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Consequences

There is an old adage in American politics that Democrats get America into wars and Republicans get the country into economic depressions. The key to any presidency is to avoid doing both.

I spent 12 years as a county politician, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. A hard-nosed realist politically, my take is “You elect officials and then you live with the results.”

Americans re-elected Donald John Trump as president and we should accept the consequences. It’s not like President Trump has made a secret of his opinions. He considers tariffs beautiful, every agreement not signed by him personally is worthless trash, and anything not specifically forbidden by law is negotiable: Actions like putting his name on public buildings, hanging huge banners with his likeness on federal government property, tearing down the East Wing of the White House and paving over the Rose Garden or turning Washington DC into a racetrack. If something is not expressly forbidden in the Constitution and Trump wants to do it, he issues an Executive Order and does his thing, whether it be resurfacing the Reflecting Pool or holding a cage fight on the White House lawn.        

There is an Unwritten Law of Unforeseen Consequences, but until they blow up in our faces, the Trump administration seems oblivious to any consequences what-so-ever. 

IRAN. When President Obama left office, the U.S. and Iran had concluded a nuclear arms agreement specifying that Iran would not develop a nuclear weapon. Once elected president, Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement was the worst deal in history and the U.S. was withdrawing from the agreement. Cut loose from any binding agreement, Iran put the pedal to the metal and accelerated development of a nuclear weapon.

This threat led to a direct military strike against Iran by Israeli and American forces on February 28, 2026. Before that date, few members of the general public had ever heard of the Strait of Hormuz. (It sounds like a brand of hummus, Strait of Hormuz brand hummus!)

I expect the White House to be better informed than the general public (including me). Suddenly the Iranians cut off oil tanker traffic in the bottleneck Strait of Hormuz and a third of the world’s crude oil became unavailable. Duh, who knew?

There is no cleaning up this mess. The world was better off with the Obama-era agreement, left to molder in the dust of history.

The economy. The Republicans had a field day poking the Biden administration in the eye over rising gas prices. I am not an economist, so for me that branch of science seems kind of diffuse. Does it really matter if the U.S. has a trade imbalance with China? It’s all numbers. If both countries wanted, you could officially erase the debt tomorrow and just start over. I realize that is unrealistic, but it is not impossible.

What does it mean when America’s national debt has topped 40 trillion dollars?

One thing seems obvious, tariffs are not a good remedy for what ails the U.S. economy. Even I notice when gas prices hit $4 a gallon and grocery prices rise by a third.

The Kennedy Center. If you don’t live in the Washington DC area, this last discussion may seem uninteresting, but I feel it is symptomatic of the current administration’s willful blindness. Someone should point out for White House spokespeople and Department of Justice lawyers that calling an elephant pink doesn’t give us a herd of pink elephants.

The Kennedy Center is the top fine arts venue in the nation’s capital. It is also a bastion of liberals and Democrats, as the name implies. Not especially welcome there, for years, Trump ignored it. Then he decided to make it his own. He issued an Execulive Order adding his name to the building’s façade and he replaced the entire board of directors with allies and supporters. The sad news is that these actions resulted in artists and patrons abandoning the Trump-Kennedy Center as too partisan and reflective of President Trump personally. Unhappy with the current administration, they stopped participating, leaving the venue with very few patrons, fewer donors, almost no artists and in a hellish position financially.

Wake up, America! How many mistakes are too many mistakes?