President Donald Trump is politically “dead,” warns an adviser to former President Bill Clinton, and Democrats need to wise up and see that.
“I think the country is done with this guy,” James Carville posted on social media last week. (The expletives have been deleted from this transcript.) “The situation with Trump and the American people are simply this, it's an awful marriage. By the way, it's a marriage that on paper has over two years left to go. He's sick of the people and the people are sick of him. And if you cannot see you that, you just gotta wake up. We've been so traumatized by him so long that we hadn't noticed that he's dead. Politically, man is dead.”
He added, “He can't win anybody a Republican primary anymore. And the craziest, most anti-Trump Democrat is gonna win the primary because just because what Democrats think they're looking for is to find the craziest anti-Trump person you can find. But I, I can assure you what you seeing is a divorce. And how do we stay and live in the same house for another two years?”
Carville concluded, “I don't think we can. I think the country is done with this guy.”
In May Carville argued that if Trump cannot retain control of Congress during the midterms, he will quite possibly quit rather than stay in power to be dogged by Democratic lawmakers.
"I think if he has still got his wits about him—and I hope he does—he’ll get out of there and leave, because his life is gonna be so miserable, he won’t know what to do,” Carville observed.
Carville is not alone among Clintonians to predict the worst for Trump. Speaking with AlterNet in July, one of Clinton’s top economists, Dr. Robert J. Shapiro, warned that Trump’s tariffs are creating economic instability.
“It's about uncertainty,” Shapiro argued to AlterNet. “Every investment is based on an assessment of the likely future demand for whatever you're investing in, and how much it's going to cost to produce it. So there are assumptions about labor costs, material costs and other input costs — and again, about demand. If you have a set of arrangements that give you some confidence about the price of your inputs coming from Mexico or Canada, or about demand for goods in Canada — and don't forget, we have virtually no trade deficit with Canada; we have enormous trade, and it goes in both directions — so it's certainly right, and it's not just about investments based on these probabilities that the trade agreement can help reduce uncertainty about.”
Shapiro continued, “It's also about how much you're going to produce today, apart from investment, because you've got thousands of companies selling goods or services into Canada. And so there's uncertainty about whether this will lead to more conflict with Canada, which would hurt Canadian demand for US goods, or whether Canada will impose a new tariff in retaliation for ours that makes my goods less competitive there. Of course it's bad — it's bad for American workers, it's bad for American investment.”