the manchurian candidate

the manchurian candidate
The Manchurian hands. (White House)

Until last week I did not believe in the transmigration of souls from celluloid to reality. That changed when Congress passed the so-called “big beautiful bill.” Raymond Shaw, the brainwashed assassin of “The Manchurian Candidate,” is alive and well and living in the White House. There may be other explanations. But outside of the theater of the loony it’s difficult to understand why a president of the United States would gift China the greatest act of strategic self-destruction next to China’s own suicide in the 15th century. 

pierre tristam column flaglerlive.com flaglerlive China is already the most innovative investor and developer of green technology. It was set to be the world’s leading economy by the time the president hobbles through his third term. The bill will accelerate both trends while the United States re-fossilizes in the bog of crude while desecrating innovation and environment to maintain production of Jurassic energy. 

The $7,500 tax credit for your next electric-car purchase? Gone. So is any chance for American car makers to stay competitive with China’s EV manufacturing: American car makers had set up 24 factories to produce cars that qualified for the tax credit. The jobs are in jeopardy. Your 30 percent tax credit for rooftop solar installations? Gone. Those 30 percent tax credits for companies building wind and solar farms? Gone. (At least a planned excise tax on solar was removed from the bill at the last minute, as a bribe to win Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote.)

Tax credits on your heat pump and other energy-efficiency measures in your home? Gone. Get ready to face higher electric bills and fewer means to combat them. Incentives for electric battery technology? Gone, sealing an industry monopoly for China. The bill “took a sledgehammer to the domestic EV and battery supply chain that will be felt in communities around the country,” Albert Gore III, son of Al, said

It is as if William McKinley had signed an executive order in 1900 eliminating all tariffs protecting the emerging American car industry and doubled down on subsidizing the horse and buggy instead. (Ironic, I know. But McKinley’s targeted tariffs were intended to foster a new economy, not prolong a dying one.)

That’s before cataclysmic math of tax cuts paid for with deficits and the plunder of food stamps, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program known as CHIPs and Obamacare, causing from 12 to 20 million people to lose their health insurance (The lower estimate is by the Congressional Budget Office, the higher by the Senate’s Democratic Joint Economic Committee, with 1.9 million in Florida losing coverage.)

Then there’s debt. The national debt today is larger than the size of the economy, a ratio as high as it was at the end of World War II. We could afford it then. The economic glory years brought that down to 35 percent of the size of the economy by the time the Great Recession hit. Again, we could afford to pull out of the recession. But we never paid down the debt afterward. Obama, Trump and Biden are all to blame. Despite the longest economic expansion in history, the debt is at 100 percent of the economy again, as it was after the world war. The interest alone on the debt alone is approaching $1 trillion a year. It is the fastest growing part of the budget (It was $345 billion at the end of Trump’s first term.) Interest payments are a bigger share of the budget than the military budget or Medicare. They’re exceeded only by Social Security, and won’t be after 2026. 

A catastrophe is not merely possible. It is mathematically inevitable. Ask England, who thought the sun would never set on its empire. “The old saw about bankruptcy is that it comes about slowly and then all at once,” The Economist–the empire’s old seer–wrote this week. There’s no panic yet but when the history of the catastrophe is written after the 2029 crash, “expect a chapter or two to be devoted to the big, baleful behemoth of the BBB.”

Or just keep an eye on the Chinese jubilation index. China had its Trump. He followed the Ming emperor Zhu Di, who in the early 14th century brought the Enlightenment to China four centuries before Europe’s. He financed immense scholarship, fostered religious tolerance, and launched a thousand-ship armada that could have rivaled the Age of Discovery: Columbus could have been Chinese and discovered San Francisco Bay. 

Instead, Zhu Di’s son became the Maga Ming of his day. He shut it all down. He demolished the armada, exiled the scholars, burned their work, closed the borders and declared a China First policy that condemned the Middle Kingdom to six centuries of isolation, until its surge since the 1980s. 

History doesn’t repeat, but it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, either. The Chinese know. They’re watching the American president imitate one of their own, and they’re laughing at his spectacular embrace of national stupor. Without them lifting a finger. That Maga gift shop on Tiananmen Square is a matter of time.

In “The Manchurian Candidate,” Raymond Shaw finally does the right thing and ends the Chinese plot against America. That honorable part of him doesn’t appear to have transmigrated to the White House. The celluloid was made in China. 

Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.

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