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Everything Is Harder Than It Should Be (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

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I’ll never forgive Bill Clinton for what he put this country through for his selfish indulgence, but I do miss one thing about him: He had a preternatural ability to explain complex issues in a way that made them understandable while preserving their complexity. Not for nothing was Clinton called “explainer-in-chief.”

It’s a skill that Barack Obama didn’t have, despite being an inspiring orator. The Affordable Care Act was never a government takeover of health care, and most Americans want to keep major portions of it (which is why Republicans haven’t been able to get rid of it). But Obama’s inability to explain the complex approach to a complex subject allowed opponents to reframe a conservative idea as some kind of socialist assault on Americans’ right to be uninsured.

Still, Obama didn’t pretend complex issues were anything but complex. He had a little plaque on the Resolute desk that said “Hard things are hard.” One of the many things I find insufferable about our current president is his insistence that hard things are easy.

This seems to have been a big part of Donald Trump’s appeal to the Republican Party that chose him from a catalog of candidates, most of whom had actual public service experience and conservative bona fides (and were never known to have bragged about grabbing women by the you-know-what). Build a wall, but don’t worry about money (or eminent domain). Mexico will pay for it. Lock her up, but don’t worry about any evidence of a prosecutable crime. She must be guilty of something. Repeal and replace with something beautiful — better insurance for everyone at a fraction of the cost.

No wonder President Trump was so impressed with Kim Jong Un. In North Korea, it really is easy to get your people to sit up at attention, and there are no pesky laws, legislative branch or courts making it impossible to rule by fiat. Representative democracy in a nation of laws gets to be a drag, doesn’t it?

Intractable problems are intractable for a reason. Last month that simple little policy of locking up all undocumented foreigners coming into the country blew up on Trump because — who could have known? — some of those foreigners turned out to be the vulnerable children of desperate parents. And while separating children from their parents didn’t seem inhumanly cruel to the Trump administration, just the logistics turned out to be really hard. Imagine that.

When forced to back down — a sure sign of weakness in the simple world where might makes right — Trump still seemed to think there was an easy answer to the intractable problem of immigration in a nation of immigrants: “It’s so simple,” he told members of Congress. “It’s called, ‘I’m sorry you can’t come in.’”

Trump’s own businesses have long depended on foreign workers, and they aren’t alone. But by all means, let’s ignore even the most obvious complications. And we certainly don’t want to consider how we’re supposed to achieve sustained growth in the GDP — much less the easy 3 percent that remains elusive over the long term — when we are at full employment and not manufacturing as many new American workers as we used to.

President Trump’s business acumen was supposed to overcome the shortcomings in his personal character, but his simplistic approach to economics may explain his multiple bankruptcies. (It probably is easy to run a “university” if you don’t actually have to give the paying students an education.)

He persists in describing trade deficits as losses, and famously declared (on Twitter, of course) that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”

So he seemed to take it as a personal affront — another insufferable character trait — when Harley Davidson responded to Trump’s good and easy trade war in the way that will be most beneficial to a for-profit company selling into a global marketplace.

It turns out that our intractable trade deficits are intractable because international trade isn’t really easy, but American businesses seem to want to keep doing it anyway. If only we had a president who could explain that.


President Trump will meet with Vladimir Putin in a couple of weeks. So exciting! Do you think he will mention Putin’s dandruff like he did French President Emmanuel Macron’s? Will he toss him a Starburst like he did German Chancellor Angela Merkel? Or maybe give him a Twitter-lashing like he did Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada who dared suggest that he would be looking out for his own country’s interests?

Or is it more likely he’ll praise the strong, smart leader of a murderous dictatorship the way he did Kim?


Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.
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