michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt, and this is “The Argument.” This week, is the economy enjoying a Trump boom?

michelle goldberg

They’re obviously not experiencing this moment as a moment of easy money.

david leonhardt

Then, constitutional crisis: are we headed for one?

ross douthat

There, the ball is sort of in Congress’s court.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

You do sort of crash land. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

The unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level in 50 years. Wages are rising at a nice clip. So how much credit does the Trump administration deserve for all of this? Michelle, you should go first this week, because you have a somewhat counterintuitive view. You think there is actually a connection between a piece of good news and a piece of Trump administration policy. What is it?

michelle goldberg

Well, yeah. I mean, I think it’s basically that just as kind of nobody but Trump could get away with bending over backwards to appease North Korea, Trump has gotten the Republicans — as other Republican presidents have, as well — to agree to tons of spending and huge deficits, right? I mean, our colleague, Paul Krugman, has a column titled “Donald J. Keynes,” and the argument is basically that when Republicans are in power, they sort of jettison austerity in favor of Keynesian economics, even though they purport not to believe in Keynesian economics when Democrats are in power. Deficits don’t matter anymore, and kind of trumped-up fears of inflation go by the wayside. And so there was an argument throughout the Obama administration, first of all, that we needed much bigger stimulus early on. And then that there remained a lot of slack in the economy so there was still a lot of room for stimulus without triggering too much inflation. And the Trump administration, I think, has proven that that theory was correct. They’ve just directed the money in a completely socially destructive way that increases inequality. But even kind of badly directed stimulus is stimulus. But I also want to say, you know, I feel like I have to be careful, as somebody who hates Trump, not to try to be intellectually dishonest and try to spin the economy. So I’m aware of a tendency in myself to kind of look for economic bad news. At the same time, I do have to say — and I’m curious what your impression is — and this is entirely subjective, but I don’t know that many people who feel flush. I’ve lived through other booms. You know, I remember the boom of the ‘90s, when people I knew were constantly being headhunted. Everybody seemed, in my little world, to have a lot of disposable income. There was a lot of elaborate corporate parties. And to some extent, it was a very good time for kind of, quote unquote, “content creators” in the San Francisco Bay Area. And obviously, I know a lot of journalists. This is a bad time for our profession. But even in other fields, when I talk to people — you know, lawyers or people who work in technology — I don’t see people kind of bouncing from job to job. I don’t see people having a super easy time finding new jobs. And certainly, the culture of millennials is one of extreme economic precarity, right? They’re obviously not experiencing this moment as a moment of easy money. Are you seeing that? Is that your experience?

ross douthat

I think there are a few things going on. One is that I do think that anti-Trump sentiment does probably bias perceptions of the economy, to some extent, in what I imagine to be your social circle, Michelle. Because I see this, I think, in my own social circles, where I move back and forth between Conservative and Liberal circles. And I hear Liberals say the kinds of things now that I sometimes heard Conservatives say in the Obama era, where Conservatives would say, oh, you know, sure, the stock market is going up, but that’s an illusion. You know, there was just a strong partisan tendency for Conservatives to look for bad news under Obama. And I feel like I’ve seen some of that among my Liberal friends in the Trump economy. So I think there’s a little bit of a perception issue. But there’s also the fact that the economy right now is as good it’s been, certainly, since the late 1990s. But it’s taken us a long time to sort of crawl our way out of the Great Recession. We only reached the median income numbers of the late 1990s a couple of years ago, right? So I don’t think it would be surprising that there would be a kind of overhang from that that makes people feel less boom-ish and less confident than they would have if we hadn’t had this incredibly slow crawl. And then I also think there may be — in the late 1990s, I feel like the sort of concentration of affluent people in big cities hadn’t yet reached the saturation level that has driven house prices as insanely high as they are in the Bay Area and New York and Boston and so on. My suspicion is that this sort of upper middle class cost of living issues, including student debt — which is larger now, obviously, than it was 20 years ago — loom large in the sentiments that you’re picking up on. But I don’t know. What do you think, David?

david leonhardt

I think that’s exactly right. I think, look, the economy is very healthy right now if you’re just looking at what has it done over the last several months or the last even couple years. I mean, it really is. If you look at how much wages have risen and what inflation has done over the last couple of years, it looks really good. But Ross, your point that this has come after years of weakness and doesn’t make up for that weakness, I think, is a crucial point. The wealth trends — you just mentioned the income trends, but the wealth trends look even worse. The Federal Reserve reports them only every three years, so we don’t have a current number. But when you look at those numbers, the typical household’s wealth in this country is actually behind where it was a decade ago. And so people are less rich than they were a decade ago. Most people don’t own a lot of stocks. And that is just going to create a situation where people are not feeling totally flush. As you said, Michelle, it just doesn’t seem that way. And so I guess my view is the economy right now is doing pretty well, but it’s come after years in which it wasn’t doing that well. And I don’t think it’s sustainable. I mean, look, if the economy were to keep doing this for the next year or so, then I think Trump’s odds of winning re-election are higher than I previously thought. But I think it’s pretty unlikely that they’re going to do so. I mean, I guess one thing I wonder is, do you guys think that if the economy keeps doing this, Trump can win over another 5 percent or 10 percent of Americans who so far have been unwilling to say they approve of him?

michelle goldberg

I would be surprised if it’s that many. To me, the problem and the real danger is that he doesn’t necessarily need another 5 percent or 10 percent to win re-election, right? I mean, I do think you have a pretty strong 50 percent of the country that hates Trump, considers his presidency an intolerable moral insult, and is going to vote against him. But I don’t think that 50 percent of the country is distributed in such a way that it actually can be guaranteed to win an election, right? I mean, I think, to me, the danger is that Trump could end up winning re-election probably with an even smaller share of the popular vote. But be able to point to successes in the Rust Belt states, where at least a plurality of people weren’t kind of completely appalled by him on a moral and cultural level.

ross douthat

I mean, I don’t think he can win re-election with a smaller share of the popular vote. But I do think another year of this— I don’t think it gains him 5 percent, but I think he has— you know, if he’s sort of stuck at 43 to 44 percent approval, I think it pushes him towards 46 percent approval, which would be sort of an all-time high for him and would set up, probably, a close election. But I would just want to go back quickly to Michelle’s argument to open things, because I generally agree with her. And I think this is a place where, in certain ways, Trump does deserve a weird kind of credit, that his total disinterest in Conservative orthodoxy — but not just Conservative orthodoxy, a sort of bipartisan centrist orthodoxy — has actually led him to better economic policies, in certain ways, than what we had, including his very public and sort of inappropriate but correct support for keeping interest rates low in the absence of strong inflation.

michelle goldberg

There was no bipartisan orthodoxy about kind of austerity and deficit reduction. It was just Republican refusal to accede to Obama’s requests for more stimulus.

ross douthat

No, I don’t think that’s right at all. I talked to people back in 2009, 2010 in the Obama White House who thought, yeah, they wanted more stimulus than what Republicans would support. But they generally agreed with Obama’s own pivot to deficit reduction. There was certainly a bipartisan consensus that inflation could become a problem. I remember talking to, like, Peter Orszag, the Obama budget director, who seemed to sincerely believe that the deficit was going to be a problem and it was important. There wasn’t a heavy emphasis in the Obama White House on filling seats on the Fed and sort of making monetary policy as loose as possible. So I think it was both Republican intransigence, but also just a sort of general mistake about the kind of landscape we were in that people on the left dissented from and a few monetary policy doves on the right dissented from, but was powerful not just in the Republican Party, but in the Obama White House, too. Don’t you think that’s right, David?

david leonhardt

Well, a lot of that comes from 2009 and ‘10. So I think you were right that the Obama administration erred on the side — as did I, as a writer, and you, as a writer — erred on the side of worrying too much about the deficit. But once you get beyond 2009 and 2010, Michelle, I agree with you. In Obama’s second term, he repeatedly wanted to spend money in ways that would have both helped the economy short term and, I believe, helped it long term, on things like infrastructure, things like pre-K. And the Republicans just said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And so I do think there’s some nefarious Keynesianism by Republicans here, in which even if they pretend not to get it, they actually get it. And they’re only willing to juice the economy when there is a Republican president. And so while I think Trump has sort of gotten that right, I don’t think he’s figured out something about the economy that Obama didn’t understand.

ross douthat

I don’t think he’s sort of grasped something conceptually, but I think his lack of any connection to the kind of Conservative assumptions that were forged in the late 1970s. Modern American conservatism begins with stagflation in the 1970s and the assumption that the combination of easy money and high government spending leads to disaster. And you need to have someone like Paul Volcker come in and raise interest rates. That’s sort of a default perspective for a lot of smart Conservative economists. It’s not just partisanship. That sort of assumption about the lessons of history informed a lot of the Republican resistance to Obama’s agenda. And Trump, because he’s not a Republican, historically, he’s not a Conservative, just didn’t have any of that baggage. And you could see it in the campaign he ran, and not just the way he has governed.

michelle goldberg

And also because he doesn’t really care about the future, right? Even if his deficits were going to lead to greater inflation in the future, I kind of assume that that fear has somewhat been discredited, but who knows? Maybe there is a tipping point. But it’s not so much, to me, that he rejects these economic assumptions. It’s just that his whole way of living is to, like, borrow a bunch of money, spend it in extravagant ways, and then leave someone else holding the bag, right? That was his model as a businessman, and that’s his model as president.

ross douthat

And that’s Keynesianism, right? In the long run, Keynes said, we’re all dead. So Trump is a perfect Keynesian in that sense. I’m being a little bit facetious, but only a little bit.

david leonhardt

Well, I’ll end with something that really is usually a terrible idea, which is making a prediction about the economy’s direction, which is that you can think about this conceptually, which is the kind of jolt of the Trump tax cuts that we’ve been talking about. Those aren’t going to repeat, right? They’ve already been jolted into the economy. They’ll stay, but it won’t cause growth going forward. And then there’s this wonky thing called final sales to private domestic purchasers, which I promise I’m not going to explain right now. But basically, it’s a measure of economic activity that is a little less volatile than GDP. And it showed that the economy was actually weakening early this year. So I think it’s more likely than not that the economy does slow down over the course of 2019, which makes Trump’s re-election campaign a little less easy than it would maybe look right now, not that it looks easy right now. So that’s my prediction. Do you guys think that sounds crazy? Do you think I’m falling victim to predicting what I’m rooting for in terms of Trump having a harder re-election campaign?

michelle goldberg

It’s so hard for me to say, in part because, you know, I don’t root for a recession, because I don’t want people to suffer. But I would love to see a stock market meltdown, because most of the people who would suffer in that situation can take it. I certainly would happily lose every cent of my savings if it meant that Donald Trump would have less likelihood of being re-elected. It’s hard for me not to read the economic news through this scrim of wishful thinking.

david leonhardt

Ross, what do you think is the right way to think about the economy going forward?

ross douthat

I would respectfully disagree with Michelle’s take, but that’s probably a longer argument. My assumption, which could be totally wrong, is that Western economies right now with sort of decent monetary policy management can probably sustain slow growth recoveries for longer than we would think, based on the historical record. We have this example in Australia. Australia’s had more than two decades without a recession. And I don’t think it’s implausible that something like that pattern could take hold in the U.S., where it’s not sort of a constant crazy boom. It’s not the late 1990s. It’s not the post-war expansion. But it’s a period of sort of sustained 2 percent growth that doesn’t make people feel flush and crazy and exuberant, but also doesn’t produce the kind of collapse that people are always worried about. And I don’t think that necessarily gets Trump over the finish line to re-election, but that’s sort of what I’m betting on for the next year or so.

david leonhardt

Yup, that strikes me as reasonable. Well, let’s leave it there. And if our predictions don’t come true, we can revisit this and see where we went wrong. And we’ll be right back with our second segment. [MUSIC PLAYING] Each day seems to bring a new way in which the Trump administration ignores Congress and ignores the law, as well.

news clip The White House to Congress this afternoon: this is war.

david leonhardt

The administration is not honoring subpoenas. The IRS has refused to release President Trump’s tax returns. And William Barr, the attorney general, will not testify before the House or release the full, unredacted Mueller Report. All of which has raised the question, is a constitutional crisis now inevitable? Ross, I want to start this segment by giving you a bit of a hard time and then inviting you to push back if you think I’m being unfair. You recently argued that Barr, who’s been at the center of many of these fights, hasn’t really been behaving that badly. So let’s play what you said two weeks ago.

ross douthat, april 25 episode I think the liberal freak-out over Barr’s summary is a little bit foolish. I think it was maybe modestly tilted towards Trump, but I think it was a reasonably accurate summary of what Mueller found.

david leonhardt

Well, Robert Mueller himself seems to disagree with you there. He has written a letter complaining about the misleading nature of the Barr summary. So first, Ross, have you changed your mind about the Barr letter? And second, do you think a constitutional crisis is inevitable?

ross douthat

No, I haven’t changed my mind about the Barr letter. I think it was a reasonable summary of what Mueller actually found. I understand that Mueller, as he said in the letter, felt that it lent itself to interpretations that didn’t capture the richness and complexity and depth of the actual Mueller Report. But I think putting out a summary that states accurately that the report found no definitive proof of collusion and rendered a mixed verdict on obstruction of justice and then putting out the full report a few weeks later was not the kind of crazy abuse of power that Liberals seem to see. And I think that what I think I said in that argument is still what I think— that Liberals who are angry at Barr are really angry at Mueller or at House Democrats, who probably aren’t going to impeach Trump, or some combination thereof. And blaming Trump’s attorney general for not launching a prosecution of Trump is just a misunderstanding of how American politics has always worked.

michelle goldberg

But that’s a misunderstanding of why Democrats are angry. Nobody thought that Barr was going to launch a prosecution of Trump. That’s not his role or his job. I mean, I’m assuming you read the Mueller report, right?

ross douthat

Every single word.

michelle goldberg

So you surely agree that one reason why the report didn’t kind of make a recommendation on criminal charges was because it cited the Office of Legal Counsel guidance saying that a president cannot be indicted. And Barr just went up there during that press conference and flatly denied that that had been Mueller’s reasoning and acted as if Mueller had left it up to him when that’s just not the case. I mean, it kind of very clearly lays out in the report that they are creating a factual record for Congress and possibly for future federal prosecutors after Trump is no longer in office.

ross douthat

I think that Mueller had an obligation, given the specific obligations of the special prosecutor job, to render a specific verdict on whether he thought Trump committed prosecutable offenses, independent of whether a president can actually be prosecuted while in office. And I think the report, while it does cite the O.L.C. memo, it also generally says that it’s laying out arguments on both sides and doesn’t— it deliberately doesn’t come to a conclusion. And that seems, to me, to be a case that Liberals and Democrats, who are angry right now, should primarily be angry at Democrats in Congress who are preventing Congress from moving forward on impeachment, not be angry at Bill Barr. That’s all I’m saying. I think Barr’s role in all of this is just greatly exaggerated by his prominence and by this democratic sense that there was this three-week window where Trump controlled the narrative, which I don’t think he did at all.

david leonhardt

O.K., so we’re clearly not going to agree about big aspects of the Mueller report. But Ross, what about the second question? When you look beyond the Mueller report, when you see the Trump administration defying subpoenas and not being willing to provide the tax returns and all the stuff related to the Mueller report, do you think that we’re headed toward some sort of constitutional conflict here? And are you O.K. with what the Trump administration is doing?

ross douthat

To get a constitutional crisis, you have to get one branch effectively in defiance of another branch’s constitutional powers. So the Trump administration is within its rights to make a lousy legal argument for why it doesn’t want to release the tax returns. And it only becomes a crisis if that lousy legal argument goes to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court dismisses it, and the Trump administration still refuses, which is what you’ve got — sort of what you tiptoed towards with Nixon. With the subpoena stuff, I think it’s on — I mean, there, the ball is sort of in Congress’s court. I think Congress has powers that it hasn’t used in a long time to hold people in contempt. And it also has, again, the power of impeachment, which I think you could imagine the Trump administration sort of performing a kind of stonewalling that ultimately does sort of force the House’s hand, forces them towards impeachment. But I think it’s too early to tell how that’s all going to develop.

david leonhardt

Michelle, do you think we’re headed toward a constitutional crisis?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I think we’ve been in a constitutional crisis, right? I mean, when you basically have the Secretary of the Treasury just kind of flatly say that he is going to defy the law for kind of legal reasons of his own, you have a constitutional crisis. And we have this hope that the courts are going to step in, that the Supreme Court is going to step in, maybe, and fix this. But I don’t see why Democrats would have any faith— I mean, to me, the whole system has been so deeply corrupted at this point, right? So you have this election of dubious legitimacy. And then the attempt to investigate the obstruction that has gone on in kind of concert with that election is possibly going to be stymied by the fact that this illegitimate president has been able to put his nominees on the court. You know, nominees who have shown extreme deference to executive power and sort of extreme contempt for precedent. So if it goes to the Supreme Court and you get a 5-4 decision with all of the Conservatives ruling against congressional power, I mean, I don’t know if you would then call that a constitutional crisis or just a kind of constitutional implosion, where the kind of three coequal branches just doesn’t mean what it used to.

david leonhardt

I just think there are all kinds of ways in which the Trump administration is behaving in ways that no previous recent administration has. The I.R.S. is a good example of it. The law seems pretty clear on this. And I just worry that we set some kind of new norm. And that, going forward, whether it’s a Republican or Democratic administration, when administrations don’t want to comply with a law that’s inconvenient for them, they won’t do so. And it seems to me a large part of the rule of law is some notion of good faith that I think Trump is really discarding.

ross douthat

I mean, I think that this really does — some of this, not all of it, but some of it does turn on whether people like Roberts and Neil Gorsuch and others are just sort of tools of Republican power or whether they are serious, good-faith jurists. I disagree that it is abnormal for administrations to make self-evidently specious arguments in defense of their own moves. I think, you know, the Obama administration basically had this argument about recess appointments at one point, where it claimed that Congress was actually in recess when it very clearly wasn’t in order to make a recess appointment. And the Supreme Court swatted that argument down. And there are plenty of case studies like this in the past. And it’s also kind of normal— not to take it back to the Barr argument, but for attorney generals to act in ways that look a little bit too favorable to their presidents. If you look at like how Janet Reno in the 1990s handled the investigation into Chinese money’s influence in the 1996 election, it looked, at the time, and still kind of looks, like she was protecting Bill Clinton. And that wasn’t good, but it wasn’t a constitutional crisis. The crisis—

michelle goldberg

But can I say something?

ross douthat

Yeah.

michelle goldberg

There’s a point at which, like, a difference in degree becomes a different in kind. So you can say that, yes, obviously, Democrats had attorney general nominees who were kind of well-disposed towards the president who appointed them. But if you look at the kind of outrage that attended Bill Clinton meeting — a brief meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch on the Tarmac because it was seen to sort of compromise the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server and you compare that to the constant conversations that Bill Barr admitted to with the White House, you compare that to the fact that Bill Barr couldn’t really bring himself to deny that the White House has suggested prosecuting its political enemies, I mean, the comparison just seems so off to me. But there is a point at which you sort of take something to such an extreme that we’re no longer talking about the same kind of system.

ross douthat

I mean, I basically agree with, I think, both of you that Trump is abnormal and, therefore, constitutionally dangerous in particular ways and sort of his total lack of interest in constitutional niceties and sort of normal public presentation. I think all of that is real. And so I don’t think it’s wrong to find aspects of this more alarming than you would find Janet Reno’s behavior under Clinton or Loretta Lynch’s behavior under Obama. But I also think you need to keep a certain kind of perspective. I would recommend reading a piece by Jack Goldsmith, who is a respected Conservative legal thinker, for Lawfare, where he basically defends Barr and argues that Barr’s behavior is sort of a normal, reasonable conservative interpretation of the special prosecutor statute. And that he’s basically getting a kind of grief that would be the equivalent of— after Jim Comey came out and sort of gave his weird little speech condemning Hillary Clinton while declining to indict her, everyone had freaked out and said that Loretta Lynch had an obligation to immediately indict Hillary Clinton.

michelle goldberg

But again, nobody is saying that Barr has an obligation to indict Trump. Nobody is saying that.

ross douthat

Right. But with Barr, then, you’re down to an argument that he is basically spinning a little too much on the White House’s behalf.

david leonhardt

Ross, I think the place I agree most with you is, in the end, the most important actors here are the Supreme Court. And the question is, will the five Conservative justices act like Republican functionaries, or will they act as jurists? And I will confess, I’m really nervous. Because there are times when I think the Supreme Court, in modern times, has acted like jurists. And there are times — the most obvious is Bush v. Gore — when they’ve acted like functionaries of one party. And so I agree with you, it’s really hard to figure out how alarmed we should be about this until the court weighs in. But boy, I wish I felt more confident about how much the court was willing to stand up to a Republican administration. So we’ll leave it there for now and no doubt come back to this once the court does weigh in. That’s our second segment. We’ll be right back with a recommendation. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation, when we spend a few minutes and try to take your mind off of politics. Michelle, it is your turn this week. What’s your recommendation?

michelle goldberg

My recommendation is going for a hot air balloon ride. The first time I went hot air ballooning was, I think, like, 19 years ago in Turkey. And I’ve remembered it all these years as this sort of magical experience. And because of that, I sort of wondered if I was remembering it correctly. I was in Arizona a couple of weeks ago. Arizona is, apparently, a really good region for hot air ballooning, because it’s really dry. And I mean, it was just so — you know, it’s so peaceful, even though there’s like occasional loud noises when they turn up the gas to make the flames that make the hot air balloon rise and fall. But then, when the gas isn’t on, you’re just floating. And you know, it’s a way to be in nature without the kind of tedium of hiking. It’s, like, just enough adventure to feel like you’ve like really done something exciting. And so I just— yeah, go hot air ballooning. Have either of you guys ever been?

ross douthat

No. My experience of hot air ballooning comes from reading “The Travels of Babar,” where they take a hot air balloon and it crashes on a cannibal island. So I have sort of literary traumas associated with hot air balloons. But I should probably overcome them by taking a hot air balloon trip.

michelle goldberg

One thing about it is that you do sort of crash land. I mean, I guess that’s the reason I probably wouldn’t take my kids till they’re a little bit older, is that the landing is always sort of rough. And you kind of drag along the ground and maybe stop right side up or maybe it kind of falls over.

ross douthat

How are you with heights, generally?

michelle goldberg

I like heights.

ross douthat

Yeah. Because when I go up on like you know the Ferris wheel rides, where you’re in almost like a gondola compartment, not a big fan. So I’m concerned that I would struggle in the balloon. Do you feel like you’re sort of inside it when you’re up there?

michelle goldberg

Well, yeah, you’re in like a basket.

ross douthat

Right.

michelle goldberg

I mean, so the thing that’s kind of frightening when you first go up is that you do first— you know, it’s like you first feel yourself rising up, and you sort of realize that there’s just this wicker platform between you and the Earth. And that’s kind of scary until you get used to it.

ross douthat

I’m literally sweating as you speak, yeah.

david leonhardt