After the Election

I was not quite as wrong as some others about how  this election would go, but I was wrong enough. After Comey made his first announcement on reopening an investigation of Clinton, I thought Trump might win but still would not be favored to do so. Before the announcement I was likening Trump to Todd Akin and figuring his candidacy probably  was sunk.  

The very  good  news is that the country will be  spared from Hillary Clinton and from  four more years of Obama’s policies.  We dodged a bullet there. We will have to see if in doing so we fell down and hit our heads on a rock.

There are opportunities for good things to happen.  Most of the worst things Obama and his administration did were done by executive fiat and can be reversed or ended by executive fiat. (The main exception is Obamacare, and the congress seems likely to kill it by legislation). If Trump puts effective managers with the right direction into various agencies,  we could see important relief from the depredations of bureaucrats and regulators,  a more conducive environment for growth and prosperity,  and more freedom in general.   If Trump really is skeptical of efforts to police the Middle East, we might at last see an end to fifteen years of mainly unnecessary war.  If he means what he says about appointing constitutionalists to the courts, there would be  important and lasting benefits for the nation from that alone. 

Of course there are also opportunities for bad things to happen. Trump is impulsive, arrogant, blustering, often unthinking,  and has shown an authoritarian streak.  There are good reasons for wondering what his actual principles are.  Some of his proposed policies  are completely wrong and will need to be rejected by the congress and/or the courts.

Still he is what we have, and we might as well be optimistic and hope for the best while being prepared for other results.  At least he is not Hillary Clinton. With her there would have been almost no reasonable hope for  good outcomes from her actions and decisions on just about anything.  With Trump, who knows?