Predicting what might happen in a Donald Trump presidency is easy. Day 1: A fabulous, really great inaugural, the best ever, with amazing entertainment by fabulous, top people. Day 2: War with Iran. Day 3: War with North Korea. Day 4: Mexico builds a wall to keep out Americans.
But let’s not go there. (Please.) Let us instead conjure what four years of a Hillary Clinton administration might bring. After all, she is, despite the media-led panic about Trump’s improving polls, still strong favourite to become the 45th President of the United States. So what would Hillary’s America look like?
Well, we could start with some predictions about the legislative fate of, say, the carried-interest loophole, student-loan relief, the Volcker Rule imposing ‘risk fees’ on banks and a realistic yet audacious guess as to whether she’ll sign the Commodity Futures Modernisation Act. But then you would stop reading this and turn to Taki’s column. So let’s not.
The difficulty with limning a template of a Hillary Clinton administration is that her existing template is unlimnable. That is, fuzzy. It’s not so much a template as a palimpsest. Mrs Clinton’s policy positions are rarely fixed points. They have a tendency to get up and wander about, whether it’s the Iraq war vote, or the trade deal she was so in favour of until she wasn’t, or the minimum wage of $12 or $15 an hour, or the Benghazi attack being the fault of that asshole in California streaming that totally inappropriate Islamophobic video, or the private emails with the nuclear launch codes and George Clooney’s recipe for penne arrabiata. If Mrs Clinton had an escutcheon, its motto would be ‘Whatever’ (Quisquis? You Brits all know Latin, right?) The catalogue of Clinton policy books has more positions than the Kamasutra. As Groucho Marx said, ‘I’ve got principles.
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