Trump's Treason?

What is treason?

Technically, it is:

the crime of betraying one's country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government.

So, in a democracy, treason consists in an attempt to destroy the sovereign people, or overthrow the government elected by the people.

How does that relate to Donald Trump?

Well here, before addressing that question directly, is a comment by Yusef, one of our few but highly intelligent readers:

One of the things bugging me is I believe suffering in the USA will be more intense than elsewhere in the West is the USA pretty much dissolved, or drastically reduced, its social safety net, most dramatically starting in the 1980's. I'm not even sure if enough of the remaining administrative infrastructure is sufficiently strong to be revved up in this soon-to-be emergency situation. As you mentioned above, the politics of both parties, and their policies, have been in the interests of one class, and that's not been the working class. The working class had been sold out by its representatives and "leaders" and the consequences of this were becoming all too apparent even before Covid-19 delivered its coup de grace. I still think there's a lot to be said for the speculation both Covid-19 and the BLM riots and violence, are ways of deflecting blame and rage away from those sell-out politicians and those for whom they sold out. Especially the BLM riots.

In response to which we would say that, for ordinary folks, the best welfare program is a job creation program. However, in the US today, the labor of many Americans at the legislated minimum wage is not cost-competitive in a globalized labor market.

 In reaction to that fact there are two common views. There is the NeoCon view as expressed in 2016 by Kevin Williamson writing in the National Review about the white American underclass, i.e., the inhabitants of towns that lost their reason for existence as manufacturing jobs were off-shored to the sweatshops of Asia:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul."

That last bit about "they need U-Haul" being added to soften the essential message which is: "Let the useless scum die, and the sooner they kill themselves with opiates or whatever, the better."

The alternative to the "let the scum die," position, is the view that it is the government's job  to create conditions insuring the availability of work at a living wage. 

The latter was precisely the position that Donald Trump adopted during the 2016 Presidential election. And where are we now? Eleven percent unemployed versus 4% when Donald Trump took office in 2017, or about 31% according to John Williams' Shadow Stats report. 

So is Trump a traitor to the sovereign people of the United States, relying on the Covid pandemic and the BLM rioters and Abraham-Lincoln-statue tossers to provide cover, as Yusef suspects? Or is there nothing the US government could do to alleviate widespread unemployment and poverty?

The answer is clear. US unemployment is an unnecessary evil that can be largely eliminated. 

How?

(1) Restore the tariff wall behind which America rose  to be the world's dominant manufacturing power, a protectionist measure in place from 1816 until the adoption of free trade in 1945. 

(2) Enforce immigration law and restrict immigration, legal and otherwise, whenever unemployment rises above the frictional rate. 

Trump has waffled and fiddled to suggest adherence to a belief in tariffs and immigration control while achieving essentially nothing. Trump is thus, either a useless blatherskite of a traitor. As a long-time employer of thousands of low-wage immigrant hotel chamber maids and desk clerks, you might be able to guess which. 

But whichever is the case, Trump's fiddling while much of America's working class suffer the seering emotional and physical consequences of poverty serves Trump's own class—that is to say the very rich—extremely well, for as the famous British economist David Ricardo noted, 

Wages plus profits, together, are always the same.

meaning the simplest way to raise profits is to lower wages. 

And in America today corporations lower wages by: 

(1) offshoring jobs to more or less unregulated Asian sweat shops with collapsible factories and nets to stop workers killing themselves by jumping off the building; and

(2) sucking in illegal immigrants to work in the black, tax-free, economy where third-world wages prevail.

And it should be remembered that a policy of screwing the workers serves the great bureaucracies of the Western world very well too. Public sector wages are paid by the long-suffering tax payer, and are not therefore subject to the same stringent Ricardian control as those of workers in the goods and useful service producing, private sector. Thus, those in the public sector benefit from the low cost of living to which low wages give rise, while skimming high wages at the expense of rich and poor alike. 

So what do readers think? Is Trump an incompetent fool, or a traitor?

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