My favorite line in the money is one that provides some real insight in to the world of Max Bialystock, and I believe it will be a guide to the next four years:
Max Bialystock: The two cardinal rules of producing. One: Never put your own money in the show.
Leo Bloom: And two?
Max Bialystock: [yelling] Never put your own money in the show!
The way Max's world works is by putting himself in situations where he can take advantage of the upside from a play's success without exposing himself to the downside of risking his own money on a failure. That basically sums up the almost 50-year history of Donald Trump. There's no other way to evaluate his career and personal life but as a series of situations where he takes advantage of the bankers, contractors, condo depositors, real estate seminar students, wives and all others who are foolish enough to transact with him.
So what does that mean for the policies and actions of a Trump administration? First and foremost, the people who put him in office will find themselves holding the short end of the stick. He got what he wanted, he doesn't need them for anything, and it's over, so they will only get the barest amount of attention from him required to keep the operation going. This is a testable prediction. You've already seen that his acceptance speech was conciliatory in ways we didn't think possible. Now that he needs the attention and acquiescence of different groups of people, he will begin appealing to those groups instead. You will find yourself saying, "Where was this guy on the campaign trail? It's like a whole different person!"
The second thing it means is that you will never see Donald Trump "put his own money in the show" by advancing a policy or course of action that could fail. He has campaigned on anti-immigrant, anti-Obamacare and anti-Trade views among other things. I don't think that any of these are particularly well-designed systems, but they all have some role to play in the real world as it is and changing any one of these pieces of the economy will be extremely disruptive. Trump won't touch any of them with a ten-foot pole. He may let someone else advance a proposal in Congress, but there will be enough plausible deniability for him to claim that it's someone else's fault if the new system doesn't work.
Third, he will address problems (I don't want to call it "making decisions") by abdication. There will be a class of other people really running things. Two kinds of people will take these jobs. The first will be real incompetents. They will be nominally qualified for whatever job they have, but totally incapable of really doing it. The result will be that they will "put new coversheets on all TPS reports before they go out" (in the language of the classic Office Space), but they will not govern anything. The second will be well-meaning, experienced individuals who don't really want to be there but feel a deep sense of responsibility to the country. Think of Robert Gates serving as Secretary of Defense for President Obama.
This implies a few things. First of all, even though he obtained the Republican nomination by appealing to racist and authoritarian instincts, he will back off from or abandon them now that he actually has the White House. The reason is because he just doesn't care. If he gets what he wants by being a racist, he'll do it. If he gets what he wants by opposing racism, he'll do that too. The second is four years of (hopefully) benign neglect of all major issues. There will be no problem of consequence addressed from the top down. The third is a disproportionately large amount of attention paid to small issues that have out-sized symbolic importance.
I'll try to develop some of these thoughts a little later, including what I think they mean for other Republicans and those other guys.... what were their names again? We used to have a political party at some point...?
Along the way, I also hope to share some thoughts on investing going forward (spoiler alert - do whatever you were going to do before).
PS - I wanted to call this post "Springtime for Hitler," which would have been funny, but inflammatory.
