Trump Advisors Promise A Recession (And Worse) If He Wins
Elon is on record warning Trump supporters to be prepared for "temporary hardship"
A common refrain heard from the Anti-Anti-Trump, “it’s the policies, not the personalities” crowd, is that we shouldn’t trust anonymous predictions about how bad things would be if Trump is elected. There are usually two reasons: (1) these are all nameless enemies of the former President, and (2) the most dire predictions about how his first term would go did not come true. Leaving aside all the predictions that have come true (for example, Trump’s Tariffs contributing to Inflation, his tax cuts ballooning the deficit, and his trade war harming some of the rural Americans who support him), they might have a bit of a point that some people who were opposed to Trump were motivated to exaggerate their predictions. But what happens when Trump’s friends and advisors start making predictions about “necessary hardships” in a second Trump term?
As I touched on in a post from yesterday, a number of Trump advisors, supporters, and apparently future administration members, have made comments about what may happen in the immediate future if Trump is elected. Benjy Sarlin from Semfor has captured a number of these in an article entitled: Donald Trump’s friends are making big plans. Democrats are taking notice. He begins with Elon Musk:
Elon Musk is suddenly going into more detail about his planned position in a government efficiency commission for Trump, with talk of reducing annual spending by $2 trillion — a figure that would almost certainly require deep cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, even before trying to reconcile it with Trump’s multi-trillion dollar tax promises. Not only that, he’s been warning that the economy will suffer “temporary hardship” before voters see the benefits of a Trump/Musk agenda. That included a prediction that “markets will tumble” at first, he said on X, not something the Dow-obsessed Trump typically wants to hear.
This year’s Federal Budget is approximately $6.75 trillion dollars. As Sarlin notes, there is no way to trim $2 trillion out of federal funding without touching social safety net (often referred to as “entitlement”) programs and military spending. The hitch with that is Republicans don’t want the services they need cut. Some mistakenly believe that eliminating undocumented and legal immigrants will somehow make up that gap, but that isn’t the case (especially as undocumented immigrants cannot access Federal Safety Net Programs). Also any market crash would also negatively impact retires with stock-based retirement savings.
But it’s not just Musk. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also sharing what Trump has promised him:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — a critical Trump endorsement for voters on the margins of party politics — has been boasting about a massive “promised” role in the next Trump administration. On Monday, he said in a livestream that he would have “control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA.”
While the Trump campaign has tried to walk this back, the way it did so doesn’t really increase my confidence about the influence the notoriously anti-Vaxx and anti-Pharmaceutical RFK Jr. will have over the administration’s health care policy (again, we’re talking about policy, not personalities):
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s transition co-chair, told CNN Wednesday night that Kennedy would not lead the HHS while echoing Kennedy’s view that vaccines cause autism after a 2.5-hour meeting with him. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has been extensively studied and never proven.
For the record, Trump has gone on record at multiple campaign events, stating that he would block federal funding for school districts that have vaccination requirements. NOT COVID vaccination requirements. ANY VACCINATION REQUIREMENTS.
I see no way that this can go wrong.
Then we get to Mike Johnson:
Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, reopened a simmering debate over the Affordable Care Act that other Republicans have been wary to discuss when he told a voter in Pennsylvania that overhauling health care would be “a big part of the agenda” next year. When the same voter followed up “No Obamacare?” Johnson replied: “No Obamacare. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we’ve got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
ACA reform might not seem like it’s as much of a threat to Republicans and Trump supporters. However, there are two realities they need to contend with. Much like Trump’s Infrastructure plans from his first term, his proposal to replace/reform the ACA was never released. So, no one knows what “massive reform” means. Secondly, replacing/reforming the ACA was a core part of the Trump platform in 2016 and resulted in a massive failure for the administration.
To be fair to the Trump Campaign, it denied they have plans to repeal the ACA. From MSNBC news:
Even Trump’s campaign distanced itself from Johnson’s comment. “Repealing Obamacare is not President Trump’s policy position,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said.
However, there was no discussion about possible repeals to the ACA. It’s entirely possible to gut an act without repealing it (as we have seen with the constant chipping away at the Voter Rights Act). Either way, I for one choose to take these warnings LITERALLY versus figuratively (especially as they align with a lot of expert consensus of what would happen AND, in some cases, Trump’s own rhetoric).
“The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we’ve got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
Jesus H-bar Christ, how do people still take these assholes seriously? Republicans have been saying they “have ideas!” since the ACA was passed, and even when they’ve had the opportunity, they’ve proposed absolutely nothing. Repeatedly saying “just repeal it!” only when you’re out of power is the mark of people who do not, in fact, have any ideas.
The GOP “has ideas” like I have a Ferrari.
I tend to agree with what Atrios had to say this morning,
Right now Trump needs Musk’s money. If he’s elected what does he need Elon for? And actually giving Elon a government efficiency commission with real authority would create a power base from which Elon could challenge Trump. And what goal of Trump’s is met by slashing the budget? Which is not to say that Trump won’t give Elon a title and a few bones. And my skepticism that Trump will do what he said with Elon is not to imply Trump won’t find other ways to destroy the economy. He’s pretty much promised to.
The GOP is always hard at work breaking government to demonstrate that the government is broken.
Nihilism.
I’ve vague recollections of an SNL sketch sometime in the 80s, maybe early 90s, of a panel interview on the subject “What Were You Thinking?”
One guest is Walter Mondale. The host reminds him he promised or campaigned on raising taxes. Then tells him no candidate ever to any office has said they’d raise taxes. Then asks “What were you thinking?”
Sometimes the good old days were actually good.
Ha, ha, I’m about three months away from being forcibly detransitioned, aren’t I?
Then it’s a good thing we elect Presidents and not Kings!
Let’s just go through these in order:
– The idea that Trump can cut $2 trillion from the annual federal budget is a complete fantasy. Even assuming the GoP retains a slim margin in the House and retakes the Senate, this is just not going to happen.
– RFK Jr is certainly a kook and should not be in charge of anything, but there’s no mechanism for the President to grant him (or anyone else) unilateral authority over these health-related agencies that would force the feared changes. Trump couldn’t even get rid of Fauci the last time around. Federal agencies are not dictatorships where a nominal leader can make such sweeping changes.
– The President doesn’t have the authority to deny federal school funding based on vaccination policy. Full Stop.
– Any ACA reforms require legislation, which isn’t going to happen in the best-case scenario (for the GoP) where they get slim margins in the House and Senate. As noted, they have a historical record of failing to do this when the ACA was less popular, when they had bigger majorities. And again, it’s quite likely the House will be under Democratic control, which means that there will be no grandiose legislative initiatives of any kind.
To reiterate, I’ve voted for Harris and don’t want to see the shitshow that will happen if Trump wins. But I think people should look at what is actually possible for a President to do and not simply assume he/she can and then worst-case it. I get that doing that is part of politics and campaigning via scaremongering, but we should be able to separate that from analytical reality.
Another general point is that I hope some of the people here who advocate for a powerful Executive (at least when a Democrat is in office), ends-justify-the-means policymaking, and limiting the Court’s oversight of the Executive branch, would more seriously consider that you can’t have it both ways—you can’t give Democratic Presidents maximal authority to do the things you like and restrain Republican Presidents who do things you don’t like. It doesn’t work like that. Power is power, authority is authority, and the reasons we have separation of powers, federalism, and what are supposed to be limitations on Executive authority (to include the shadow legislature of administrative rulemaking) is precisely to limit the damage a President like Trump can do. If anyone genuinely fears electing a fascist, then it should be obvious that one shouldn’t also desire to expand the de facto power and authority of that office. Yet somehow, it’s not.
@Andy:
Well, don’t forget one of the first things Trump will do is return Schedule F allowing him to get rid of thousands of career federal employees and replace them with political loyalists. I wouldn’t underestimate him on this point. There are thousands of people in his orbit who want these jobs because they’ve been so conditioned to believe that government bureaucrats don’t do any work at all, they just collect paychecks and make life miserable for corporations.
@Stormy Dragon:
Don’t be so melodramatic. You will probably have a choice between voluntarily detransitioning, being unable to afford transitioning, or being forcibly detransitioned.
So many options.
@Andy:
Just because an incompetent arsonist can’t burn down a busy store with a box of matches and a can of gasoline, doesn’t mean he won’t do damage and kill people if you let him try.
@Jen: If we have a wholesale replacement of high level bureaucrats with incompetent boobs, I have a greater fear not of change of policies but basic incompetence at the agencies that are forward facings such as Medicare, SSA, and other basic government services. It is the death of expertise that I fear; not the replacement of specific expertise with another kind but the replacement with nothing. It will be many workers going: “I don’t know what you want me to do, please explain it again” and ‘No, I’m not trained for that. When will you provide the policies and procedures so that I can do my job?”
@Andy:
Andy, Trump will have dictatorial powers granted to him by the Supreme Court. If he holds the House and takes the Senate even by the thinnest margin, Republicans will do exactly what Trump tells them to do. There will be no separation of powers. SCOTUS and Congress will take orders.
@ptfe: I had a different take. I read that full quote and wondered if the Speaker wasn’t making use of the whole thing where “Obamacare” is bad, but “ACA” is good.
@Jay L Gischer:
You mean it’s fine with them as long as it doesn’t have Obama’s name on it?
@Kathy:
This. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies have already caused death and injury. So we should decline to be mollified by the boiling frogs who swore Roe was settled law, mocking warnings from folks like Sen. Mark Udall and Sec. Hillary Clinton.
We ignored these Cassandras. Now forced birth extremism maims, scars, and kills:
Amber Thurman — Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.
Josseli Barnica — A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital
Nevaeh Crain — A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms
There could many more such cases. Along with Jan. 6 related deaths, they caution us against the naïve assumtion that guardrails governing our past and present will automatically remain.
Once, presidents could not incite a terror attack on Congress, trying to assassinate his VP and block the transfer of power. Yet Trump did it anyway.
Washington, Lincoln, and Truman would’ve understood such conduct as disgracefully criminal. Didn’t stop the current Supreme Court from rewriting the Constitution to say, “Eh, maybe not.”
It is hubris to think our protestations about presidential constraints matter to Trump, the MAGA SCOTUS, Project 2025’s architects, or to dominionist Mike Johnson and his “little secret” with Trump.
The iceberg didn’t care we built the Titanic to be unsinkable.
John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff for two years, to the NYT: “He said that, in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”
Kelly is echoed by dozens of Trump White House vets, including Mark Milley, Trump’s joint chiefs chair, who identifies Trump as “fascist to the core” and a “dangerous threat.”
All just fearmongering Democrats? Doubtful.
We should believe those who worked side-by-side with Trump. They know his presidential capabilities better than anyone here.
@Michael J Reynolds:
And worse yet, looking at the overall pattern:
Trump will do what the various “Trump whisperer’s” tell him to do, because it’s pretty obvious Trump can barely string a coherent thought sequence together now, if he ever could.
And the implementation will also be largely in the hands of the various “true-believers” of the various projects.
Doubtless they’ll eventually fall out with each other; anarcho-oligarchists, paleocon authoritarians, and Christo-fascist populists, are unlikely to be happy bedfellows in the longer term.
But could seriously screw your democratic Republic before they do.
If it were just Trump plus the Republican cynics, I’d be less concerned.
But some in the current Trump penumbra are genuinely scary.
If only the EU was no so currently plagued with faction-fight squabbles, and the UK sat outside scared of the Brexiter base.
I really wish I didn’t live in such “interesting” times.
My nostalgia for the 1990’s is currently going exponential.
So true
https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/1852438192059732446
@DK:
When pretty stolid, and likely “conservative”, people like Kelly, Mattis, Milley, McRaven, McMaster, Pompeo, Tillerson, Bolton, etc are all denouncing Trump as a dangerous loon, you’d think it would be front pages 24/7.
If half the former UK Chiefs of Staff plus former Secretaries of State and a Cabinet Secretary had done so re. a Conservative Party leader, you’d have probably be able to count the Tory votes in a single wastebasket.
These are serious people, who do not make public comments of this sort lightly.
Deplorable, garbage and Nazi.
You lost. You got nothing.
Vote Trump
@CSK: That is exactly what I mean. We’ve seen polls showing that, if memory serves.
Easy choice.
Kamala 4 years vs. Trump 4 yrs.
Trump by a landslide
Oh, wow. Thoughtful commentary from @Andy, @JohnSF, and @Jen.
Now, this:
And this:
In the unlikely event that there is an undecided person reading this, I ask you to consider which side truly has “nothing”. Do the first three use all those words to say something or not? Because those posts certainly have substance.
The Trump supporter? @Jake offered nothing of substance. This shouldn’t be a surprise, because the most substantive offering from the GOP side is Project 2025, from which the Trump campaign has repeatedly distanced itself.
@Kurtz:
More lies. Do some research get out of your echo chamber
@Jake: And you prove his point again.
@Jake: you sound like one of those insane conspiracy types claiming that only you know the secrets of the Illuminati and everyone should just trust you and make you Ruler of the Universe.
I also suggest you take a look at what happens when one of those people get into power and what happens in reality. Have you ever heard of a dude called Rasputin?
Mike Johnson today said he’d try to repeal the CHIPS Act if Republicans win the House and presidency. So much for bringing manufacturing back to America.
@Jake:
Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot you were here. You may go now.
In all seriousness, I am one of the people who does not fit the description of a person in an echo chamber. There are others here.
I also will give credit to points about which I disagree if the point is solid and argued well.
You make no points. You get no credit.
@Kurtz:
No one in their right mind would back Kamala. She lies has no real positions, vapid
@jake:
From an obviously ignorant non-American perspective, could you explain to me how Harris is “vapid”, and has “no real positions”, in contrast to Trump, who must obviously be “non-vapid” and have “real positions”?
@jake:
So, possibilities are three:
1. Pure projection
2. Brainwashed by disinformation
3. Part of the disinformation project
My money is on #3… simple dupes aren’t commenting at OTB. #1 is possible, but unlikely — it’s hard to accidentally fail to notice that Harris has policy proposals and Trump only has impossible nonsense like “seal the border” and “stop inflation”.
@jake:
Notice that I never called into question your soundness of mind.
It’s understandable to me why one may take offense to “basket of deplorables” or “garbage”. But why would you expect any of us to accept similar statements from you without taking offense?
It is almost as if you do not accept those who disagree with your point of view as anything more than automatons programmed by ‘the elite’ in the academy and media.
But in what world are Elon Musk, Trump, those at the Heritage Foundation/any other GOP-aligned think tank, Fox News, or The Hoover Institution not included in the definition of ‘the elite’?
You know the answer. I’ve made similar comments before. Specifically, I’ve pointed out that for years, though not as much now, Fox News would advertise themselves as “the most watched news network” with one side of their mouth, while calling out bias in ‘the mainstream media’ with the other.
Those two instances of cognitive dissonance are enough for tonight, but they are hardly the only examples I can conjure on the spot.
I’ll leave you with on more thought:
Based on your contributions here, there is a good chance that I can defend casting a vote for Trump better than you can. That should bother you. People in echo chambers are unlikely to be able to do that.
@jake:
You regurgitate Trump’s lies, verbatim and are then completely incapable of backing up what you said. Congratulations: you’re in a cult.
@TheRyGuy:
1: budget deficit: what is your point?
2: the 6 foot rule: there are myriad things that people historically did based on information that was later found to be wrong. When new information came to light we changed our behavior. That’s how things are supposed to work. Also: what is your point?
3: I see we are Gish galloping back to the budget. Ok. Surely you’ve heard that correlation does not equal causation. What other reasons could be increasing health care costs other than the ACA? What would costs be without the ACA? The correct question is are we as a nation getting appropriate value for the money we are spending on healthcare through the ACA, and how do we measure appropriate value. Also: what’s your point?
4: great to hear that you don’t want to have a bad faith argument. I’m all for engaging with you in a good faith argument. What Matt posts or does not post is irrelevant to a conversation between you and me, except in as much as we chose to reference what he has written. So let’s do it! Each of my previous points asked what your point was because you haven’t made an argument yet, you’ve just stated facts. So feel free to pick one or more of those facts and build an argument on it. Or make an argument about one of Harris’ policy positions and why you think it is good or bad.
5: Harris didn’t win a primary vote: what’s your point? (See how this works?)
6: Harris didn’t do interviews for a while. Now she has. What’s your point?
7: The rest of the stuff about Matt is irrelevant to our conversation since I can’t speak for him. Unless you want to make some sort of broader point that you want me to respond to?
Overall you’ve listed some grievances, but haven’t made an argument yet. If you’d like to make an argument in good faith I’ll be happy to engage.
@DrDaveT:
Both #2 and #3, they work in combination.
Plus, thread derail = successful.
@TheRyGuy:
Hey, I am going to be AFK for most of the day. I saw that post and in your apparent desire to have an actual conversation, I will respond later.
@TheRyGuy: “We now know there was really no scientific basis for that idea ”
Do you ever listen to yourself? “We now know.” Even given that this is true, the fact is that WE DIDN’T KNOW THEN. Scientists and governments were working with the information available at the time and doing what they could to prevent possibly millions of people from dying.
The rest of your list is just horseshit, but this is such an obvious piece of bad faith argument that it actually deserved a response.
Hmm … The ‘six foot rule’ was a mistaken policy…
Sure, but the corrected understanding is that six feet wasn’t far enough to largely prevent infection because the droplets capable of spreading the virus traveled further, not that people could be closer packed. And it wasn’t just the six foot rule that closed schools but the need to minimize spread back to families and others at higher risk from COVID.
Someone mentioned health care? Health care costs? That’s my area. Since the ACA was passed health care costs have increased, like everything else, but for the first time since about 1965 health care costs have not increased faster than the rate of inflation. There are a number of reasons for this but among them the way payments are made have been changing so that hospitals/providers have some incentives to control costs. Note that health care spending as a percentage of GDP was 12.1% in 1990, 13.3% in 2000, 17.2% in 2010 when ACA passed and in 2022 it was 17.3%. While we had bumps in the covid years of 21 and 22, spending has stayed pretty constant as a share of GDP while the population has grown, especially the older population which is most likely to need and use health care. PLUS, the ACA provided health insurance to millions of people for the first time.
So overall, the ACA is a triumph about which we mostly dont talk.May more people covered, coverage improved AND costs slowed down fo the first time in the Medicare era. The GOP/Trump says they have a “plan” but wont reveal it but one should note that in red states they arent using any special plans to control health care costs.
(Just as an aside for those interested, conservatives dont actually look at numbers, charts or any kind of data so I know they wont look at it, if you look at the link you will notice that the times when spending increased the most were 1980-1990, 2000-2010 when the GOP held the POTUS office. When Clinton and Obama were in office the rate of growth was slower.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184968/us-health-expenditure-as-percent-of-gdp-since-1960/
Make America Great Again by denying insurance to anyone with a pre-existing hangnail. Got cancer and no insurance? No problem, sell everything you have, go homeless and don’t worry because a church charity group will set up go fund me in your name while you crawl into the woods to expire.
@Argon:
This conversation, over and over.
“Your science is not infallible!”
“We know, it’s falsifiable. That’s what makes it science.”
I do think that Musk is looking to Argentina’s situation.
As reported recently, Argentina’s economy has descended into recession as Javier Milei’s government imposed drastic budget cuts. Elimination of thousands of government jobs, all in the effort to get runaway inflation under control.
We don’t have their problem, however, this is Musk’s way of giving us a heads-up as to their plans if Trump is elected. Eliminate as many federal jobs as possible, cut back Social Security and Medicare, all while telling us it had to be done {blah, blah blah}. MAGA wants to give us the recession that they kept telling us would result from Biden’s economic policies.
@Michael Reynolds:
Yes. That points to the importance of @Erik‘s line:
Stating facts is fine, but they are not an argument in and of themselves. Hell, you can construct an argument with dubious facts. But dubious facts or not, there has been no argumentation.