Broken clocks and blind squirrels

We elected an impulsive 71-year-old teenager president of the United States, and now we’re dealing with the consequences.
           
Many of us have known this for years, but suddenly, even Trump’s most dyed in the wool supporters are getting queasy at the thought of an aimless trade war with no stated purpose other than to stroke his own ego and get us “a great deal.” It seems that he and I define the phrase in vastly different terms.
           
If the president truly wants to bring back American manufacturing and ensure that we make everything right here within our walled off borders, he’s going to have to do something radical: abolish the minimum wage altogether and let the race to the bottom begin.
           
There’s a reason the U.S. loses jobs to third world countries: it’s because we have labor standards, regulations, organized workers and other checks on corporate power that force companies to do things they may not otherwise have any interest in doing. Some call it “big government,” while others call it “making sure that poor people can maintain some semblance of their self-worth without utilizing quite as much government assistance.”
 
I know Trump isn’t big on reading, but he should take a gander at The Grapes of Wrath during his next break from tweeting and see how that played out for everyone involved. Has anyone ever sat back and wondered why so many unfamiliar faces from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala suddenly showed up in places like Marshalltown, Hampton and Storm Lake? It couldn’t possibly have a thing to do with large corporations slashing wages and busting unions in undesirable professions.
           
To call this latest push foolish is an understatement. Chuck Grassley, Joni Ernst, David Young, Dave Loebsack and Steve King have all come together against it, and anyone who farms or does any sort of business around here should be worried. The economy is global, and to believe that we can magically bring all production back to the U.S. is asinine—no matter what that horde of MAGA Facebook commenters tells you.
           
“For one, you cannot build a grain bin out of a paper bag or plow a field with a toothpick.  You see, our farmers rely on steel and aluminum for the products and equipment that make farms work,” Ernst wrote in a press release.“Imported products like these are used to keep farm operations moving and making money. Higher prices on such products drastically increase the cost of doing business.”
           
Preach, Joni. Of course, none of this matters. The Donald got an idea in his head, and he’s sticking to it—anything to distract from the ever-widening Russia investigation, the fact that we’ll never get the “big, beautiful wall” we were promised or that governing a world power isn’t as easy as starring in a reality television show.
           
Throughout his presidency, Trump has been keen on saving anachronistic industries and ideas—coal mining, making America great “again,” opening up our libel laws and imposing counterproductive tariffs—and it’s hard to know which pet cause he’ll take up next. Farmers, however, were one of the core constituencies that put him in office in the first place, and it suddenly seems that he’s turning his back on them to satisfy his own personal whims.
 
Unless he can find a way to force developing nations to adopt all of our labor standards and/or corporations to abide by a more stringent moral code, Trump should leave this one alone, but we all know he won’t. So it goes.
 
Alas, our fearless leader has the strange ability to do something objectively positive and rational when we least expect it, and if he can get Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table, good on him. One of his few redeeming qualities during the 2016 campaign was his break from the GOP orthodoxy (and Hillary) on war all the time in every country.
 
Trump, being Trump, scared us a bit with his “fire and fury” talk (isn’t there a book with that title?), but despite the chorus of skepticism among lifetime appointee CNN panelists, Beltway think tank insiders funded by defense contractors and liberals who reflexively oppose anything he says or does, having faith in the power of diplomacy isn’t a completely naïve concept. It beats the heck out of the alternative.
 
Donald Trump is a contradictory, confounding scatterbrain with a million different ideas, many of them bad. But if we can’t give him credit when he steps up to the plate and attempts to do right by people of the United States of America who elected him, what does that say about us?