. So the only difference would presumably be that some conservatives who are poor cannot pay for it now and can then choose what they want. However, conservatives probably give charity payments or raise money in church to make the conversion therapy more accessible to poor conservatives.
So the actual effect may be mostly limited to all tax payers being forced to pay for this, rather than just the conservatives who are fans of it.
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@aajpe: I’m fairly certain parents can force their minor doormen into most any medical treatment, although this tends to be less true in the late teens. Why are you so confident that parents can’t legally force children into conversion therapy when they can currently force them into counseling, psychiatric therapy, or those abysmal programs where they basically start by kidnapping you?
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Can you give a single example of a child who was forced to undergo gay conversion therapy by legal judgement or by being kidnapped by their parents? I simply have never heard of such a case.
Ultimately, I still have a very hard time to come up with a scenario where the mere change to make the therapy federally funded will cause substantially more people to be subjected to it against their will.
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@aapje:
First, apologies for earlier typos, I posted that from my phone.
I can’t provide examples specifically for gay conversion therapy, but I’m connecting several consistent principles. One is that, in America, your parents can pay to have you “kidnapped” (e.g. 1, 2, 3). I leave kidnapped in quotes because while it fits the name, it’s not legally kidnapping, as the parents are exercising their legal control over their child in terms of location and behaviour.
Another is that parents have significant control over the care provided to their children even when it’s medical care provided by medical doctors, and conversion therapy doesn’t have that level of regulation.
So to date the only protections minor children have against their parents sending them to conversion therapy are the laws of some states, and the cost. A teen in California has nothing to worry about, as conversion therapy of minors is illegal in that state. A teen in Alabama has no such protection, aside from the general level of poverty.
The level of harm will largely depend on the level of funding. A $100 voucher will not make a difference if the cost of is measured in the thousands; fully-funded therapy could lead to hundreds or thousands of LGBT teens being subject to conversion therapy. Because parents can legally force their minor children into it, and the barriers in most states are availability and cost.
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@aapje: a previous post I made appears to be caught in the spam filter, so apologies if this shows up first, but it appears that I can provide an example of teens kidnapped for conversion therapy. There’s even a documentary on the subject.
To reiterate, there is no general legal protection against this; the primary barrier to this practice is cost.
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Ok, that is a good case for that scenario, although it is still unclear how many people are prevented from doing so due to a lack of finances.
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What does the phrase “cargo-culting” mean here?
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Conflating specific objects with the ideals those objects were used to describe.
“Freedom means that anyone can say what they want, like for example the media can report on stories that reflect poorly on powerful people and the powerful people can’t stop them.”
“So freedom means the media, right? Arguing with someone who’s part of the media means you’re arguing with freedom? Awesome! I should join the media! Then all of my opponents will have to kiss my feet or else be anti-freedom!”
Akin to conflating the scientific method with the peer review process. The peer review isn’t the scientific method, it’s just a large group of people who are supposed to try to confirm that you used the scientific method. The peer-reviewers aren’t the scientific method any more than a man dressed up as God is God.
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And to unpack it further, just because people who call themselves journalists do something, doesn’t mean that they are actually doing proper journalism.
And just because many people who called themselves scientists agree that p < 0.05 means 'this is true,' that doesn't mean that such a statement is actually scientific.
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Two other major scenarios I worry about are:
-Trump gets himself impeached almost immediately, now we have 3.5 years of President Pence.
-Trump is so overwhelmed/uninterested by the duties of the Presidency that he lets someone else make all the boring decisions for him. That person will probably not be a good person.
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Ozy explicitly argues that Pence ending up in charge would be a good thing – or at least, a low-variance thing which is somewhat bad, but unlikely to result in nuclear war.
I am a bit worried that Trump might choose spectacularly awful people as advisors, leading him to adopt spectacularly awful policies which may well be completely different to the awful policies he’s spoken in favour of.
Similarly, I’m worried that he’ll appoint awful people to key roles (e.g. rather than successfully banning Muslims from immigrating, he puts people who are nice to him about his plan to ban Muslims in charge of all the things Presidents can put people in charge of, and they decide it would be even better to declare all Muslims non-citizens in a landmark court case and put them in camps.)
This is arguably a form of “Trump is incompetent”, but a rather different one to the one Ozy presents.
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I think Pence ending up in charge is preferable to Trump ending up in charge (conditional on there not being strong signs in the next few months that Trump is a surprisingly good president), but I am of course extraordinarily unhappy about this choice.
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The post is explicitly limited to ways in which a Trump administration could be significantly worse than a Generic Republican President. Your scenarios are ways in which a Trump administration could be a Generic Republican administration, unless you define Generic Republican such that Pence is not one.
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I think another bad possibility, which is related to all of your categories of badness but I think is important enough to deserve its own section, is “Trump makes bad decisions in appointing people.” This can happen because he’s incompetent, because he has bad policy priorities, or because he focuses too much on rewarding people loyal to him – but I think these reasons are going to reinforce each other and not be easily distinguishable from each other, which is why I think this particular failure mode deserves to be considered separately.
The signs in this area are not that encouraging so far as far as I can tell (though perhaps I’m only seeing the particularly bad examples). Bannon’s the example that’s gotten the most attention, and you mention Sessions, but Flynn and Pompeo aren’t much better, and of course having a climate change skeptic head the EPA is pretty awful too.
This is also where Trump’s personal sense of right and wrong matters, as does whether he sees reality in a bigotry-distorted way (I think he does). If he doesn’t think racism is terrible, he will have no problem appointing people who are very racist. If his facts about the world are wrong, he will appoint people whose facts about the world are also wrong (see e.g. Flynn), and if those facts are wrong in bigoted ways, this will likely lead to bigoted policies.
In a sense what matters to me is not so much whether Trump’s actions are virtuous, and more what he actually thinks is right and what is wrong, and even in a sense what he thinks is considered right and wrong by the people who matter to him. The [offensive statement]–>[outrage]–>[apology] cycle of modern politics is kind of silly, but at least when politicians apologize they show that they understand what they said is widely considered to be wrong and that they should avoid that thing henceforth. Trump has been pretty unwilling to show remorse, and I’m not convinced he has any kind of reasonable moral compass. I think this is legitimately a bad sign.
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On the other hand it’s also very possible that by being so conspicuously and unabashedly terrible, Trump has provoked a much more effective opposition than most presidents have, which will limit his ability to do terrible things. Note how Trump’s uncareful talk about a “Muslim registry” has made everyone pay attention as his appointees consider reviving a registry-of-approximately-Muslims-ish which people didn’t really know about when it was created without so much loud and obnoxious fanfare.
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Yeah, it seems he is less bad than was anticipated. Hopefully.
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>>Positive signs: Trump appoints to his cabinet competent people who are not sycophants, preferably including at least one #NeverTrumper; Trump appoints qualified people to the Fed; over his first year in office, Trump has a cool-headed and moderate foreign policy.
I think that this might be true already, despite Jeff Sessions. Romney and Nikki Haley, for example, appear at first glance to be rather qualified and both opposed Trump (or so I remember).
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Also I love that apparently the prototypical generic Republican president is not in fact a president.
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The US getting into a trade war with China (and possibly losing) might not even be a bad thing in the long term, globally. Arguably the best thing that could happen to Central America, Africa and the southern half of Asia would be that foreign powers lose the appetite (or, better yet, the ability) to meddle in their governments and support coups. And the US and China are the two worst offenders at the moment (although China is less into grand political schemes and more into petty corruption).
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I don’t think that there is much value in predictions about the danger of Trump for foreign policy, as most people seem to be really bad at these kinds of judgments, even with 20/20 hindsight, let alone in advance. For example, JFK polled as the best US president, while he brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, because of his own actions.
I have a list of things that prevent a politician from getting a passing grade, pretty much no matter what else they do and ‘almost annihilating most humans’ is one of these.
I also don’t agree that a limited trade war is necessarily bad. Right now, global trade results in quite a bit of suffering and oppression, We are constantly told that we have to give multinationals what they want or they will take their ball and go home (very Ayn Randian, that). At one point there needs to be some push back to get ‘them’ to realize that there are limits.
This is how socialism got us the 5 x 8 work week, decent salaries, worker protections and such. They were told that striking and demanding so much would destroy the economy, but it actually set the stage for major economic growth.
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[Epistemic Status: I usually turn a decent profit when betting on US political outcomes, possibly because I’m a dispassionate foreigner]
* Climate change: Trump can’t make a lot of difference. Technology is past the tipping point and global CO2/GNP is dropping everywhere except India which will tip soon. Barring ridiculous subsidies, coal will never again be profitable and shale oil/gas is just pushing it out of business faster.
Prediction: US total CO2 emissions will be down by 2020 and even more down compared to GDP. If GDP goes down, CO2 emissions will plummet. Confidence 90%
* Prisons: I honestly don’t see how the US prison system can in any way be worse than it already is. Whether prisoner are tortured by staff or each other seems almost irrelevant.
Prediction: There will be no significant changes to the prison system and if there are minor ones, it will be to the better. Confidence 80%
(possible minor change: Some legislation or better enforcing of current legislation with regards to private prison scams and kickbacks)
* Nuclear War: Compared to someone who promised to tell Putin where to fly his fighter planes or not? Really? Besides, Trump is not suicidal.
Prediction: There will not be a nuclear war with anyone by 2020. Confidence 99.9%
Prediction: The US will scale back on the world policing job, withdraw from Syria and not instigate a new conflict by 2020. Confidence 75%
* The autocrat bit relies on essentially everyone going along with it and that seems unlikely.
Prediction: Unless reelected, Trump will leave office with no fuss at the end of his term. If reelected, after 2 terms. Confidence 99%
* Trade war: I’m not at all sure about this one, but the US has a YUUGE handicap when it comes to trade and jobs because of the repatriation tax. If Trump is sane, he’ll drop that and factories will return.
Prediction: The repatriation tax will be dropped (or reduced substantially) and there will be only minor changes to existing trade deals. Confidence: 55%
Prediction: There will be some pressure on China as a currency manipulator, but mostly symbolic especially after Trump realises that China is your largest creditor. There will be no measurable results on trade. Confidence: 80%
The other stuff, I wouldn’t presume to guess about.
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Oh, and the muslim registry? The NSA already have a registry of everyone with a phone. Running the query with “where religion = ‘islam’;” doesn’t require a policy change.
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On nuclear war: Russia is unlikely to start anything, but what about Pakistan and North Korea? Especially if Trump continues making offhand comments about nuclear first strikes.
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Are we actually worried about North Korea? I don’t see it prompting WW3. It doesn’t have the power and nobody’s actually going to end the world to protect it.
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My main worry there is that the retaliatory strike from the US would mistakenly trip the early warning systems of any of the other Asian nuclear powers, Russia and China included. Ideally, early warning systems are able to estimate the impact point of a missile in flight to determine if it will land inside the border. Non-ideally, somebody in a uniquely terrible circumstance and under enormous pressure screws up.
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Russia is in a rather uniquely bad spot.
– It’s current conventional armed forces is 11% of what it was in 1989
– It still has enough nukes to do significant harm
– It is expansionist
– It’s been encroached upon by NATO for a couple decades.
So in an actual shooting war with US/NATO, it faces the choice of utter defeat or nuclear. This is not good for anyone. Therefore hawkish presidents talking about no fly zones is not a great idea.
For NC and Pakistan, what can they actually do? Launch a rocket with about even chance of blowing up on the ramp and fizzing out somewhere in the pacific? (after all, this is in fact rocket science and NC and Pakistan have not impressed anyone yet.) Even if they managed to score a hit, it would be that one hit in trade for a country made of fused glass. Nobody is that crazy and still able to walk upright.
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Don’t fear them. Nukes are expensive to build and maintain. North Korea (or even Pakistan) will never have an arsenal large enough to threaten complete destruction to anyone significantly larger than Luxembourg. They could devastate a few cities in nearby countries, but would go down in the inevitable retaliation. Using nukes would still cross the moral event horizon – you can only get away with it if you can credibly threaten Russia, China and the US.
Kim Jong Un might pretend to be crazy – but even he knows damn well that South Korea would be an island within the hour if he sufficiently pisses off the US, China and Russia (and a nuclear first strike pretty much guarantees that).
If Trump made good on his promise of using nukes (even if he only allowed to use tactical nukes on purely military targets), that could maybe normalize it enough that others feel they could get away with using them without immediately provoking a retaliation strike by third parties. But while this would definitely be a bad thing, it won’t be an existential threat, and nobody in America or Europe would have to fear getting nuked (but it might suck to live in Seoul or Delhi).
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Fortunately for your concerns about Trump’s high-variance-ness, but unfortunately for those of us who were hoping that Trump would actually be different from other Republican candidates (or at least be too inept and petty to actually accomplish any of the damage that the other candidates wanted to get done), his cabinet picks so far consist of the blandest and most bog-standard establishment Republican elites ever, plus Steve Bannon.
I was dreading a Trump presidency, but when it happened, I did hope he’d at least be a renegade who would shake things up a little. But no, turns out he’s probably just going to sit back and let the likes of Romney and Ryan make all the decisions, and it’ll just be business as usual.
So those who were worried about him being high-variance can rest assured, the horrors of a Trump administration will not be the slightest bit different from the horrors of Reagan and Bush.
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“I also worry about Trump being rash and easily offended, which leads to him escalating tense situations. This is where Trump’s largest chance of being an existential risk comes from, I think.”
Speaking as a foreigner who doesn’t have to worry about some of the other stuff: this, this, a thousand times this. Trump’s approach to criticism is to bluster and shout the other person down. He is almost the last person I want to be involved in brinkmanship* with anyone who has nuclear weapons.
*(I’d like a gender-neutral version of this term and this seems like an unusually good place to ask for suggestions. “Brinkpersonship” just doesn’t work.)
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Playing chicken? Saber-rattling?
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Incidently, could we perhaps have a Trump / Clinton election post-mortem Turing Test?
I suspect that would be at least as interesting as the previous one.
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I am not certain that I have enough Trump supporter readers for it to be interesting.
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A nice follow up to the Turing test might be to get people to fill in this:
http://moralfoundations.org/questionnaires
It may be interesting to see how people differ based on SJ vs non-SJ or another categorization.
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“climate change is predicted to kill lots of people”
I didn’t know this. Obviously I’ve heard it before, but not from anywhere i was inclined to take seriously. Would be interested in your best reference/references for this claim.
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