MAGAlomaniac – no Camelot for Kamala

Be careful what you wish for – Donald Trump’s “formidable” election victory in the United States last Tuesday (Bonfire Night in Britain) might be the culmination of a wet dream for President Javier Milei, even if a recipe for the ultimate bad hair day when they next meet, but a Republican White House could mean something more than a fast track to the greenbacks needed to exit ‘cepo’ capital controls and really open up the economy. Not least because Trump is threatening to close down his via protectionism.

That is not the only problem. Milei does not seem to care a hoot about Trump being politically incorrect but he should worry more about his being fiscally incorrect. Protectionism is the downside most frequently mentioned here but it might not be the worst consequence of Trumponomics. If the Trump campaign proposed a tariff of 60 percent on all Chinese goods and 10 percent for the rest of the world (surcharges which seem an odd solution to the inflation anxieties of US voters), The Donald’s local fans tend to downplay the danger – just campaign rhetoric for the Rust Belt or an exception will be made for Milei’s Argentina. Yet the damage of future trade barriers should not be underestimated when coming from Argentina’s third trade partner after China and Brazil.

(Just to digress slightly, this columnist is convinced that a prime reason why Argentina was a success story before 1930 and a failure thereafter is that Britain was the main business partner up to that watershed and bought Argentine goods voraciously whereas a self-sufficient United States taking its place afterwards did not, thus throwing the balance of payments out of whack).

Yet Trump’s tax cuts could be a bigger danger than his tariffs, leading to deficit financing corrected by the Federal Reserve raising interest rates and a global flight to quality at the expense of the developing world including Argentina. Milei might thus be counting his chickens in the form of massive dollar inflows a trifle early.

That future economic scenario under Trump leads us to the current US economy widely considered the main cause of the Democratic implosion. Many outside observers were puzzled how Trump could brainwash voters into thinking they inhabited the worst economy ever when the outgoing administration could boast some excellent data – the strongest growth in the developed world, annual inflation of 2.1 percent, the creation of almost 16 million jobs, Wall Street records, etc. In fact, the real culprit was neither Donald Trump nor the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris duo but a pandemic which destroyed the last two US presidencies. Lockdown imposed a monster explosion of the money supply which had to be controlled by brutal interest rates to keep the economy stable, factors feeding into both prices and mortgages, thus making the widespread discontent of voters real enough.

Last Tuesday confronted the electorate with a choice hardly more congenial than Milei versus Sergio Massa here last November. Unattractive as they were, both seemed “condemned to success” – Trump because the dissatisfied are such a huge majority of US society and because the global trends against incumbents have been so strong for many years while apart from The Donald being such a howling cad, Harris had going for her the fact that there are more women than men and that a higher percentage of them vote. But her defeat marked a failure of both identity and gender politics – the self-styled Afro-American woman received less black and less female votes than Biden while all too many Latinos were suckers for Trump’s merciless denigration.

This columnist would argue that feminists should not mourn Kamala’s demise – the first woman president of the United States needs more than anybody to be a really good one in order not to pull the ladder up after her and there are doubts whether this improvised candidate, wavering between woke and the centrism also proving fatal for our Horacio Rodríguez Larreta here, would measure up.

The first once and future president since Grover Cleveland just after the 1892 election, Trump nevertheless seems to have picked up less votes in this victory than in his 2020 defeat but has painted the country’s map and the White House red. When this columnist was growing up in the Cold War, “better dead than red” was a watchword in the United States – they do not seem to be saying that today.