The Seventh Son

“…I can talk these words that will sound so sweet they will even make your little heart skip a beat, heal the sick, raise the dead and make the little girls talk outta’ their heads…” Seventh Son …Willie Dixon… The other day, I described Donald Trump as having the survival skills of a garbage can raiding racoon, that’s kind of a backhand compliment, because he does have good political instincts in spotting weakness in an opponent and capitalizing on voter dissatisfaction. Prone to word salad, endless adjectives and adverbs, he specializes in reading the fears of everyday voters, and it gave him a 49% to 48% victory in the November popular vote- certainly not a mandate, but a clear victory. The downside is he’s also AD /HD to the max and craves adulation to the point where it quickly knocks him off track. He won on two issues, chaos on the southern border and post Covid inflation. The question now is, will he concentrate on those issues or get sidetracked in petty vendettas? Excuse me for not being overly optimistic, but Trump’s first nomination was the mouth breather, Matt Gaetz, to be Attorney General. By anyone’s guess, this was a “bridge too far” even by Trump standards. Gaetz’s nomination lasted 48 hours and he was replaced by another Floridian, Pam Bondi, who announced her priority would be to investigate the 2020 presidential election. In today’s fast paced society, the 2020 election is ancient history, and you’d have trouble finding a half dozen people, who don’t wear tin foil on their head, who care. His second pick was Robert F Kennedy Jr. to run the country’s health care. RFK is a crackpot--if his name wasn’t Kennedy, and he wasn’t heir to a lot of money, he’d be living down at the Savannah Mission, standing on the street corner, preaching out of a dog-eared old Bible and panhandling change. Hopefully, for the good of the country, Trump’s just paying back some political favors with these nominations and is going to let the Senate do his dirty work by showing them the door. Of his two major campaign themes, the border and inflation, there are concerns—respected money professionals don’t like tariffs, because they tend to drive, not cure inflation, and are ultimately handed down the chain to consumers in the form of higher prices at the shelf. Trump’s second reason for tariffs was to bring manufacturing jobs back to the USA. The snag here will be getting American factory workers to accept the same pay scale as Chinese political prisoners. Our economy along with manufacturing, finance and consumer demand has become totally international and intertwined—probably best left to competition, consumer demand, profit, greed, and back-room deals. An old boss of mine used to say, “there’s some shit better left alone, the average person wouldn’t understand it, and damn well wouldn’t sleep for a week…” Trump’s campaign loudly talked about the mass deportation of up to 4 million people the first month in office. Allowing for the fact Trump frequently talks before he thinks, the logistics, let alone the optics of deporting millions of people is not realistic. It’s a “target rich” environment, you have lots of intelligence info, so politically and public safety-wise do the smart thing. On day one with the cooperation of local authorities round up gang members, cartel members, convicted felons, anyone in custody for a felony, and anyone on the terrorist watchlist and ship them out of the country ASAP. Trump has this kind of a mini mandate, so let’s hope he looks forward and gets some important things done for the good of the country instead of wasting his first couple of years saying stupid shit, obsessing on past grievances, and jousting with windmills. The Reno betting line is about 3 to 2 against…