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“Judging by his reaction to a reporter’s question this week, Donald Trump doesn’t like it when you ask him about ‘TACO,’ the reported Wall Street acronym for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’ – an assumption that makes it safe to be in the market even when the president threatens Europe and China with intensifications of his trade war,” Ross Douthat recently wrote in The New York Times.
“Even if he dislikes the barnyard-fowl comparison, though, the acronym gets at something that’s crucial to Trump’s political resilience. The willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable, and the promise of chickening out is part of Trump’s implicit pitch to swing voters — reassuring them that anything extreme is also provisional, that he’s always testing limits (on policy, on power) but also generally willing to pull back.”
Jason Lange of Reuters wrote last month: “President Donald Trump’s approval rating rose this week as Americans worried less about his handling of the economy and prospects of a recession, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.”
Added Douthat: “And lo and behold, his poll numbers have floated back up, not to genuine popularity but to a perfectly normal level for a president in a polarized country.”
So is the TACO tactic, if it is a tactic, and the prospect of cheaper stuff what it takes to make fat cats and working stiffs feel better about the convicted felon/authoritarian wannabe in the White House?
Aided and abetted by MAGA true believers and the profiles in cowardice crowd that constitute the GOP these days, Trump is hellbent on turning the clock back to the 1950s and 1960s when straight conservative white men ran the country, when women were supposed to be cheerful and obedient wives and helpmeets who gladly stayed home and had kids, when Blacks were invisible, when Hispanics stayed south of the border, when LGBTQ folks stayed in the closet, and when cops didn’t have to worry excessively about due process and equal protection of the laws.
Robert Reich, who heads Inequality Media, says 45/47 really wants to push the clock back more than 130 years.”Donald Trump wants you to think that he’s bringing back the ‘Golden Age’ of economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s,” he wrote in a recent email introducing a new video on the subject. “But in reality, he’s dragging us toward something else: the Gilded Age of the 1890s.
Explained the pundit, scholar, author and President Bill Clinton’s labor secretary: “The Gilded Age was dominated both economically and politically by a privileged elite – at the expense of everyone else.”
Trump is all in with the rampant racism, sexism, nativism, and homophobia that characterized the first two decades after World War II. The bigotry was even deeper in the Gilded Age.
But Trump, according to Reich, is more partial to the Gilded Age because back then unions were few, and most workers toiled long hours at low pay, risking, and often losing, lives and limbs in dangerous factory, mine and mill jobs.
“In the three decades that followed World War Two, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen,” Reich wrote.”During those years, the earnings of the typical American worker doubled, just as the size of the American economy doubled.”
Added Reich: “By 1954, 35% of American workers were union members, corporate taxes were around 50%, and the top marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was 91%.
“That is exactly what Trump and his Republican allies want to roll back. He wants the rich to be richer, unions to be weaker, and everyone else to be easier to exploit.”
Warned Reich: “So next time you hear him talking about how much wealthier Americans will be, remember that he’s not talking about you.”
Time will tell If the TACO Tango works for the president, and if John and Jane Q. Citizen really do care more about lower priced eggs than about Trump turning the Constitution into a birdcage bottom liner. If both eventualities become realities, then authoritarianism is just around the corner.
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