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GELFAND’S WORLD - There are two stories that are simultaneously peaking. Taking them in order:
(1) Was James Carville right, and Trump has now self-destructed and/or peaked?
(2) Is Trump the Taco Man, as in Trump Always Chickens Out?
The big news out of the weekend wasn't that ICE continues to flex its muscle or that immigration raids continue on the local level. The big story out of the weekend of June 14 is this: Trump's military parade was boring. That's boorrrrring. Tedious. Unexciting and uninspiring.
If you are trying to be the dictator, you need to scare people, not put them to sleep. Saturday's event hardly kept Trump himself awake, and photos of Marco Rubio yawning have gone world-wide.
It's not that Trump has suddenly ceased to be dangerous. Far from it. But the fears of fascism are receding to the extent that the populace as a whole are willing to stand up to his outrages.
We should still expect Trumpian outrages. I'm going to guess there will be 3 per week on the average, but the No Kings rallies showed that protests can happen and will happen again. The outrages will be resisted, and as the Taco-Man discussion will show, will often be reversed in short order.
Politically speaking:
If you want to get tactical about the politics and optics of the weekend's events, you will come to this conclusion: The ICE raids and consequent protests over the entirety of last week took all the air out of the room politically speaking. There wasn't a lot of room on the nightly news for upbeat stories about Saturday's parade.
The raids and protests, if nothing else, motivated a lot of people to come out to the No Kings rallies. And they did come out -- as the news kept pointing out, they showed up at "nearly 2000" such protests. Whether those No Kings rallies had 2 million people (a minimal estimate) or 10 million or 20 million, there were a lot of bodies that filled television screens. Ever hear of Golden, Colorado? It had its own rally. The greater Los Angeles area had more than enough rallies that you couldn't have visited all of them. Torrance, Long Beach, Seal Beach, Beverly Hills and so on, with the even bigger rally in downtown L.A.
Let's summarize the take-home lesson of the weekend's events: People are talking back to Donald Trump and to his Republican colleagues, in a way that minimizes the ability of fascism to take over the American experiment. As long as late-night TV hosts continue to do jokes about the president, as long as anti-Trump caucuses exist, and as long as the U.S. Army refuses to become the 1930s German equivalent, this American republic stands a chance.
That leads us to the other finding that has been communicated by none other than the nation's investment counselors: Trump Always Chickens Out. I think that the actuality is a bit different -- that the Trump negotiation style causes him to oscillate between grandiose demands and modest final positions because that, apparently, was his business style back when as a businessman, he was screwing vendors out of their payments.
On the international scene:
Inconveniently for Trump, this country's trading partners are not in the position of somebody installing furniture in the Trump casino. They come from positions of strength, and since Trump's "Liberation Day" speech, they have been willing to use that strength. Here is just one example: American automobile manufacturing is wavering because of the lack of rare earth elements that are sourced from -- get this -- China. Ford has had to shut down operations in one of its plants from time to time, as you can see here. Meanwhile, the scene out my window (L.A. Harbor) continues to be largely absent the cargo ships that used to fill the view. If you chat with dock workers or their families in local shops, you will hear the same thing -- work is way down and nobody knows when it will pick up again.
But does Trump always chicken out?
The Taco acronym caught on because people were making a bundle by buying stocks right after Trump's tariff announcements caused prices to drop. As the past few months' history shows, Trump always backtracked when he felt the pressure. As soon as the tariffs were paused, stock prices went back up.
Taco, taco man.
So how else can we interpret Trump's latest reversal -- this time on ICE raids -- as anything but Trump going Taco again? Agriculture, restaurants, and hotels are being spared from the ICE raids.
Here's from the AP:
"Trump posted on his Truth Social site Thursday that he heard from hotel, agriculture and leisure industries that his “very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them” and promised that changes would be made.
"That same day Tatum King, an official with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, wrote to regional leaders telling them to halt investigations of the agriculture industry, including meatpackers, as well as of restaurants and hotels, according to the U.S. official."
Maybe it's not just chickening out, but also includes paying off on political debts. Notice the parallel with the tariffs here: Big business -- industries which have a lot of income and can contribute substantial sums to Trump -- are spared. Notice that tens of thousands of workers in chicken processing plants and slaughterhouses are not being targeted by ICE. We might also notice that Las Vegas casinos and hotels are not being raided.
Not every industry is rich enough to be spared. The car wash industry and flea markets don't carry that kind of clout with the Taco man. Over the weekend, ICE raiders were dragging people out of bathrooms at one flea market. So Trump can still be a macho-man where it comes to flea market bathrooms.
Turnabout
There are multiple sayings in the English language that communicate "what goes around comes around," or alternatively, "turnabout is fair play." We might say it even more simply -- revenge happens. Right now, Trump is taking his revenge for being arrested and tried. He is doing so by pushing for the arrest -- or at least detaining and handcuffing -- of as many Democrats as he has the excuse to persecute. Senator Alex Padilla's detention the other day was just the latest example, but Gavin Newsom was threatened with a nonsensical arrest just a few days ago. Newsom and Padilla both responded in the right way, by figuratively spitting in the oppressor’s eye. "Bring it on, tough guy," said Newsom.
What is missing from Republican calculations about attacking California is simple: At some point, the Republicans will be out of power. If Republican policy is to treat all Democrats (and all blue states) as their enemy, it is hard to imagine that when the blue states regain power, they won't have retribution on their minds. The red states which rely on federal spending and welfare benefits -- not to mention FEMA in hurricane-prone areas -- might best be served by considering how to assuage the blue states. Republicans in the Senate are the ones in a position to do this, if only they might decide to act as Americans instead of just as Republicans.
A couple of final thoughts on this new day in the American experiment. If every Trump negotiation begins with a wild and crazy demand (those "Liberation Day" tariffs) in the expectation that some negotiated settlement that "splits the difference" will be reached, then the proper response by everyone else is to dismiss the opening demand out of hand. We've learned not to take Trump seriously at the start of any new set of demands. We understand that there will be a week or two of turmoil and that leaders of other countries will protest. The rest of us can sit back and enjoy the popcorn.
The other conclusion from the past few weeks is that Trump himself is increasingly confused and increasingly lacking in the facts. It seems strange that the current Trump is even less competent than the Trump of 2018, but the data are compelling.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]).
