David Leonhardt

The unrelenting chaos that Trump creates can sometimes obscure the big picture. But the big picture is simple: The United States has never had a president as demonstrably unfit for the office as Trump. And it’s becoming clear that 2019 is likely to be dominated by a single question: What are we going to do about it?

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The biggest risk may be that an external emergency — a war, a terrorist attack, a financial crisis, an immense natural disaster — will arise. By then, it will be too late to pretend that he is anything other than manifestly unfit to lead.

Our current plight sparks nostalgia for the Great Depression. Wonderful.

A trick question: If Congress takes no action in coming years, what will happen to the budget deficit?

It will shrink — and shrink a lot. This simple fact may offer the best hope for deficit reduction.

As federal law currently stands, some significant tax increases are set to take effect in coming years. The most important is the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012.

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For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

Given what people have been saying about a successful stimulus bill, just imagine what they’ll say about one that doesn’t accomplish much.

There was this great debate among F.D.R.’s advisers about whether you had to split up companies — not just banks — you had to split up companies in order to regulate them effectively, or whether it was possible to have big, huge, sprawling, powerful companies — even not just possible, but better — and then have strong regulators. And it seems to me there’s an analogy of that debate now. Which is, do you think it is O.K.