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The Trump/Biden Handoff: Back to Business as Usual, as Usual

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Joe Biden (photo by Gage Skidmore) and Donald Trump (photo by Shealah Craighead). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Joe Biden (photo by Gage Skidmore) and Donald Trump (photo by Shealah Craighead). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Few will find it surprising that the incoming Biden administration looks, in both form and function, a lot like the Obama administration of 2009-2017. After all, Joe Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice-president for those eight years. His staff and cabinet appointments comprise a veritable Who’s Who of Obama holdovers and members of Biden’s own political circle, built over decades in the Senate and White House.

Some might, however,  be surprised to at how closely Biden’s administration will likely resemble outgoing President Donald Trump’s, both personnel- and policy-wise. The new boss looks a lot like the old boss, minus a flair for the melodramatic. And the old boss looked a lot like the older boss, too.

Trump’s 2016 campaign, and his actions in office, were a classic case of multiple personality disorder.

He ran on “draining the swamp,” all the while recruiting support from, then staffing up with, the usual gang of ward-heelers and lobbyists.

He ran on a less interventionist foreign policy, when he wasn’t bragging about being “the most militaristic” candidate and promising to “rebuild” an already bloated military. Then he escalated every war he inherited from his predecessor (and re-booted the old US war in Somalia), after which he tried to pass of his draw-downs to 2016 troop levels in Syria and Afghanistan as “withdrawing” and did his damnedest to bait Iran into a new war.

He ran on cutting taxes. His income tax cuts were intended to be temporary (the bill doubled the standard deduction for two years while eliminating the personal exemption permanently — Congress made things permanent later), included a “soak the rich” scheme (the State And Local Tax deduction cap), and were more than eclipsed by the tariffs he levied on American buyers of foreign goods to “protect” the American industries with the most effective lobbyists.

He ran on cutting regulations, and issued an executive order that he claimed required federal bureaucracies to repeal two regulations for each new one. It really only required those bureaucracies to “identify” two regulations “for” repeal, not actually repeal them. As of three days before his inauguration, the Federal Register included 1,079,651 regulations.  On December 31, 2020, that number was 1,090,371.

He ran on cutting entitlements and “welfare,” then presided over the highest levels of both since the New Deal. Not reluctantly, but joyfully. And not solely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but starting with lavish farm subsidies to off-set the damage his trade wars did to American agriculture.

On the “culture war” side, his embrace of identity politics differed from the American pseudo-“left” version only in terms of the complexions, sexual orientations, and gender identities of those he championed versus those he condemned.

Even on his signature issue, immigration, he came in second — behind Barack Obama and Joe Biden — on numbers of immigrants deported.

The differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden are and always have been soap opera differences rather than substantive differences. Americans looking for more freedom from either were and are looking in the wrong places. Business as usual never paused.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

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The No Fly List: More Dangerous than the Capitol Rioters

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Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

As I write this, the Capitol Hill riot of January 6 is enjoying its extended 15 minutes of fame, complete with straight-faced comparisons to December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001.

In hindsight, it will hopefully (and hopefully quickly) shrink to its real-life proportions: A few thousand hysterical Donald Trump supporters, and likely at most a few dozen truly dangerous thugs, protested against what they claimed was a stolen election. Then they stormed and vandalized a building, scared some politicians, and killed a cop (who turned out to be a Trump supporter himself).

No, it wasn’t pretty. Neither was the March 1, 1954 attack on the Capitol in which Puerto Rican nationalists shot and wounded five members of Congress, or Frank Eugene Corder’s September 12, 1994 suicide by plane on the White House’s south lawn. Last time I checked, those dates were no more occasions of somber remembrance than January 6 is likely to become. In the grand scheme of things, they were all teapot tempests.

The real and lasting damage of the Capitol riot will come not from the riot itself but from its exploitation by authoritarians of all stripes. The Rahm Emanuel strategy — “never allow a good crisis to go to waste when it’s an opportunity to do things that you had never considered, or that you didn’t think were possible” — is in full play, in the form of “let’s stack new evil ideas on top of existing evil ideas.”

One such new evil idea, advocated by politicians on both sides of the partisan aisle, is adding those accused of participating in the Capitol riot to the Terrorist Screening Center’s “No Fly List.”

The No Fly List was sold as a way of protecting US air traffic from terrorist attack by barring suspected terrorists from flying. In reality, it’s just a secret government enemies list that’s grown from 16 names to tens of thousands since the 9/11 attacks.

You have no way of knowing if you’re on the list until and unless you’re prevented from boarding a plane. You have no way of finding out WHY you’re on the list even then. You can politely ask the US Department of Homeland Security to remove you from the list, and they can politely tell you no. If you have the means, you can go to court, maybe win, maybe lose. The US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled the list unconstitutional in 2019, but the list is still there.

One previous item from the Bag of Stupid No Fly List Tricks was barring those on the No Fly List from purchasing firearms.  Fortunately that scheme has repeatedly failed (despite support from, among others, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and pseudo-Libertarian 2016 vice-presidential candidate William Weld). It was a bad idea. So is this one.

The power to prevent a person from traveling without even charging, let alone convicting, that person of a crime (or even notifying the victim!) isn’t a power we should have even considered letting government have at all.  Rather than allow its expansion, it’s time to demand its abolition.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

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The Political Class: At War with Each Other and on the Rest of Us

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Execution of Louis XVI, by Georg Heinrich Sieveking. Public Domain.
Execution of Louis XVI, by Georg Heinrich Sieveking. Public Domain.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible,” President John F. Kennedy said in a 1962 speech, “will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Nearly 60 years later, two warring groups within the American political class seem resolutely determined to make “peaceful revolution” — by which JFK seems to have meant orderly democratic decision-making — impossible.

Supporters of Donald Trump rejected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and, with his active if  deniably worded encouragement, rioted in a tantrum intended to overturn that election’s results.

Trump’s opponents immediately and predictably responded with calls for a reign of terror to suppress “sedition.” US Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) asked the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to add Trump supporters who have yet to be convicted of (or, in many cases, even charged with) any crime to the unconstitutional “no-fly list.” Newly elected US Representative Cori Bush (D-MO) filed a resolution calling for the expulsion from Congress of members who objected (as House rules allow) to certification of the election results.

Big Tech promptly swung into action in support of the latter side. The two largest social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, banned Team Trump’s major voices and vowed to block or delete posts that call Team Pelosi’s line into question. Google, Apple, and Amazon colluded to take another social media platform, Parler, offline with the obvious purpose of denying Team Trump’s supporters any venue for expressing wrongthink.

If you’re looking for good guys, you won’t find them on either side of this fight. It’s a fight between two factions of the political class, with Big Tech trying to appease and co-opt one of those two factions. It’s neither a revolution nor a fight for freedom. It’s just a schoolyard brawl over which gang gets to rule. The interests of ordinary Americans aren’t represented.

But ordinary Americans do seem to be rallying in great numbers  to one side or the other. Whoever said “there’s a sucker born every minute” was low-balling it. The political class is well practiced at duping most of us into thinking we have skin in their power games.

That’s a big problem. Peaceful revolution, which would require an orderly dissolution, or at least devolution, of the US government, isn’t on the table. Neither major political class gang is willing to allow it on the table, because it would deprive them of power.

Fortunately, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Sooner or later, sufficient numbers will wise up, rise up, and put an end to this nonsense.

The Trump base, as personified by the DC rioters, is hardly an unstoppable force. But neither are its opponents an immovable object. The fates of Louis XVI, Nicholas II, and Nicolae Ceausescu are the alternative to peaceful revolution.

This dust-up is only one front in a larger war: A war by both gangs upon the rest of us. A war for power. A war for control. Neither gang will ultimately win that war. Their choice is whether to lose peaceably or violently.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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