The meeting between the so-called president and German Chancellor Angela Merkel seemed a bit prickly to me, although of course I wasn’t there. Germans were upset that the so-called president failed to shake her hand at one point. But that seems the least of it.

Trump apparently believes that Germany is screwing the U.S. in trade deals.

Trump told Merkel and the press that Germany had gotten the better end of the stick in trade deals with the US in the past and that he was looking to rectify that situation.

“The negotiators for Germany have done a far better job than the negotiators for the United States,” he said. “But hopefully we can even it out.”

We know what “even it out” means, and it is an absurd notion. It means negotiating a bilateral trade deal with Germany and somehow ignoring the rest of the rest of the European Union.

Merkel explained to Trump that  “The European Union is negotiating those agreements for all of the member states,” but whether he grasped that is hard to tell

Of course, what Merkel says about it doesn’t matter in a White House that is gripped by the delusion that Germany can just tell the EU to take a hike — at least, it will be gripped by this for as long as that policy is directed by Trump’s trade head, Peter Navarro.

Navarro, in a much-derided speech this month, said Germany “uses the argument” of being in the eurozone to avoid trade deals with the US, and that because of this Germany would be “one of the most difficult trade deficits we’re going to have to deal with.”

Navarro has gone as far as to accuse Germany of being a currency manipulator for using the euro. He thinks that because countries with weaker economies than Germany’s are factored into the euro’s value, Germany can sell its manufactured goods more cheaply than it could if it had its own currency.

Obviously, that’s not currency manipulation. That’s just the reality of the euro’s makeup.

But it means Merkel faces a scenario in which the president of the United States and his top trade adviser think one of their closest and most important allies is lying to them about its need to respect the EU. Trump and Navarro think this is a choice Germany is making about the US, not an obligation that is part of the fabric of its political and economic systems.

Peter Navarro is director of the National Trade Council, a newly formed bureaucratic thingie in the executive branch somewhere. This is from an article about him:

It is sometimes difficult to get a detailed, direct answer from President Trump and his surrogates on their economic policy.

During the campaign he slid past substance by making sweeping claims of how, under a Trump administration, the US would ‘”win bigly” and “stop being taken advantage of.”

Those pronouncements continue.

But luckily there is one voice coming from the White House that clearly articulates the direction in which it wants this country to head economically. That voice belongs to Peter Navarro, the head of Trump’s newly formed National Trade Council.

Over the past few weeks, Navarro has given a number of interviews that explain the administration’s propensity for victimhood, an obsession with Germany, and a deep-seated desire to change the face of the American economy as we know it.

All these factors have contributed to growing fears that this administration will start a trade war with any of the countries it has scapegoated — Mexico, China, or, yes, now Germany.

I missed this, but in January Trump suggested a 35 percent tariff on BMWs imported into the U.S., and Germans probably are still pissed about that —

Germany’s deputy chancellor and minister for the economy, Sigmar Gabriel, said on Monday morning that a tax on German imports would lead to a “bad awakening” among US carmakers since they were reliant on transatlantic supply chains.

“I believe BMW’s biggest factory is already in the US, in Spartanburg [South Carolina],” Gabriel, leader of the centre-left Social Democratic party, told the Bild newspaper in a video interview.

“The US car industry would have a bad awakening if all the supply parts that aren’t being built in the US were to suddenly come with a 35% tariff. I believe it would make the US car industry weaker, worse and above all more expensive. I would wait and see what the Congress has to say about that, which is mostly full of people who want the opposite of Trump.”

In an interview with Bild and the Times, the US president-elect had indicated that he would aim to realign the “out of balance” car trade between Germany and the US. “If you go down Fifth Avenue everyone has a Mercedes Benz in front of his house, isn’t that the case?” he said. “How many Chevrolets do you see in Germany? Not very many, maybe none at all … it’s a one-way street.”

Asked what Trump could do to make sure German customers bought more American cars, Gabriel said: “Build better cars.”

Trump was never a manufacturing guy, so he doesn’t understand supply chains. And he doesn’t understand how the EU works, and neither does his trade guy, Navarro. What else doesn’t he know?

After tweeting from Mar-a-Lago that he had a GREAT meeting with Angela Merkel, in spite of what the FAKE NEWS said, he stepped in more doo doo.

Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, Germany owes…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2017

…vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2017

Um, what is he talking about? I didn’t think the U.S. collected money to run NATO. 

And, of course, it doesn’t. Nobody owes NATO money. Nobody owes the U.S. anything on behalf of NATO. The issue is that NATO members commit to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, and most of them don’t. Germany spends 1.2 percent, although Merkel has said that will increase. But framing this issue as if Germany is somehow victimizing the United States is just  … weird.

See also Oops, he did it again: Donald Trump just can’t stop himself from blurting out state secrets.

More compassionate conservatism:

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters at a press conference Thursday that Meals on Wheels “sounds great.” But he said that along with other anti-poverty programs, it is “not showing any results.”

“We can’t spend money on programs just because they sound good,” Mulvaney told reporters. “We’re not going to spend money on programs that cannot show that they actually deliver the promises that we’ve made to people.”

Trump’s budget would strip $3 billion from the Community Development Block Grant program, which supports a variety of community-development and anti-poverty programs. Those include Meals on Wheels, which provided 219 million meals to 2.4 million seniors in 2016.

CNN reporter Jim Acosta asked Mulvaney if the funding cuts were “hard-hearted.” Mulvaney responded that reducing government spending on ineffective programs is “probably one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

There’s a post being shared all over social media saying that it’s costing taxpayers $183 million/year to provide security for Melania Trump and little Barron so they can live in New York City. I checked; according to Snopes, it’s probably closer to $50 million/year. Still, $50 million is a lot of money.

Trump’s weekend visits to Mar-a-Lago cost taxpayers $3 million a pop, Politico says. Since the inauguration, that’s been five weekends. For argument’s sake let’s say he will make 40 trips to Mar-a-Lago this year. That’s $120 million.

McClatchy reported that in eight years of the Obama Administration, the nation paid a total of $85 million for presidential family vacations.

And the adult Trump children are getting security, too. For example,

When the president-elect’s son Eric Trump jetted to Uruguay in early January for a Trump Organization promotional trip, U.S. taxpayers were left footing a bill of nearly $100,000 in hotel rooms for Secret Service and embassy staff.

It wasn’t a vacation, but it wasn’t government business, either. And I still want to know how embassy staff got mixed up in Eric’s business trip.

But I say that if we’re going to be so compassionate as to stop providing meals to elderly shut-ins, we ought to do the Trumps a favor and put them on a budget for vacation travel and non-White House residence expenses.  And we’ll be at least as generous to Trump as the nation was to Obama. So $85 million divided by eight is $10,625,000 a year for Trump to vacation and Melania to live anywhere she wants. Since the Obamas sometimes took other vacations (such as the famous “date night,” I’d be willing to round that up to $11 million to make it even.

Back to Mr. Mulvaney,

“You’re only focusing on half of the equation, right? You’re only focusing on recipients of the money,” Mulvaney said. “We’re trying to focus on both the recipients of the money and the folks who give us the money in the first place. I think it’s fairly compassionate to go to them and say, ‘Look, we’re not going to ask you for your hard-earned money anymore.'”

I appreciate what you say, Mr. Mulvaney, and I want you to know that I resent the hell out of being asked to pay taxes so that the president can pop down to his Florida resort every weekend. The closest thing I’ve had to a vacation for the past several years was the family reunion in Moline, Illinois last summer.

Of course, I don’t have the stresses that a president has. But if the POTUS were to agree to spend his weekends at Camp David — which I understand is perfectly nice — instead of Mar-a-Lago I’d be happy to give him some de-stressing meditation tips. It’s got a golf tees/greens area and a swimming pool. They’ve got marines guarding the place all the time, anyway, so it’s not that much of an additional expense.

Trump could still go to Mar-a-Lago whenever he wanted, but once his annual budget is used up he would have to pay the expenses out of his own pocket. Likewise Melania and Barron might have to move into the White House. But, y’know, there are people who have it worse.

This is happening now:

President Donald Trump announced plans Wednesday to re-examine federal requirements governing the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks, moving forcefully against Obama-era environmental regulations that Trump says are stifling economic growth.

Trump was set to reveal his plans during a speech at an automotive testing center near Detroit, but he previewed the announcement during a round-table meeting at the American Center for Mobility with auto company executives and workers, just before the speech.

“This is going to be a new era for American jobs and job creation,” Trump said.

Some of you probably know the auto industry better than I do. Was it really just those awful old auto emissions standards that killed Detroit? Especially since the current standards were agreed to in 2009, after the auto industry was already on life support?

Trump’s announcement, while having no immediate effect, is expected to set the stage for weaker fuel efficiency standards as well as drawn-out legal battles with environmental groups and states such as California that adopted their own tough tailpipe standards for drivers.

Trump’s EPA director, Scott “What Global Warming?” Pruitt, doesn’t think California should be allowed to set its own emissions standards.

Scott Pruitt said at a contentious confirmation hearing Wednesday that he cannot commit to keeping in place the current version of a decades-old federal waiver that allows California to set emissions standards stricter than elsewhere in the United States.

In recent years, California regulators have used the waiver to force automakers to build more efficient vehicles, which has helped the state cut its greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks by nearly a third since 2009.

More than a dozen other states have adopted the California standard as part of their own efforts both to clean their air and fight global warming.

The other states include Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont; all together, states with their own high emissions standards make up about 30 percent of the American market, it says here.

Wingnuts love states’ rights as long as states are doing things they approve of. Otherwise, not so much.

But isn’t it a fact that most first-world industrialized nations have auto-emissions standards? Even if Detroit is allowed to knock off cheaper cars to sell domestically, what about international sales? And will foreign auto makers cut the standards for cars they sell in the U.S., making them cheaper, too?

And I doubt  doubling down on internal combustion is really a smart long-term strategy, given that much of the rest of the world is moving toward electric cars. Or so I’ve read.

So, what do you think of the bomb the CBO dropped on Trumpcare yesterday? And let us not forget all of Trump’s bigly promises (image from Talking Points Memo) —

Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth —

So what are we really going to get?

• The CBO estimates the Trump/Ryan bill would leave 14 million fewer people insured in the first year, 24 million fewer by 2026.
• The CBO says deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs will be higher.
• The CBO says premiums for private insurance will go up 15 to 20 percent until after 2020, when they could come down. But premiums will come down because the bill pushes out older, sicker people, leaving only younger and healthier people able to buy insurance.

As a lot of people have already pointed out, this is not a health care bill. It’s a tax cut bill.

What are the odds this monstrosity will pass? Discuss …

Rep. Steve “Calves Like Cantaloupes” King tweeted this recently:

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017

Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

Slammed because his tweet was rather nakedly racist, King said on CNN,

“I’ve been to Europe and I’ve spoken on this issue and I’ve said the same thing as far as ten years ago to the German people and to any population of people that is a declining population that isn’t willing to have enough babies to reproduce themselves. And I’ve said to them, you can’t rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies,” King said on CNN. “You’ve got to keep your birth rate up and that you need to teach your children your values.”

King then lamented that the U.S. has “aborted nearly 60 million babies” since 1973 and claimed that there is an effort to “replace that void with somebody else’s babies.”

“That’s the push to bring in much illegal immigration into America, living in enclaves, refusing to assimilate into the American culture and civilization,” he said. “Some embrace it, yes. But many are two and three generations living in enclaves that are pushing back now in resistance against the assimilation. It’s far worse in Europe than it is today here in the United States, but I want us to be looking at that, promoting the birth rate in America, restoring the rule of law, putting an end to illegal immigration and recognizing that we need to be a country that’s pulled together on similar values.”

Never mind that in the 19th century Americans were saying the same things about the Irish that they’re saying about Syrians now.

The CNN host told King that the congressman has appeared to push for white people to raise their birth rate, prompting the congressman to argue that he has talked about “culture,” not race.

“I did defend western civilization,” King said. “If we have an element of Americans here — and that’s a big element — that reject western civilization, then what have we? This is an effort on the left I think to break down the American civilization and the American culture and turn it into something entirely different.”

“This western civilization is a superior civilization and we want to share it with everybody,” he added.

The Republican-dominated federal government is poised to do away with the National Endowment for the Arts, and this clown is concerned about western civilization because there aren’t enough (white) American babies? That’s rich.

Western civilization is doing just fine, actually. There’s an all-Beethoven program scheduled for the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra. The National Ballet of China will be performing “Giselle” later this month (and also that perennial favorite, “The Red Detachment of Women”). And check out the schedule for the Royal Opera House Muscat in Syria.

What’s great about western civilization is widely appreciated just about everywhere but in the U.S., it seems. And I don’t think that has anything to do with who’s having babies.

See also Charles Pierce, “This Is the Most Blatantly Racist Statement from a Member of Congress in 50 Years.”

So here’s another article about the poor Appalachian people who used to work in coal mines and don’t anymore and are dependent on Obamacare and might lose it and voted for Trump. And it’s really, really sad. Here’s just a bit of it:

Heartburn is just the latest problem for Clyde, a patient Keisha sees every three months. Like so many in this corner of Appalachia, he used to have a highly paid job at a coal mine. Company insurance covered all of his medical needs. Then he lost the job and ended up here, holding a cane and suffering not only from heartburn but diabetes, arthritis, diverticulitis, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Because of the ACA, Clyde’s visit is covered by Medicaid. Before the law, most West Virginians without children or disabilities could not qualify for Medicaid, no matter how poor they were. The ACA — better known here as Obamacare — expanded the program to cover more people, such as Clyde, who can depend on Keisha to fix his heartburn without having to worry about the cost.

As for the other problems in his life, he has put his hopes in Trump, who came to West Virginia saying he would bring back coal and put miners back to work. When Trump mentioned repealing Obamacare, Clyde wasn’t sure what that might mean for his Medicaid. But if he had a job that provided health insurance, he reasoned, he wouldn’t need Medicaid anyway, so he voted for Trump, along with 74 percent of McDowell County.

And we might judge this man a fool, but in truth he voted for the candidate who promised him something, as opposed to the one who promised him nothing. And assuming he gets most of his politics news from the teevee, nobody warned him what a con man Trump is.

The truth is that Clyde was abandoned by both parties. It might be that the Democrats were working to get him better benefits, but neither party has ever been straight with coal people about why their jobs are not going to come back. Neither party, on a local, state or national level, has hustled to come up with a plan to replace those coal jobs or otherwise come up with a way for the Clydes of America to find self-worth and income.

And it’s not like the end of coal was something that just sneaked up on everybody last week. They’ve had years to figure out what to do about Clyde. Meanwhile, nobody tells him straight-out what’s really going on. They just dangle promises in front of him that nobody intends to keep.

One of the best things I’ve read today is An open letter to America’s coal miners, and to America by Mark Sumners, a former mineworker himself. In other words, he’s someone who knows the business. Here’s a bit:

This is the hard truth. In 2000, coal generated almost 53 percent of all the electricity in the United States. By 2009, that was 45 percent. In 2014 it was 39 percent. One year later, it was 33 percent.

Look at that last number. Coal’s contribution to the electrical picture dropped by 6 percent in a single year. That didn’t happen because of rules on carbon pollution that were never even made. It didn’t happen because of regulations on water pollution that never went into effect.

It happened because fracking for natural gas has made that fuel extremely abundant, and generators of electricity would much, much rather deal with gas than coal. Even when the gas itself is more expensive than coal, gas is easier to transport, easier to store, easier to burn. You don’t need expensive ash-removal on the smokestacks of a gas-powered plant, because gas doesn’t make ash. You don’t need to worry about where to bury ton after ton of clinkers left over when the coal is burned. There are no dams full of slurry to burst.

Better still, from the point of view of the people making electricity, gas generators are cheaper. You can buy them small and add on power gradually. Coal plants are big. They take a huge amount of money up front and don’t start making money for decades after construction.

That’s why there are no new coal plants under construction anywhere in the United States. None.

Forget the songs. Ignore the banners. You don’t sell coal to “America.” You sell it to Duke Energy, and Southern Company, and NRG and a few dozen others. That’s who buys coal. Only they’re buying less. And they’re going to keep buying less, until they’re buying none at all. Donald Trump isn’t going to change that. Short of passing a law that requires power companies to burn coal, which he won’t, there’s nothing that can stop it.

If Congress repealed every environmental law and every safety law that affects coal mining tonight, you know what would happen tomorrow? There would be fewer coal jobs. And fewer still the day after.

In fact, the regulations that Trump is repealing will make that happen faster. The rule that was changed on allowing more coal waste in streams won’t make new coal jobs. It will allow mining companies to replace underground mines with mountaintop removal mines. Those mines use far fewer people. When Trump signed that document and handed you the pen, what he was repealing was coal jobs.

There was a time that mine workers got much of their news about what government was up to from the unions. I assume Clyde doesn’t hear from unions any more, either, but if he did I’m not sure how they are handling the cold, hard fact that coal mining is going the way of the whaling industry.

And I’d also bet that Clyde had no idea what any Democratic running for office anywhere actually proposed. And that isn’t entirely Clyde’s fault.

Of course, a lot of people are being left behind by the economy. I keep reading that this isn’t really the fault of outsourcing jobs to other countries, although that used to be the cause. Maybe it isn’t the real cause these days. But something is a problem.

Someone asked some pollsters recently about what the Democrats have been doing wrong, and they said,

[Hillary Clinton] had a list of policies, but she didn’t have an overall explanation of what her diagnosis of the problem was, or what her solution was. This is what we call the Listerine test, after the eight-word slogan: “Listerine kills the germs that cause bad breath.”

It defines the problem, and gives a solution that sounds like it might work. It’s what advertising calls a “reason to believe.” Hillary didn’t have one. She had a goal statement: “An economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top.”

The very first question of the very first debate came from [moderator] Lester Holt, and it was: “Secretary Clinton, why are you the better choice than your opponent to create the kind of jobs that will put more money in the pockets of American workers?” And her answer listed 14 different policies, but with just a few grace notes to connect them. That was the moment at which I became convinced she wasn’t going to win.

That is not her problem—it is a party problem.

It is a party problem, and it goes deeper than just messaging.

First, they need to figure out what they’re going to do about Clyde. And I don’t mean appealing to his presumed racism or misogyny or anything else. We don’t need to do that, and we shouldn’t do it. I mean they need to figure out how are they going to change the economy so that there’s a place for Clyde in it, somewhere. Because until they figure that out, all the clever slogans in the world aren’t going to help them.

And I don’t know what that solution might be, but I suspect it’s going to take more than a few tweaks to status quo. Be bold, Democrats. Stop negotiating with yourselves. Stop whimpering that Republicans are mean to you. Come up with the plan you’d like to put into place if you had complete control of Congress and the White House, and stick to it.

Then, when you’ve got the plan, sell it. Get everybody on the same page with a simple message that basically says, We can do this. But it’s got to be more than a slogan; people need to know the message means something.

And at this point the Democratic Brand has become so degraded it’s going to take a few election cycles to be credible again to most of the Clydes. But if they don’t do this, they’re going to be keep losing.

See also: Andrew O’Hehir, How the DudeBros ruined everything: A totally clear-headed guide to political reality

Seriously, the end result of Republican ideology is to privatize all government functions, including the military; expect all these functions to pay for themselves out of profits; and then cut taxes to zero. Well, except maybe for sales taxes and user fees. Anyone reading this who thinks that would be a great idea … must be a wingnut.

Catherine Rampell writes for WaPo,

Let’s abandon the pretense.

Republicans’ “health care” bill is not really about health care. It’s not about improving access to health insurance, or reducing premiums, or making sure you get to keep your doctor if you like your doctor. And it’s certainly not about preventing people from dying in the streets.

Instead, it’s about hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts — tax cuts that will quietly pave the way for more, and far larger, tax cuts.

And she makes a good case for it. Why are the Republicans ramming through this mess of legislation that nobody likes as fast as they can? Because they need this to cut more taxes and privatize Medicare, and they know that if people actually have time to look at this monstrosity of a bill, it will never pass. It’s now or never.

The American Health Care Act, which has been opposed by nearly every possible stakeholder of nearly every ideological orientation, is being rushed through Congress with non-extreme vetting. In fact, it passed out of one committee in the middle of the night, overseen by a committee chairman who just a day earlier criticized Obamacare for being “written in the dark of night.” …

… Part of the reason they have rushed the bill through committees is to front-run an (inevitably unflattering) analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

In the meantime, other experts and government bodies have scrambled to compile their own estimates for the bill’s effects.

The ratings and analytics firm S&P Global has ballparked the number of people who would lose their insurance at 6 million to 10 million; others have offered figures as high as 15 million and 20 million. Meanwhile, a group of health researchers calculated that the bill would increase costs for enrollees on the individual insurance market by, on average, more than $1,500 per year when it would take effect, and by more than $2,400 per year by 2020.

Oh, and the Medicare trust fund would be exhausted by 2024, according to Brookings Institution researchers.

And the point is …

… tax cuts. Specifically, $600 billion of them, predominantly benefiting the rich.

And the connection is …

The presence of expensive tax cuts in a bill purportedly about health-care reform is not a side effect; it’s the entire point. They make it easier for Republicans’ (much bigger) individual and corporate tax cuts to sail through the Senate with minimal Democratic obstruction in a few months’ time.

Why? Under normal circumstances, Democrats would almost certainly filibuster the coming tax overhaul, preventing it from ever getting to a vote. But Republicans can take the filibuster option away by using the “reconciliation” process, which is an option if, and only if, the tax bill doesn’t increase government deficits in the long term, relative to existing law.

How do you keep tax cuts from increasing deficits relative to existing law? One useful tool is to change existing law — that is, to move the goalposts. Cutting taxes in the Obamacare repeal bill today lowers the revenue baseline against which a tax overhaul plan will be judged tomorrow.

Allegra Kirkland writes for TPM:

By repealing a payroll tax on high earners that provided a critical additional revenue stream for the Medicare trust fund, the GOP’s proposed American Health Care Act would speed up the fund’s exhaustion by as many as three to four years, according to estimates from health care policy experts. …

…  Critics say this provision is a prime example of the GOP bill granting tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the country’s neediest citizens, and that it paves the way for Medicare privatization. One former Obama administration official argued that by endangering the program’s funding, so-called “entitlement hawks” like House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) will have cover to argue that Medicare as we know it is financially unsustainable—then realize their long-held dream of turning it into a voucher program.

Andy Slavitt, acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during the last two years of the Obama administration, has been ringing this bell loudly since the AHCA was made public Monday night.

“I think it’s a smarter play for them to move Medicare closer to a crisis, try to get this bill done, and then build a case about why this crisis needs to be addressed,” he told TPM in a Thursday phone interview.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities figured out how much Trumpcare tax credits would actually provide compared to Obamacare subsidies. In some states — mostly red ones, ironically — people will end up paying thousands of dollars more out of their own pockets every year for insurance. At the same time, the Republican bill is expected to increase the deficit because of the tax cuts. The White House has pre-emptively attacked the CBO, anticipating their bill will get a bad grade.

So … costs more, provides less. Lose/lose! That’s the Republican way!

In one of his most brilliant moves yet, the so-called president is considering paying for his border wall by cutting funds to the Coast Guard and airport security. This will make it easier for the terrorists and drug smugglers he talks about to get into the country by boat and plane.