A hamstrung Trump is the best-case scenario

At my lecture in Sheffield last week, the final question in an otherwise temperate Q&A was antagonistic. My last Spectator column led the man to conclude that I was a Trump supporter. Was this true? I was affronted. And let me tell you, these millennials are on to something. I spend way too much time causing offence, and far too little taking it. Huffing and puffing in indignation is so much fun.

Because I am not a Trumpster, I naturally rooted for the Dems to take the House in Tuesday’s midterms. Less intuitively, I did not want Democrats to take the Senate. I believe that DC is in such a perilous, fractious, hysterical and dysfunctional state that we are all safest with the American federal government in a state of maximum paralysis. I don’t want that government to be capable of doing anything.

In broad strokes, Trump is right about any number of items on his to-do list. That’s why he has to be stopped from acting on them. The areas of policy crying out for redress are too critical to make a hash of.

Trump was right, for example, that the American tax code, much like the UK’s, is obscenely complex and riddled with contradictions, injustice and perverse incentives. Having been kludged together in layer upon layer of exceptions, loopholes and quick fixes, US tax law recalls the lumpy build-up of chewing gum on the underside of a school desk. We might best have scraped back down to the wood and started from scratch. Rebuilding a fair, consistent, genuinely simplified system would have taken time, but the bother would have been worth it. My American tax return is two inches thick, and I don’t even live there.