I know the market is up. Prosperity is in the wind. Still, anyone with enough bucks to play the market in America knows what fickle means. If you are a debt hawk -- let's stop saying deficit -- you know Trump is not your man however much you love him. If you read Jackie Calmes' discouraging look at the Trump budget in today's New York Times, you know fiscal conservatism is no longer part of the Republican playbook.

Fiscal cowboys

All the GOP does now is pull money away from what makes for prosperity and spend it on what makes for war and protecting oil.

That was Ronald Reagan's way and it reached full flower with Newt Gingrich. This philosophy achieved its dismal denouement with the disastrous eight-year maladministration of George W. Bush. Seen in this light, the rise of Donald Trump is most optimistically regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of GOP logic. We should pray hard that it does not lead to the two monstrous defeats W suffered in the Middle East and Wall Street.

Doom scenario

If you think the foregoing is alarmist, let me reassure you. I hope against hope that Mr. Trump actually believes a few of the criticisms he lobbed at George W.

Bush. But it is my job to follow the man and in doing so I cannot avoid his fearsome association with Steve Bannon and his even more frightening connection to a woman named Pamela Geller. Pamela Geller is sort of a female Dick Cheney when it comes to conjuring up a war. She is whacked out. Her enemy is not just the seven nations Trump has anathematized but all of Islam.

We are talking about the worst thinking to be found in all Christendom -- an apocalyptic to strike fear into the strongest of souls.

More trillions?

It is hard to think of trillions but consider this. Our national debt is moving toward $20 trillion. Trump's tax cuts and other moves would add, it is generally conceded, some $3 trillion to that figure.

According to Calmes, "Congressional Republicans’ own budget resolution, approved in January, would add $9 trillion." You would have to have a mouth with many sides if you were a GOP person seeking to explain this to anyone who thought Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility.
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