My grandmother used to say, “God protects fools, madmen and the United States of America.” As we turn our eyes toward the election on Nov. 5, we certainly need the Lord’s blessing.
We don’t face a war or a (truly) major economic crisis such as the Great Depression or even the Great Recession. We are wealthy and prosperous in ways our ancestors could never have fathomed. No outside force or nation is about to take us down — we are too strong for that — but, dear Lord, we can certainly do ourselves in. Will the history of this country be that in our wealth, our power and our arrogance, we simply imploded?
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
I cannot say that former President Donald Trump will truly cause this country to fall apart, but I can certainly say the people who support him would like him to blow some things up. I see the problems — the corruption, the stasis, the decadence. Our country is deeply in debt; our population and government are being drained by large corporations who have decided the best way to make money is by sending armies of lobbyists to Washington rather than by adding value to our economy; we are overextended in our global commitments; our national government is sclerotic. But believe me when I say, no one is going to want the destruction that Trump promises to bring. The bomb will explode in all the wrong directions.
How do I know this? Just look at his prior administration.
Between 2017 and 2020, Trump ran up the national debt by $8.8 trillion; cut corporate taxes by 14 percentage points; removed ethics safeguards against hiring corporate lobbyists into the federal government (and then hired four times as many as former President Barack Obama had); hemorrhaged talented and competent staff; and undermined our global standing by threatening NATO, which was intended to contain Russia, and pulled out of multiple international agreements meant to box in countries like China and Iran.
Recall the first impeachment was because Trump tried to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to provide political dirt on now-President Joe Biden by withholding aid to help Ukraine counter Russia — hardly the behavior of someone who is going to stand strong in defense of democracy against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, Trump mismanaged a major pandemic that ultimately led to 1.1 million Americans dying and undermined faith in our elections and in our elected officials, culminating in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and instigated an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the certification of a free and fair election — leading to his second impeachment.
Looking forward, what does he offer? More of the same but bigger and better.
His proposals are projected to add as much as $15.15 trillion to the national debt (Vice President Kamala Harris is no saint of fiscal responsibility but is not as bad, maxing out an estimated $8.1 trillion). We are already spending more on interest payments alone than we spend on national defense — a very dangerous fiscal position to be in. It’s hard to imagine the self-proclaimed “king of bankruptcy” even cares enough to fix this.
His proposals would render the Social Security trust fund insolvent in six years, triggering 33% cuts across the board in social security benefits. But just as Biden had to stabilize the country after the coronavirus pandemic, the administration after Trump would be left holding the bag.
Trump is proposing to eviscerate the civil service by replacing nonpartisan professionals with his handpicked political appointees. This was something he started to do in 2020, and it is central to his future plans. Of course, there is the concern that he will turn his administration against his political opponents, but I suspect the bigger problem will be the misery of incompetent governance.
This country operated with a civil service that was entirely political appointees for most of the 19th century. The “spoils system” was wickedly corrupt, with politicians rewarding donors and supporters with government job and contract patronage. Around the turn of the 20th century, business leaders and progressives (largely Republicans) spent decades at great political cost cleaning up a bureaucracy full of incompetent political apparatchiks and replacing them with lawyers, engineers, scientists and other professionals who had the expertise to solve public problems and administer public programs.
No one likes “the bureaucracy,” but when you are in a crisis or dealing with situations that affect national defense, health, safety or economic well-being, it really matters if you have competent, experienced people in key positions. We got a taste of this in the first Trump administration when this country suffered far more than other developed nations during the coronavirus pandemic, in part because Trump had disbanded the National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, a small but critical group of experts who were supposed to coordinate a pandemic response for the federal government.
At the same time, we have come to take for granted the Pax Americana that underpins the global order. Our country has provided the military backing and supported the international institutions that have kept the peace, avoided catastrophic nuclear war and helped make this country the wealthiest in the world for more than half a century. We now live in a deeply interconnected world — that this country maintains.
Part of Trump’s critique is fair: We do police the world at great cost to this country, but we want to renegotiate these arrangements, not walk away from them. For his next administration, Trump is proposing high tariffs (read: tax increases) likely to spark a trade war with China and the rest of the world, backing away from our international agreements, abandoning Ukraine and pulling back on our NATO commitments. In essence, with “America First,” Trump and his advisers want to step back from our role in world leadership. Don’t think that this wouldn’t come at great cost to global stability and American prestige and dominance or that it would not benefit Russia, China and Iran.
I have many criticisms of Democrats. I don’t think they have built a party or platform particularly reflective of American values, nor do I think they have any great vision for solving some of the problems I listed. But if I have to live with the occasional taxpayer-funded gender transition surgery for an undocumented immigrant (as every Republican commercial these days seems to claim), then so be it. At least Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, won’t make the problems we are facing as a nation much worse. If we take Donald Trump at his word, he will.
So, I make my final plea: Please vote for Kamala Harris. If you cannot bring yourself to do this, just leave the top of the ticket blank. And may God bless and protect the United States of America.
Carolyn Bourdeaux is a former member of Congress from Georgia’s 7th District. She is a contributor to the AJC Opinion page.
