Today's "Meet The Press" missed the mark. The fallback position of dissecting Democratic presidential candidates was frankly a waste of time for more important things that only get a passing statement.
Granted, there was sufficient focus on the economy and Mr. Todd did interview the president's chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow, however, wider implications were not addressed. For example, the trade war with China is an unmitigated disaster. As fmr. Congressman Beto O'Rourke stated, the trade standoff with China is 'hammering the hell out of farmers in this country,' and the once robust market for American agricultural products may not come back as China looks to other countries for soybeans and other agricultural products.
The wider implication is that President Trump is so desperate to get a trade deal with China, who is basically playing a long game versus his transactional nature, that he has no leverage to speak out for the citizens of Hong Kong and the protests against Beijing's tactics of repression. The Trump Administration has said that America shouldn't get involved, which is completely wrong-headed inasmuch as not only are democratic freedoms threatened but the stability of a global financial center are being put at risk.
If the Trans-Pacific Partnership had moved forward, something that the president was against, the United States would have had tremendous leverage over China and this tariff folly that the president continues on could have been resolved already. As Mr. O'Rourke pointed out, some of the finer points of the TPP needed to be worked out, but overall it was a short-sighted mistake that the United States didn't proceed with this to open up even more markets for U.S. agriculture.
Going forward with such a deal was traditionally a no-brainer for Republicans, which is part of the 'conversation' that fmr. Congressman Mark Sanford was touching on. Setting aside the poisonous rhetoric the president constantly spews, Mr. Sanford has a point that the once fiscally-stingy Republican party is now following a cult of personality figure that is running up trillion-dollar deficits year over year. With that said, as soon as a Democrat is elected president, the Republicans will miraculously regain their ever hypocritical fiscal sanity.
Speaking of wider implications, Mr. Todd only briefly touched (and that's being generous) on the fact that at the president's urging, Israel denied entry for two duly elected United States Congresswomen. This is an unprecedented act in American foreign policy. This should have been a focal point of today's discussion and how the president is politicizing the United States' traditional bipartisan support for Israel. That Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave into the president's badgering and statements that once again dishonor the office of the presidency, shows his fecklessness as a leader. This topic alone could have taken up the entire hour and even though Mr. Netanyahu reversed his government's decision with regard to Congresswoman Tlaib, on principle she was correct to reject the invitation. Mr. Netanyahu and Israel had an opportunity to show the open arms of their democracy but instead chose narrow-mindedness over openness.
Lastly, we return to Mr. Kudlow who stated multiple times during the interview that we shouldn't be afraid of optimism, which seriously worried Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and if you share that worry, you'd be right. Carol Lee noted that despite his statements of optimism, he gave no real concrete answers to how the administration would deal with an economic slowdown. We'd be remiss if we didn't point out that Mr. Kudlow has an awful record on predicting this country's economic future. When confronted with the statements that Mr. Kudlow made before the 2008 economic meltdown, in which he said the economy was strong, he admitted that he blew that call. We'd say so...
He blew that call then, and today, "Meet The Press" dropped the ball.
Yamiche Alcindor, PBS NewsHour; Joshua Johnson, NPR; Carol Lee, NBC News; Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal
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