100 Days of "What the.....?"

Keeping an eye on the "Deep State"

So, 100 Days of Trump. Everyone and their uncle is currently writing pieces assessing Trump's first 100. I think it's fair to say the majority of them are decidedly negative-- more so if you think the "mainstream media" is nothing but "fake news." The most generous thing I can say about the first 100 is that Trump as President is a work in progress and that some of that fake news may yet come back to bite him. There's a lot of smoke billowing around Trump, but, as of yet, no white-hot fire.

There are moments in which he seems rather conventional only to follow it quickly with yet another head-scratcher. The "chaos candidate" has definitely turned into a chaotic president-- so much so, the Washington Post has a new portal for sharing tips confidentially and a podcast entitled "Can He Do That?"

I'll leave the thorough assessments of most of Trump's first 100 to others, including the piece linked here.  However, what follows are a few observations I have made, and a small sample of the research and writing I've been doing here.

The NAFTA's Stay of Execution

One area that typifies Trump's chaotic governance style is is approach to trade. As a campaigner, Trump was relentless in his condemnation of the terms of America's trading relationships. China was a currency manipulator, the NAFTA was the worst deal ever negotiated (or was it the Iran Nuclear deal?), and the U.S. would rip up the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). As promised, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the TPP, but on the others,.... well,... not so much.

A case in point were the few hours this past Wednesday in which the immediate future of the NAFTA was evidently determined. Rather than rehash all of that here, I offer you a Trump-esq Tweet.

I hardly know what to say....‘I was all set to terminate’: Inside Trump’s sudden shift on NAFTA https://t.co/P7iTrMeCwK

— Greg Anderson (@AnderPoli) April 28, 2017

What I, and most of the others I've spoken to while I've been in Washington, find most disturbing is the impulsive incoherence to anything Trump seems to be doing.... Another case in point was this week's White House announcement ordering an "Omnibus Report" on the causes of large U.S. trade deficits. Okay, except that the announcement reflects a complete misunderstanding of the roots causes of trade deficits-- hint, it's got very little to do with trade (see link).

Then again, I suppose if chaos, inconsistency, and short-sightedness are the rule, can one argue all of that amounts to some twisted form of coherence? Good grief.... Trump has me searching for logic and coherence in impulsiveness and chaos.

In the two months I've been here in D.C., I have been hoping to discover the essence of Trumpism in governance. Along with just about everyone else, I've come up empty. It's my conclusion that no one really knows, perhaps not even Trump.

Much more inspiring

Trump might be President, but he's got problems all over this city; one of his biggest is the fact that he has yet to even make nominations (much less get Senate confirmation) for hundreds of executive branch agencies. Government is not functioning well, in part, because there's no one to offer policy guidance to the professional civil service.

Perhaps my strongest observation, however, is that Trump is learning the hard way that campaigning isn't as easy as governing. I think there are areas in which he is learning on the fly. The problem is that in economics, learning-by-doing is a virtue. In governing, not so much.

On some issues, including the decision-making on the NAFTA, it seems the more conventional policy-thinkers around Trump-- people like H.R. McMaster, Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, and son-in-law Jarred Kushner-- are prevailing over the likes of Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, or Peter Navarro.

More important than anything else in this first 100 days is the fact that Trump can only do so much through Executive Orders-- something Republicans loved to say Obama was abusing. In fact, Trump is going a little overboard there using EO's at the highest rate since President Truman. To do the big stuff, Trump needs legislation and to do that, he need allies on Capitol Hill. It's still hard to tell how many Republicans feel empowered to challenge Trump openly, but the legislative debacle of "repealing and replacing" Obama Care signaled there were big caveats to that GOP support.

Trump's continued support among those who voted for him, and the vehement opposition among those who did not is fascinating. But Trump's most important constituency may actually be his GOP comrades in the House and Senate. If the smoke of controversy continues to billow around the President (Russia, self-dealing, etc), or the White House continues to make legislative mistakes such as "repeal and replace," the tide of support could turn quickly.

Investment Protection and the TTIP

The reason for being in D.C. for the past two months was to take up a fellowship at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS), a small part of the sprawling Johns Hopkins University.

In case investment doesn't sober you up

I've been looking at the evolution of foreign direct investment rules on both sides of the Atlantic; the EU and United States. Investment protections have been around for a very long time in the form of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs), but first completed between Germany and Pakistan in 1959.
Most BITs have been between developed and developing states. While there might have been reasons to critique those arrangements, no one really paid attention to them until after 1994. In that year, BIT-like provisions were inserted into the NAFTA and the Energy Charter Treaty.

The moment investment protections were applied to dyads of developed states, everything seemed to change. In North America, Chapter 11 of the NAFTA began generating investment disputes targeting Canada and the United States-- developed countries with strong histories of property rights protections. In Europe 20yrs later, Germany was being sued over its decision to close all its nuclear power facilities. This past week, I gave a seminar at AICGS in which I spoke about this research. Here's more Trump-esq self-promotion:

AICGS fellow Greg Anderson (@AnderPoli) talks politics of investment protection and the role of TTIP #AICGSEvents pic.twitter.com/N0dkgFBE79

— AICGS (@AICGS) April 27, 2017

Here, also, is my presentation:

The TTIP, Investment Protection, and Transatlantic Populism: Doing a "Big League" Agreement, "Bigly"

The main point of my remarks was that the respective experiences of Europe and the United States on investment protection-- flowing from controversies arising from cases under the NAFTA and Energy Charter, and efforts to reform and modify their investment protection models-- had the two sides of the Atlantic heading toward convergence in many areas. The TTIP negotiations have been put into deep freeze for a number of reasons-- notably Brexit and Trump-- but many observers thought investment was destined to be so difficult that the TTIP could have fallen apart over that alone.

I'm trying to make the case that the gap is not as large as thought and that more traditional points of transatlantic contention-- agriculture, subsidies, or intellectual property-- were likely to be the more important sticking points. Investment protections, and the investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms (ISDS) in particular, are convenient focal points for tropes intended to terrify everyone about the virtues of trade.