Editor's note
John Krull is director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
Two things just happened in quick succession.
Both of them reveal the right wing’s determination to run away from anything resembling reality.
On a Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell spoke at an event in Chicago.
Powell said that President Donald Trump’s administration had initiated policy changes that were much more sweeping than anticipated. He said Trump’s on-again-off-again threats of tariffs larger than any seen in modern history had forced the Fed to navigate a course over an unmapped path.
Powell said both the Fed and the markets were waiting for “clarity” from the Trump administration and the president’s economic policy team.
There was nothing that was not true about what Powell said.
As this president has done the hokey pokey—putting his left foot in, then pulling it out, then his right one in and pulling it out before shaking all about—the markets have done their own kind of dance.
The limbo.
In one four-day period, Trump’s stop-start-then-about-face tariff maneuvering cost Americans about $10 trillion as the stock market plunged in one of the biggest drops in history.
If anything, Powell’s remarks represented a measured and even diplomatic assessment of the volatility in the economy anyone with clear eyes can see.
Still, Trump would have none of it.
“Jerome Powell of the Fed, who is always TOO LATE AND WRONG, yesterday issued a report which was another, and typical, complete ‘mess!’” Trump wrote in a social media post. “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”
Please notice that the president didn’t point to any factual errors in Powell’s assessment.
Maybe that’s because there weren’t any errors to which Trump could point.
That’s why he did his all-purpose temper tantrum. His complaint wasn’t that Powell was mistaken about the fact that the stock market under Trump’s leadership has taken more sudden dips than an amusement park roller coaster.
Rather, it was that Powell had no right to notice the ups, downs, swerves and shakes that have defined the president’s economic policy thus far.
In Donald Trump’s world, any time reality collides with his fantasies of his own omniscience and omnipotence, he expects reality to retreat.
Just after the Trump-Powell dustup, another reckoning with the real world took place here in Indiana.
The lawmakers in the Indiana General Assembly sent Gov. Mike Braun a budget to sign that delivered significant property tax cuts, largely by gutting public education here in the state. Braun wasted no time in signing the budget into law.
But before the ink expended on Braun’s signature had time to dry, new revenue projections came out.
The projections did not make for pleasant reading.
Indiana faces a shortfall of nearly $2.4 billion.
The economic volatility and the looming likelihood of a recession brought on by Trump’s detached-from-reality devotion to trade wars helped account for the unwelcome news.
Normally, a hole that deep might prompt thoughtful people to stop digging.
But these are not normal times. Nor are many people on the right any longer thoughtful.
Instead of asking whether this was the proper time to cut taxes, many Hoosier Republicans argued instead for making deep spending cuts in the state budget.
That’s right.
At a time when ordinary people are about to be hammered by the recession-driven loss of jobs and the tariff-driven rise in consumer prices brought on by President Trump’s economic fecklessness, Indiana Republicans want to tear away more of the supports and shelters protecting those good people.
You may have noticed that I have not used the word “conservative” in describing the president and his minions here in the state.
That’s because they aren’t conservative.
Conservatism is grounded in acknowledging reality—in seeing things as they are and responding accordingly.
Classic conservatives understand that everything has a cost and that we defer paying those costs at our own risk and our own increased expense.
Trump and his followers, though, would have us believe that good government and genuine economic prosperity and stability are the only true free lunches in this world. They believe not in hard work and self-discipline but in closing their eyes and making a wish.
The problem in this country right now isn’t that we have too many real conservatives, but that we have too few.
Because those true conservatives are right about one important thing.
There will be costs for this foolishness.
There always are.
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