Thread by @LarryGlickman

It's important to look at Trump in this regard, because, although it has been largely forgotten, he ran in 20016 part as a "deficit hawk," who would get rid of waste. But this message of austerity was always selective and racialized.
nyti.ms/2tfy17N

Here's what he said in Iowa in February 2016: "We owe 19 trillion dollars. The budget we just approved....is worth 2 trillion dollars. It funds everything that that all of us in this room don't want to see funded." /2
kcci.com/article/donald…

I wonder what he meant by "all of us in this room" and what kinds of things Trump assumed that he and they didn't want to see funded? /3

Implicit here was the idea that it was not so much the size of the budget and the amount of spending that was the problem so much as who the spending benefited. /4

It's notable that Trump turned immediately from this concern about excessive spending to a discussion of spending that his administration would undertake on border security and "the wall," (with the promise that Mexico would pay for it.) /5

Presaging his presidency, he talked about “running” the country rather than governing it. And he did not disclaim public spending but rather spending spending that "people in the room" didn't like./6

The message, implicit in this speech excerpt, but explicit in his presidency was that Trump would use the pursestrings of government to reward those he called that February evening, "everyone in this room." /7

Trump has tried to goose the economy through tax cuts and spending increases, with no regard to the deficit, in spite of his campaign promise to eliminate the federal debt. /8
washingtonpost.com/business/2019/…

The Washington Post article linked to above says that Trump has "steered most Republicans to abandon the deficit obsession they held during the Obama administration." But it doesn't note that the GOP "deficit obsession" has always been selective./9

In Trump's November remarks to the Economic Club of NY he complained about the Fed's "rate increases and qualitative tightenening." /10
whitehouse.gov/briefings-stat…

In that same speech, Trump displayed what we might call his targeted Keynesianism when he said of farmers, "We’re going to give them $28 billion. We’re going to take it right out of the tariffs. And, hopefully, the farmers will say, “Thank you very much, China.” /11

Although Trump averred that farmers "don’t want a handout," he decided it was "something that I wanted to do, and I was able to do it — $28 billion." Note that he is treating the public purse as money that he can direct to particular groups./12

In the speech to the Economic Club of NY, Trump said of government funds: "We could distribute it to people." Not _the_ people but specific people. /13

Compare with Trump's answer in a 2015 debate about raising the minimum wage: "I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum."/14
time.com/4107636/transc…