Michael Barone avoids over-the-top denunciations and instead focuses on substantive analysis in his first-year assessment of the Trump presidency for the Washington Examiner.
2016 turned out to be a year in which it was wise to take Donald Trump as a political candidate seriously but not literally, in the inspired phrase of the Washington Examiner’s Pittsburgh-based columnist Salena Zito. As 2017 is on the point of vanishing, it’s worth asking whether it’s time to take Trump seriously, if not literally, as a public policy maker.
At least that’s the approach of two heterodox policy analysts, one a persistent skeptic and the other an early Trump fan.
The skeptic is George Mason University economist and Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen. Like most economists, he tends to favor free trade and has not been converted by Trump’s rants and tweets.
But he sees a pattern where others see only mayhem. “The real significance of the Trump economic revolution,” he wrote In a Bloomberg column, earlier this month, “is a focus on investment.” …
… America has proved competitive at the top levels. But a country whose labor force is always going to include many low-skill workers may have some continuing interest in incentivizing low-skill employment. That’s not Cowen’s view or mine, but it’s apparently President Trump’s. Maybe it’s not just dismissible as crazy ranting.
Something similar may be said for the Trump foreign policy, considered as a perhaps unstable amalgam of his sober drafted national security Strategy and his sometimes impulsive tweets. This view explicated by David P. Goldman, writing this month in the Asia Times.
Trump’s view, Goldman argues, is of an America that is more competitive than cooperative, not necessarily hostile to others but not willing to rely on assertions of abstract common interests.
