Thoughts on Trump

Here's the fundamental problem. Trump doesn't take rejection well and he takes being outsmarted by someone even worse. His single biggest weak point is that he's too conceited to listen to the experts and that includes Intelligence experts. Putin is smarter than Trump and I think he has a good handle on Trump's personality foibles. The scenario I see is Putin leading Trump around by his nose while Trump remains convinced that he's actually in control. He will hold onto onto that opinion, despite what the Intelligence community is telling him, until it becomes impossible for even him to continue lying to himself. When that day comes it's going to get terribly scary. The basic problem with just about everything Trump has "promised," is that while many are laudable objectives, most have associated with them high risk implementations which could go drastically wrong. I suppose we shall see what we shall see but: - There's isn't going to be a wall. It's too expensive and too controversial.
- Any tax reform will make the already rich richer and do nothing for 98% of the country.
- Manufacturing jobs aren't coming back in any quantity. If he makes it too expensive to build stuff abroad through tariffs, any factories built here will be so highly automated that the number of manufacturing jobs will be minimal. Where the jobs will be is where they are now, high tech and engineering positions to design, build and maintain the robots.
- The vetting of refugees is already extreme. It's much easier to enter the country through any of the various visas.
- You can't repeal Obamacare without replacing it or removing the unfunded mandate that hospitals must treat the sick and injured regardless of their ability to pay which has been in effect since the early 1980s. The big issue with healthcare is the list of "stuff you might have and should be screened for" continues to grow and the cost of the treatments continue to balloon. It's a problem but removing health insurance from 12 million people is probably not the answer.
- Climate change is a real issue and even his Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson acknowledges that it's a problem. Tillerson however believes that it's not progressing as fast as the models indicate and that's it's basically an engineering problem. I hope he's right but the latest research suggests that it may be progressing faster than the models indicate.

As for the maniacs he may appoint to the Supreme Court, we'll have to wait and see.