Reuseable Trump straws in durable plastic never stop keeping you hydrated.  Now available for $15 a pack; proceeds go to a worthy cause: Trump re-election campaign.

“Now you can finally be free from liberal paper straws that fall apart within minutes and ruin your drink,” stated Trump Campaign Manager Brad Parscale in a fundraising email. “Trump Straws are custom made with the Official Trump Logo, recyclable and reusable, and, as always, 100% MADE IN AMERICA.”

Liking him or not doesn’t matter:  He is the one stopping the climate lunatics from taking over the asylum.

Joel Kotkin makes sense of the confusing US politics around the 2020 presidential campaigning. He writes A class guide to the 2020 presidential election in Orange County Register. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

America’s electorate in 2020 has been dissected by race, region, cultural attitudes and gender. But the most important division may well be, in a nation that has become profoundly unequal, along class lines. All politicians, from Donald Trump to Elizabeth Warren, portray themselves as “fighting for the middle class” and “working families.”

Yet our increasingly neo-feudal America is best broken down into four broad groups — the oligarchs, the clerisy, the yeomanry and the serfs. The oligarchs dominate the economic realm, including control of information media. Below them are sometimes allied members of the clerisy, the well-educated middle class who set the country’s intellectual and cultural context.

Below them are the two most numerous classes — the property-owning yeomanry and, most numerous of all, the expanding new serfdom. Understanding these groups provides a valuable insight into 2020’s realities.

The candidates of the oligarchy

The oligarchs, roughly the top .01 percent, now own the highest share of wealth in almost a century. They can fund nonprofits, media outlets, campaigns and political action committees with almost unlimited largesse. The oligarchy’s wealthiest and most influential members hail from the tech sector, Wall Street and Hollywood. In recent decades they have created a plutocrat-funded Democratic Party backing economically non-threatening but culturally and environmentally liberal figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

At first Joe Biden seemed to be winning the battle for oligarchal support. But his poor performance has opened the field for Kamala Harris, who enjoys long-standing financial ties, both political and through her husband’s law practice, to big media companies, telecom providers, Hollywood and, most of all, Silicon Valley. Harris offers gentry liberal delight — telegenic, smart, female, non-white but without posing the threat to oligarchal power represented by Elizabeth Warren and, even worse, Bernie Sanders.

Trump, of course, also boasts oligarchal supporters from older sectors of the corporate elite — retail chain owners, builders of single-family homes, manufacturing and energy executives. Given the Democratic embrace of the Green New Deal, massive redistribution of income and reversing corporate tax cuts, a lot of old economy money will flow into Dr. Demento’s coffers this time around.

The clerisy’s favorite

What analyst Michael Lind calls the “overclass” — made up of academics, the media and well-paid professionals — represents some 15 percent of the American workforce. This group has done better than the traditional middle class, let alone the working class, but over the past few decades has lost much ground against the oligarchs, who have reaped the vast majority of the economic gains.

Like the rising professional classes of the gilded age, many in the clerisy are offended by the huge wealth of the oligarchs. Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren reprises the role performed by Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson over a century ago. Her most radical proposals target not the affluent middle class but the super-rich, notably through anti-trust, while her wealth tax impacts only people with over $50 million. Most of her financial support, not surprisingly, comes from women’s groups and academics. Only Pete Buttigieg, with his base of gay support, comes close to competing in the intersectional sweepstakes.

Warren’s insistence on calling herself a “capitalist” separates her from Bernie Sanders’ full-throated socialism, with its odd Soviet nostalgia. It helps her appealing to those who still have something to protect. Sanders also loses by dint of his race and sex; Warren may have to failed to prove her Native American credentials, but her gender remains an asset at a time when being old, white and male is not the preferred brand among progressives.

The Yeomanry: Trump’s to lose

Most of America sees itself as middle class. But there’s a growing gap between the yeomanry — small business and property owners — and the clerisy as well as a vast, expanding class of permanently landless permanent serfs. Most members of the yeomanry work in the private sector; unlike the clerisy, for them government regulation provides not employment, but a burden.

They gained little from the largely asset-based prosperity of the Obama years but have done far better under Trump Many suburban dwellers and property owners may find Trump personally abhorrent (which is easy to do) but are directly threatened by a Democratic Party anxious to force up worker wages, control rents, boost regulations and raise taxes.

Many of these voters also would not like to give up their private health insurance, which Warren, Sanders and, intermittently, Harris have demanded. As the Democrats go further left, this constituency is likely to line up largely with Trump or simply abstain, given the awfulness of the choices.

Serfs and the “blue tidal wave”

The property-less working class does not tend to vote as much as the yeomanry, but their numbers are growing. Some are déclassé millennials unable to launch full careers or afford to buy houses. Unlike previous generations, they also have been reluctant to start businesses.

Many of the new serf class inhabit the precariat, a modern proletariat lacking the protections of steady work and trade unions. Many participate in the gig economy as Uber drivers, trainers, personal assistants and contract technicians. Most depend on their gigs for their livelihood income, and they are often lowly paid; according to one study nearly half of gig workers in California are under the poverty line.

With little stake in the capitalist economy, the youthful members of the precariat have been drawn to the socialist appeals of Sanders and, increasingly, Warren. The leftist American Prospect sees them driving a potential new “blue tidal wave.”

Yet if economics may impel this class toward the Democrats, two factors may work against them, particularly those who did not attend college and are older. First, low-income workers, including minorities, generally have done better under Trump than under Obama, something the president’s handlers will no doubt emphasize.

The other is support for such things as reparations, health care for the undocumented, open borders and virtually unlimited right to abortion. These positions may not play well in blue-collar communities, particularly in the Midwest, Great Plains and the south. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination cannot win based only on support from the clerical and oligarchal elites but also by winning over the serf vote, which they now are in danger of squandering.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).

I don’t do many posts on politics, but am reblogging this essay as especially insightful. It comes from Loren Thompson, a Democratic political operative experienced with US Presidential campaigns, and who is not rooting for Trump. He writes in Forbes Five Principles That Will Power President Trump’s Reelection. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

If you are eagerly awaiting each new development in America’s quadrennial drama to select a president, then please regard the opening sentence to this commentary as a spoiler alert.

I have seen this movie before, and I know how it turns out. In fact, I have seen the movie several times.

I was there in 1972 when President Nixon soundly defeated the left-wing candidacy of George McGovern. I was actually in the McGovern campaign, and I was in on the early stages of the Dukakis campaign 16 years later, when George H.W. Bush defeated the liberal Massachusetts governor. I wasn’t associated with the Mondale campaign in 1984, but it was pretty much the same plot: left-wing Democrat wiped out by right-wing Republican. Mondale, like McGovern, only managed to carry one state (Dukakis won eight).

So, as the candidates seeking next year’s Democratic presidential nomination compete to outdo each other on issues like socializing medicine, opening borders and providing racial reparations, I think I have a pretty good idea of how this drama is going to turn out.

President Trump is going to be reelected.

With Democratic presidential hopefuls steadily trending Left, President Trump has good reason to be smiling about his reelection prospects. OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY SHEALAH CRAIGHEAD

The American electorate simply doesn’t like left-wing ideologues. You can trace this pattern back over a hundred years to the defeat of William Jennings Bryan in three different presidential runs, during each of which he offered radical cures for what supposedly ailed the country. Even in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR knew he had to run as a centrist and populist rather than a socialist to bolster his chances of getting elected (Carter and Clinton successfully embraced the same lesson).

Today’s Democrats have decided they can’t win the party’s nomination unless they go far Left, and that will be their undoing come November of next year. As we have all learned the hard way, the Internet has a memory. Trying to move to the center after securing the party’s nomination doesn’t work the way it once did because the other side won’t let you forget all those awful things you said during the primary season about ICE, gun owners, coal miners et. al.

But wait, you say. Isn’t Trump different from past candidates—so eccentric that the usual rules applying to electoral outcomes aren’t operative? I don’t think so. His reelection campaign will massage the president’s policy initiatives and pronouncements into a platform that sounds like something Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan would have had no trouble supporting.

In fact, I can already predict in advance what that streamlined expression of Trump principles will look like. Unlike the Democratic platform, which will consist almost entirely of domestic economic and social issues, the Trump principles will be heavy on security and nationalism. When the smoke clears late on Election Day, Trump will have prevailed against the Democrats’ latter-day Dukakis. And here are the ideas that will do the trick.

Peace. Trump said this week that if he hadn’t been elected, the U.S. would be at war with North Korea. That’s a stretch, but he has demonstrated repeatedly that he is not eager to use America’s military overseas. In addition to smothering North Korean despot Kim Jong Un with love, he has signaled from day one he wanted to get along with a nuclear-armed Russia; refrained from bombing Iran; tried to pull all remaining U.S. troops out of Syria; avoided sending forces to remove Venezuela’s discredited dictator; and told his advisors he wants to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. Having watched what happened in past presidential elections to parties that were blamed for unpopular wars, Trump is not going to let anybody accuse him of being a military interventionist.

Prosperity. The single most reliable indicator of whether an incumbent president will be reelected is whether the economy is doing well. Under Trump, the economy is going gangbusters—in fact, better than most economists predicted was even possible. With unemployment at record lows and the stock market at record highs, there isn’t even a hint of inflation. Trump stimulated an economy thought to be in the late stages of expansion, and gave it a new lease on life. Democrats will say his trade policies are undermining prosperity, but the nation’s yawning trade deficit actually cuts a full percentage point off the economic growth rate each year, so there’s a link between all his tariffs and bolstering prosperity.

Sovereignty. If a country can’t control its borders and can’t stop foreign entities from interfering in its domestic affairs, then it has diminished sovereignty. Nationalists like Trump believe the sovereignty of nation-states, at least legitimate ones, should be absolute. So of course the fact that apprehensions of illegal migrants on the southern border were averaging over 3,000 per day in April is an issue, especially given uncertainty as to how many illegals were not apprehended. And signing onto multilateral treaties like the Paris climate accords or the Trans-Pacific Partnership can also be construed as potentially infringing sovereignty. Trump’s campaign will say he wants to restore America’s control of its destiny. How the Democrats will explain their incoherent approach to border security is anyone’s guess.

Self-sufficiency. Like sovereignty, self-sufficiency is not a term Trump would likely invoke at a campaign rally. But the two ideas are related. Trump doesn’t subscribe to the theory of comparative advantage among nations, or to free trade, or to economic globalization, because he believes every nation is out to get the best deal for itself even if that means breaking the rules. In that regard, the international economy is not much different from the New York real-estate market where Trump made his fortune. So rather than sacrificing his generation to a principle (as Churchill might have put it), Trump wants America to be self-sufficient in key commodities and manufactured items. That’s why he tells Apple to make its iPhones here, and Mercedes to make its cars here. He doesn’t care if that violates trade rules—and neither do most voters.

Energy. I’m not talking about fossil fuels here, I’m talking about initiative. Trump is an activist who is relentless about pursuing his agenda, whether the topic is deregulation of the economy or denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. His energy level surpasses the performance of any president in living memory, and once he decides what his goals are he doesn’t pay much attention to critics. Having an activist at the helm conveys a sense of dynamism about the administration and the nation that is largely missing from the politics of other nations. You don’t need to agree with Trump’s agenda to see why nobody in Republican circles is talking about “passing the torch.”

Peace, prosperity, sovereignty, self-sufficiency and energy are the ideas that will win President Trump a second term. A handful of Democratic hopefuls such as Mayor Pete might give Trump a run for his money in the general election, but any candidate espousing a left-leaning agenda in a strong economy is doomed to failure. That’s what the historic record shows. Trump’s low approval rating don’t really matter, because come Election Day, many voters will be casting their ballots against a candidate they can’t stand, rather than to support a candidate they like. That’s the way these things usually play out.

The Editorial Board of Issues and Insights tells the story ignored by others in their article Trump Just Revolutionized Health Care — And Nobody Noticed. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Few have ever heard of “Health Reimbursement Accounts,” but they could fundamentally change the nation’s health care system — for the better — and destroy the Democrats’ case for socialized health care.

Late last week, the Trump administration finalized rules that will let companies put money into tax-exempt HRAs that their employees could then use to buy an individual insurance plan on their own. Seems like no big deal, right? Except it will start to unravel a 77-year-old policy mistake that is largely responsible for many of the problems the health care system suffers today.

Back in 1942, the Roosevelt administration imposed wage and price controls on the economy. But it exempted employer-provided benefits like health insurance, and the IRS later decreed that these benefits wouldn’t be taxed as income.

The result was to massively tilt the health insurance playing field toward employer-provided insurance. Today 88% of those with private insurance get it at work.

The massive tax subsidy — now valued at more than $300 billion — also encouraged overly generous health plans, because any health care paid by insurers was tax exempt, while out of pocket spending had to come from after-tax dollars.

So not only did this Roosevelt-era mistake create an employer-dominated health insurance market, it made consumers largely indifferent to the cost of care, since the vast bulk of it was picked up by a third party.

But while health care experts across the political spectrum recognize this mistake, Democrats’ response has been to get the government even more involved in health care, with the latest proposal a total government takeover under the guise of “Medicare for All.”

Republicans, to their credit, have been pushing in the opposite direction. The introduction of Health Savings Accounts — a GOP reform idea Democrats fiercely opposed — 14 years ago helped to remedy one of the tax distortions, by allowing some people to pay out of pocket costs with pre-tax money.

Even with all the restrictions Congress put on HSAs, the market for high-deductible HSA plans exploded — climbing from nothing in 2005 to nearly 30% of the employer market today. By the end of last years, consumers had saved up $10 billion in these accounts.

The rise in these “consumer directed” plans was at least partially responsible for the slow-down in health spending in recent years, according to official government reports, as consumers increasingly started shopping around.

Trump’s HRA rules will have a far more profound impact.

Under the plan, employers will be able to fund tax-free Health Reimbursement Accounts for their workers, who can then use the money to buy an individual insurance plan — thereby taking another step toward fixing the 77-year-old tax distortion. The rule also lets employers fund a different account to buy cheaper “short-term” plans.

“This subtle, technical tweak has the potential to revolutionize the private health insurance market,” wrote Avik Roy, one of the smartest health care experts around, in the Washington Post.

The administration figures that 800,000 employers will eventually move to HRA plans, and 11 million workers will get their benefits this way.

At the same time, Trump also loosened the federal rules that had needlessly impeded “association health plans.” These are plans that let members of various groups band together to buy insurance. The result will be more competition, and more affordable choices for millions of people.

The Democrats’ response? Attack these changes as another attempt by Trump to “sabotage” Obamacare. What they really fear, however, is that the two new rules will destroy their case for socialized medicine.

As Roy put: “Together, over time, these changes would give workers more transparency into — and more control over — the health-care dollars that are now spent by other people on their behalf. That transparency and control, in turn, would create a powerful market incentive for health-care payers and providers to lower prices and increase quality.”

Once that happens, the last thing these millions of newly empowered health care shoppers will want is to be shuffled into a one-size-fits-all government plan designed for the masses by socialists like Bernie Sanders.

Special Counsel Mueller is exiting the stage.  In taking his final bow, he emulated Yasser Arafat, famous for never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity.  The editors of IBD explain how, instead of seizing the moment to do the right thing, Mueller completely failed his profession and his country.

Mueller’s Final Statement Turns Jurisprudence On Its Head. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller today spent 10 minutes publicly stating that his 448-page, two-part, $35 million and 22-months-in-the-making report speaks for itself, as he announced he was closing shop and retiring. In so doing, he said he couldn’t charge a sitting President with a crime, but if he could have exonerated him he would have said so.

This starkly politicizes presidential investigations going forward and indicts, if we may say so, the already-dubious system of weaponizing a lawyer with a blank check, no deadline, and an open-ended mandate for him to fish where he likes with minimal oversight.

“If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime,” Mueller said. “We concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime.”

What kind of strange new standard is Mueller setting here?

Mueller had all the time and money he could want, recorded countless hours of testimony, compiled a mountain of documents, got multiple plea deals, chased down out every conceivable lead, and then says he couldn’t prove the president didn’t commit a crime.

Since when is the job of prosecutors to determine innocence beyond a reasonable doubt? And, short of that, feel free to dump all the evidence that didn’t lead to a criminal charge, but that makes the defendant look a suspect nonetheless.

How would the average American citizen like this said of him or her after a couple of years of 18 prosecutors scrutinizing his or her affairs? After reviewing all the evidence, we don’t have enough evidence to say that John Doe robbed that store. But we can’t say definitively that he didn’t rob that store, so here’s a bunch of embarrassing revelations about him that we uncovered along the way. Have fun.

When the Mueller report came out, I&I’s Tom McArdle noted “that in the United States, we don’t let prosecutors publicly blemish the reputations of law-abiding citizens for actions that fall short of criminality. At least we didn’t until special counsel Robert Mueller.”

A prosecutor’s job is — or at least used to be — to charge or not charge, not choose this or that shade of gray.

Mueller compounds this error with an equally nonsensical claim that he’s somehow protecting Trump. Mueller says the only reason he didn’t bring criminal charges against Trump for obstruction was because the President can’t be charged with a crime while serving in office.

“It would be unfair,” he said in his statement, “to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.”

But what Mueller has done is worse. He’s left the public with the impression that Trump is — nudge, nudge, wink, wink — guilty of something, even if Mueller can’t say what exactly it is. And in doing so, he’s laying the groundwork for Democrats to impeach Trump, without ever having to actually accuse Trump of anything. How exactly is that fair?

Ex-terrorism prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of National Review noted earlier this month that Mueller had options if he actually thought Trump had committed a crime. If there were a case against Trump, he says, “then it is the prosecutor’s job to recommend indictment. The question of whether the (Office of Legal Counsel) guidance should then be invoked to delay indictment should then be up to the attorney general. The guidance should not burden the prosecutor’s analysis of whether there is an indictable case. Yet Mueller chose not to see it that way.”

Mueller’s dark hints of wrongdoing will no doubt add fuel to the Democrats’ longstanding desire to start impeachment proceedings.

In the wake of what will go down as the most outrageous curtain call in the history of political Washington, it is now hard to explain his report and his concluding statement in any way other than impeachment having been Robert Mueller’s design all along.

Comment:  

We have reached the logical conclusion of identity politics:  Trump is guilty of being Trump.  That’s that, and that’s enough.  The tribe has spoken.

Brett Arends writes at Market Watch The media is lying to you about Trump’s China tariffs. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The hysteria must have a political agenda because the amount that’s being charged is peanuts.

Are you kidding me?

I’m used to partisan, inaccurate drivel from all sides these days, but the media’s coverage of President Trump’s tariffs and the so-called “trade war” takes some kind of cake.

There’s no serious doubt that some in the media would absolutely love to tank the stock market. They figure that would hurt Trump’s re-election chances in 2020. Monday’s stock market slump, which saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.48% tumble 2.4% and the Nasdaq Composite 3.4%, looked just like what the doctor ordered.

I write this, incidentally, as someone who is no fan of the president. But I remember when politics was supposed to stop at the water’s edge.

And, anyway, facts are facts. Most of what the public is being told about these tariffs is either misleading or a downright lie.

I’ve been following the coverage all weekend with my jaw on the floor.

Uncle Sam benefits
Yes, tariffs are “costs.” But they do not somehow destroy our money. They do not take our hard-earned dollars and burn them in a big pile. Tariffs are simply federal taxes. That’s it. The extra costs paid by importers, and consumers, goes to Uncle Sam, to distribute as he sees fit, including, for example, on Obamacare subsidies.

It wasn’t long ago the media was complaining because Trump was cutting taxes. Now it’s complaining he’s raising them. Confused? Me too.

And the amounts involved are trivial. Chicken feed.

President Trump just hiked tariffs from 10% to 25% on about $200 billion in Chinese imports. In other words, he just raised taxes by … $30 billion a year.

Oh, no!

The total amount we all paid in taxes last year — federal, state and local — was $5.51 trillion. This tax increase that has everyone’s panties in a twist is a rounding error.

Investors panic needlessly
Meanwhile, the total value wiped off U.S. stocks during Monday’s panic was about $700 billion. More than 20 years’ worth of the new tariffs.

Even if Trump slapped 25% taxes on all Chinese imports, it would come to a tax hike of … $135 billion a year. U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) last year: $20.5 trillion.

So even this supposedly scary “escalation” of this “tariff war” would, er, raise our total tax bill from 26.9% of GDP all the way to 27.5% of GDP.

Oh, and isn’t it interesting to see some people’s priorities? Apparently the most shocking part of this trivial tax hike is that it might raise the price of new Apple AAPL, +1.16% iPhones.

Last I checked, these were luxury items, right?

U.S. consumers gain
Meanwhile, the trade spat seems to be bringing down food prices. China is going to take less of our farm products. So wheat prices are down 20% since the start of the year. Soybeans are at 10-year lows.

Good for consumers, right?

No, no, of course not! Silly you. This is also bad news … for farmers!

And all this ignores the much bigger picture, anyway.

The tariffs are simply a means to an end. The president is trying to get China to start buying more of our stuff. He knows the so-called Middle Kingdom, which now has the second-biggest economy in the world, responds to incentives more than to nice words. These tariffs give China an incentive to open up.

OK, so China’s first reaction is just to retaliate. Big deal. That’s just posturing.

Right now we export less to China than we do to Japan, South Korea and Singapore put together. That’s the point. So the effect of China’s new tariffs on the U.S. are yet another rounding error. Even if China banned all imports from the U.S., that would amount to only 0.6% of our gross domestic product. And we’d sell the stuff somewhere else.

Don’t buy the hysteria. President Trump is simply trying to pressure our biggest competitor to buy more American goods. That should be a good thing, even if you don’t like him.

Footnote:

New York Post Editorial Board adds:

President Trump’s tariffs on China may well take a toll on the US economy, but the price of not confronting Beijing would be higher.

The president isn’t playing protectionist here. He’s pushing a single player who needs to be confronted, a cheater and a bully. For decades, China has gotten away with theft of others’ production techniques and other intellectual property, along with technology transfers and mistreatment of US companies. Moreover, it uses its ill-gotten gains to boost its military, adding another threat.

And Beijing just backed off key concessions it had already made in months of trade talks, expecting Washington to fold.

Instead, Trump goosed fees on $200 billion in Chinese imports to 25 percent, from 10 percent. China struck back with its own new tariffs on US products, and now Team Trump is eyeing fees on another $325 billion in Chinese goods (i.e., basically the rest).

The markets didn’t like it: Beijing’s new tariffs brought a 600-point drop in the Dow. Yet the index is still up 9 percent for the year, and nearly 30 percent since Trump took office.

And the Dow isn’t the US economy, which is now robust, with 3.2 percent growth last quarter and 3.6 percent unemployment in April, the lowest in half a century. If the country can’t afford to stand up to China now, it never will.

There’s a reason the president isn’t taking heat from Democrats on this one issue, even though top economic adviser Larry Kudlow admits “both sides will suffer” in this trade war: China knows it will suffer worse.

Short-term, US consumers will pay a bit more — on goods that make up less than 2 percent of the nation’s $20.5 trillion economy. But China is at growing risk of losing access to the world’s top market, because Americans can buy from other lower-wage producers if Beijing doesn’t blink.

And China’s leadership has no remaining claim to legitimacy if it can’t keep its economy booming: President Xi Jinping needs a deal far more than the US president does.

Trump didn’t start this trade war, but he’s well positioned to win it.