Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp And The Fantasy Of MAGA

New York Times bestselling author David A. Stockman is the ultimate Washington insider turned iconoclast. He sounded the alarm on U.S. deficit spending and special interest domination of both parties in the Triumph of Politics (1986); warned in The Great Deformation (2013) about massive public and private debt and the Fed's unhinged money printing and bailouts; and exposed the imperiled American economic dream in TRUMPED! (2016).

Now in PEAK TRUMP: The Undrainable Swamp and The Fantasy of MAGA, he debunks Trump-O-Nomics and the perils of Washington's addiction to perpetual wars.

Stockman says Trump is headed for a great big fall from the imminent crash of a 30 year financial bubble, which he condemned on the campaign trail, but foolishly embraced once in office: "The Donald is not remotely the force of nature he's been made to seem by the Trump-obsessed media. To the contrary, he's actually a political flyweight, megalomaniacal incompetent and bile-ridden bully who stumbled into the Oval Office against all odds; and then lucked-out a second time-- bragging about the last gasp of a failing business cycle expansion that had 'recession ahead' written all over its forehead".

Stockman says the Great Disrupter's lasting contribution will be to discredit "Imperial Washington's self-serving bipartisan consensus in favor of permanent war, unchained entitlements, fiscal incontinence, debt-fueled consumer spending, rampant corporate financial engineering and endless bubble inflations at the Fed."

Still, Trump has no real economic program and "made matters inestimably worse with his misbegotten Trade Wars, Border Wars, Fed-bashing and Fiscal Debauch."

Stockman praises Trump for attempting to roll back the Empire and bring American forces home, but notes that his "America First foreign policy has mostly been sabotaged by the Deep State incumbents who run the government and the phalanx of failed generals and neocon interventionists that he unaccountably installed in key offices."

Stockman says the deep-end of the "undrainable swamp" lies on the Pentagon side of the Potomac, but that Trump has fed the military/industrial/surveillance complex like never before, thereby defeating his own stated goal: "...the needed pivot to fiscal and national security sanity was stopped cold by the Donald's mindless $100 billion per year boost of an already vastly excessive and waste-ridden national defense budget".

Stockman contends the utterly groundless Russia-collusion investigation has functioned to disable his presidency and cause "the Deep State to come out of hiding and bare its fangs against American democracy itself....underscoring the immense dangers of the Warfare State and the sweeping surveillance apparatus that has been created in the service of the neocons' misbegotten quest for Empire....the terrifying capabilities of the nation's $75 billion per year intelligence community were hijacked by Obama officials.... in furtherance of a plot to forestall Trump's election, and then to eviscerate his Presidency after the voters had spoken".

Finally, Stockman warns "the twin fiscal menace of the Warfare State and Welfare State" will be Trump's undoing. After taking the $2 trillion per year of uncontrolled entitlements off the table, Trump "then added insult to injury via his unfunded $1.7 trillion tax cut and massive defense and domestic spending increases. The result was a guaranteed $20 trillion explosion of the Federal debt over the coming decade."

"The Donald's unprecedented late-cycle Fiscal Debauch plus the Fed's long-overdue normalization will bring the mother of all supply/demand collisions to the bond pits", Stockman argues, "...