Don Brash
Don Brash was Reserve Bank Governor from 1988 to 2002 and National Party Leader from 2003 to 2006.
I was surprised, indeed astounded, when I discovered that some of my New Zealand friends were enthusiastic about Donald Trump’s winning the US presidency. How could they be supportive of such a man becoming the chief executive of the most powerful country in the world? How could John Key support such a man for president?
Had I had a vote in the US election, I would certainly have voted for Kamala Harris. Yes, there was plenty wrong with the Biden Administration, with which Kamala Harris was inevitably (and rightly) tarnished:
• One of the most obvious failings of the Biden Administration was its failure to control the very substantial flow of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border, though when the Democrats finally came up with a substantial solution to that issue, and had a majority in Congress to support that solution earlier this year, Trump urged the Republicans in Congress to scuttle the deal – he needed a continuing strong flow of illegal immigrants as one of the key points in his campaign.
• I want a society where everybody is treated equally, regardless of gender and ethnicity, but I can well understand why a great many Americans had become heartedly sick of the DEI madness where to be a white heterosexual male was to be an object of scorn in some quarters, and the Democrats were seen as tolerant, or even supportive, of that attitude.
• The Biden Administration continued a policy which Trump had initiated in 2017, when previously president, of failing to nominate judges to the World Trade Organisation’s appeal body, effectively neutering that crucially important body of vital importance to all small trading countries. And Biden continued many of the tariffs which Trump had imposed during his term, particularly those against China. This policy was damaging to the US and damaging to the rest of the world.
• The Biden Administration paid little attention to the overall US fiscal situation, with the consequence that the debt of the federal government continues to increase strongly to the point where it now comfortably exceeds the size of the US economy measured by GDP.
• On foreign policy, the Biden Administration continued the policy of previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, of seeking to push the eastern boundary of NATO further and further towards Russia. In 2008, when George W Bush was President, a meeting of NATO members indicated that they were hopeful that in due course both Georgia and Ukraine would be NATO members, despite being warned by the US ambassador to Moscow at the time that having Ukraine in NATO was the “reddest of red lines” for Russia. Unsurprisingly, Russia has been pushing back since at least 2014. (As David Stockman, a senior official in the Reagan Administration, has noted, if you’re surprised by Russia’s reaction you have forgotten how the US reacted to the prospect of having Soviet missiles in Cuba.) On China, Biden continued not just with Trump’s tariffs on some imports from China but with an increasingly confrontational stance vis-à-vis China’s access to technology, banning not just American companies from exporting some high-tech gear but banning non-American companies using American technology from exporting to China.
That’s a fairly long list of reasons why I have seen the Biden Administration as falling a long way short of the ideal. But despite that, I could not have dreamt of voting for Trump.
• Yes, the Biden Administration failed to stem the enormous flow of illegal immigrants coming across the US southern border, but Trump wants not only to stem that flow but to deport many millions of those now living in the US, some for many years, who are not American citizens. This threatens enormous personal hardship for those who are deported, ongoing fear for those who fear they may be deported, and considerable worry for those US firms which are employing many of those people.
• Yes, like many others, I’m fed up with the DEI madness, but Trump’s obvious misogyny and racism (remember his attempt to scuttle Barack Obama’s presidential run on the dreamt-up nonsense that Obama was not born in the US?) are surely worse.
• Yes, Biden has maintained, and in some areas increased, tariffs, especially on some imports from China, but Trump is proposing a 60 per cent tariff on imports from China and a tariff of 10 per cent or 20 per cent (he seems ambivalent on which) on all other imports. He has tried to convince American voters, and may even believe himself, that such a tariff would be paid by foreign exporters, not by American consumers. Yes, some of a tariff is typically paid by exporters, but much of a tariff is paid by consumers. Tariffs on the scale that Trump is proposing would sharply increase US inflation, would invite retaliation from other countries and would therefore substantially damage both the US and world economies. They would certainly be very bad news for small countries like New Zealand.
• Yes, the US government debt already exceeds US GDP, and it has been estimated that Kamala Harris’s campaign platform would have added, if implemented, US$3.5 trillion to that debt over the next decade. But Trump’s election platform is estimated to add US$7 trillion to the government debt over the next decade. There was no sign during the campaign, from either candidate, that the size of the federal debt was of the slightest concern.
• On foreign policy, Trump has promised to end the Ukraine-Russia war in short order. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian deaths ago, Elon Musk suggested how that might be done by guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality and holding an internationally supervised referendum in the Russian-speaking provinces of Ukraine to determine to which country those provinces wanted to belong. With Musk now playing an important role in the Trump administration, we might see something of that kind eventuate. Good. With regard to China, Trump has talked aggressively and proposes to appoint to his administration several well-known “China hawks”. That can’t be good news for New Zealand, to have our traditional security partner in a more and more confrontational stance vis-à-vis our largest trading partner. We can only hope that some of Trump’s strongest backers, many of whom have strong commercial interests in China (Musk included), realise the dangers of an aggressively anti-China policy.
• Then there is a raft of personal characteristics which make Trump utterly unsuited to be president. According to many of those who worked in his first administration, he is contemptuous of the advice of experts and doesn’t like reading anything more than the briefest of notes. He is insecure and personally vindictive, so that any apparently successful policies implemented by his predecessor are for the chopping block – witness his scrapping American participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership days after his inauguration in 2017, his repeated promise to scrap Obamacare but failure to even propose a better alternative, and his pulling the US out of an international agreement to monitor Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, thus doing great damage to America’s reputation and allowing Iran to get much closer to developing such weapons. This insecurity is seeing him nominate for very senior posts in his administration people whose only obvious qualification is unfailing personal loyalty to Trump.
• And finally, the thing which alone should make him utterly unqualified to ever be president again was his attempt to over-turn the result of the 2020 election. Nobody close to the details of that election believes for one moment that Trump won. He put unprecedented pressure on election officials in key battleground states like Arizona and Georgia, tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get the courts to overturn the results of various state elections, tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to break the law by refusing to certify the results, called on a mob to “fight like hell” to overturn the election result, and all despite the fact that Bill Barr, his own Attorney General (a man who had been unfailingly loyal to Trump during his two year tenure as AG), had stated that there was absolutely no evidence that there was anything wrong with the election result. Perhaps most unforgiveable of all, he managed to persuade tens of millions of Americans that he had won in 2020, thereby putting enormous stress on American democracy itself.
No, the Democrats are a very long way from perfect but, compared with the alternative, there should have been no choice.
This article was originally published by Bassett, Brash and Hide.
