Once again I found the Q&A at E-V.com to be excellent. You can read the whole thing at Q&A Nov30.

But here are just a few questions and answers that I’ve pulled out to highlight.

R.M.S. in Lebanon, CT, asks: Do you think lesbian, gay, and bisexual soldiers are at risk of being expelled from the military by Donald Trump? I am aware that Congress passed a law ending the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 2010, which means the Pentagon can no longer expel people on the basis of sexual orientation. And I am also aware of the Bostock v. Clayton County Supreme Court decision, which holds that LGBT employees are covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

However, the President of the U.S. is the commander-in-chief of the military, and one of his official duties is ensuring the readiness of the armed forces. The Supreme Court has ruled it is legally permissible if presidents break the law in the course of their official duties.

Do you think Trump would be on solid legal footing to conduct a purge of LGBs from the military? I think the country will shortly rue the day it awarded presidential immunity for anything a president does that is considered an official act.

(V) & (Z) answer: There has been some indication (and we have a piece coming up that touches on this) that Trump will try to eject 15,000 trans soldiers from the armed forces. If he actually tries it, it will be very difficult to achieve. First, as you point out, these folks are legally protected from being discriminated against. Second, the Pentagon will scream bloody murder (OK, not Pete Hegseth, but the Joint Chiefs), because it’s none too easy to replace 15,000 trained personnel overnight. All of this said, Trump ran on the notion that trans people are one of the great threats to the ‘Murican way of life, and trying to eject them would get him a lot of headlines, and he could tell “his people” that he’s fighting the good fight. He likes this kind of PR.

What we are saying is that, when it comes to the trans soldiers, it could go either way. Trump could try it (and deal with years of lawsuits), or he could decide against it. He is considerably less likely to try it with LGB soldiers. First, the legal arguments for doing so would be even more tenuous, particularly given that things have been just fine since DADT was tossed in the garbage. Second, if the Joint Chiefs are upset about losing 15,000 or so trained trans troops, they’ll be even more upset about losing an additional 110,000 or so trained LGB troops (about 6% of the active-duty military identifies as LGB, and there are about 2 million active-duty personnel). Third, even Trump’s base is not especially anti-LGB, it’s transphobia that’s the new homophobia. Add it up, and we just don’t see it happening.

 

B.R.D. in Columbus, OH, asks: Perhaps you and others have written about this, but it seems to be absent from a lot of coverage about the new administration’s deportation plans. And that is, don’t people have to be deported somewhere? To the country of their origin or elsewhere? And don’t those countries have to agree to take in those deportees? Can the U.S. just show up with planes full of deportees without having some kind of agreement with the country they have landed in?

(V) & (Z) answer: This is one of many problems with Trump’s promise. In fact, if you wanted a Big Three when it comes to issues with mass deportations, we’d offer this list: (1) the logistics will be nightmarish (how do you find these folks), (2) the costs will be enormous, and (3) where do you send them all? There’s no country in the world that’s going to gladly accept 500,000 or 1 million or 2 million new refugees. Actually, there’s also a fourth problem, though it’s kind of a different character. The donor class likes cheap labor, and is not going to be pleased to lose their workers. We count this one differently because it’s less about executing the scheme, and more about whether it’s worth it to Trump in the first place.

Trump has a long, long history of talking big, delivering small, and then declaring total victory. That is why we suspect he’ll engineer a couple of high-profile deportation events (say, a raid on some meatpacking plant in a blue state), will tell his people he’s solving the problem, and then that will be that. With that said, he’s surrounded himself with even more fanatics this time than last (in addition to Stephen Miller, there’s Tom Homan, and Kristi Noem), so maybe they’ll push him to go further. Although, even if they do, the problems we outline in the previous paragraph will be big obstacles.

 

Politics

R.B. in San Francisco, CA, asks: When I was young, I had a uniformly negative opinion of Richard Nixon’s presidency due to Watergate, but later in life I was shocked to discover that his administration created the Environmental Protection Agency and passed legislation such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Acts, all of which I think were important accomplishments for the environment, and which I support.

Like many of your readers, I was deeply saddened by Donald Trump’s re-election. As progressive Democrat, is there any possible achievement of a second Trump term I might look forward to?

(V) & (Z) answer: You’ve probably heard the phrase “Only Nixon could to go to China.” If Trump is going to achieve things that please progressive Democrats, it is likely to be in areas where Republican presidents have considerably more leeway than Democratic presidents do. So, for example, it’s at least possible that Trump could produce some sort of lasting solution to the situation in Israel, one that’s actually tolerable to folks on the left. If Joe Biden says “We have to keep in mind the needs of the people of Gaza,” the Israel hardliners will tend to be dismissive. If Donald Trump says it, the Israel hardliners might listen. Similarly, if Trump becomes persuaded that supporting environmental legislation for is better for him than opposing it, he might win over MAGA folks who are never, ever going to accept environmentalism coming from a Democrat.

We do not think these outcomes are likely, but they’re not impossible.

 

F.S. in Cologne, Germany, asks: What is the most plausible worst-case scenario for the second Trump presidency? And what is the most plausible best-case scenario for the second Trump presidency?

(V) & (Z) answer: Domestically, the most plausible worst-case scenario is that Trump and his team find a way to let him run again, or to establish de facto one-party Trumpist rule (say, by repealing the Voting Rights Act of 1965). Other things he might plausibly do could hurt for 4 years, but this would extract a worse price, as it would be the effective end of American democracy.

Internationally, the most plausible worst-case scenario is that he goes all-in on trade wars and isolationism, meaning that the U.S. permanently surrenders its role as leader of the free world, while folks hostile to democracy and friendly to authoritarianism feel free to take advantage of the situation, plunging various parts of the world into chaos and violence.

The most plausible best-case scenario, at least for those who dislike Trumpism, is that Trump is as ineffective the second time around as he was the first time around, securing tax cuts for rich people, but not all that much else, before the Republicans lose the trifecta in 2018. If you want to read something rosier, then check the answer to the previous question, but the scenarios we outline there are merely possible, not plausible.

 

T.V. in Moorpark, CA, asks: The first time around, Donald Trump was pretty much an unknown on the international stage. This time around, do you think world leaders will view him as stronger or weaker? I would think they know they can easily manipulate him with praise and giving him something he can claim as a win is all they need to do.

(V) & (Z) answer: We think the world’s strongmen—Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, etc.—decided long ago that Trump is weak and is easily manipulated. We see no reason to think they will change their judgment or their approach. As to the leaders of the democracies/the allies, they also figured out that Trump could be manipulated, though they had to tread much more lightly.

To refer to the example we note above, the governments of Canada and Mexico did not give Trump a “win” on NAFTA v2.0 as much as they gave him the ability to claim a win, which they knew is what he really cared about. Similarly, the Abraham Accords were not really a great diplomatic coup; they were a recognition of a state of affairs that already basically existed. But in exchange for signing a piece of paper and posing for some photo-ops, the various participants got some juicy concessions (a $1.2 billion loan for Sudan, access to American F-35s for UAE, a free trade agreement for Bahrain, U.S. recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, etc.). All diplomatic agreements involve this sort of horse trading, but there is near-universal agreement that Trump gave up more than he got.

In any case, we don’t think “stronger” vs. “weaker” is the most important calculation that will be going on in the minds of foreign leaders. We think that their main notion will be that electing Trump once might be a fluke, but electing him twice shows that the U.S. is unreliable and is pulling away from internationalism. So, they will proceed accordingly.

[…]

History

G.C. in South Pasadena, CA, asks: If I can pull you away from the current politics for a moment, I have a question on the history of the West, specifically on Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and the Cowboys’ gang. I’ve been watching a show on Netflix called Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War. Having been to Tombstone, watched their reenactment, and learned about this in my history class, I thought I knew the whole deal. This Netflix show is a stunner with a slew of peripheral (and essential) side issues that make the whole story much more interesting than I ever knew.

So, how much of this “extra stuff” is true? If it is, it makes the whole story much more interesting and relatable (especially in comparison to today’s political makeup). [Oh shoot, I said I would not get into today’s politics, sigh…]

(V) & (Z) answer: We haven’t seen the show, but there’s no real reason for the producers to make stuff up out of whole cloth, since the real story has plenty of drama and intrigue.

In popular culture, the story of the Shootout at the OK Corral is a story of lawmen (the Earps) standing up against lawlessness and vigilantism (the Cowboys). The fact that the Earps and Doc Holliday end up as the heroes of the story may have something to do with the fact that the main source of information for many years, particularly for all the people who made all those Westerns, was the 1931 book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, which relied extensively on the recollections of… Wyatt Earp, who died a little over a year before the book came out. By contrast, every member of the Cowboys who was present for the Shootout was dead by 1887.

In truth, the Shootout was about a whole bunch of different disputes. The list included: (1) Republicans (the Earps) vs. the Democrats (the Cowboys); (2) new arrivals (the Earps) vs. longer-term residents (the Cowboys); (3) town-dwellers (the Earps) vs. rural-dwellers (the Cowboys); disagreements about the results of a couple of local elections and, very possibly, competition over a woman (Josephine Marcus, who was dating a Cowboy, and who ended up with Wyatt Earp).