GeneralMacArthur
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« on: November 06, 2020, 06:51:27 PM » |
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« edited: November 06, 2020, 06:55:32 PM by GeneralMacArthur »
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Trump wasn't an economic populist though.
At the end of the day he was just totally clueless and had no core principles other than political self-service.
Some days he would start trade wars with China. Other days he would be begging China to sign a great trade deal.
Some days he would insist that we were being ripped off by our hemispheric neighbors and start trade wars with them. Other days he would sign a rebranded NAFTA. And then tell everyone he had "killed NAFTA" when he barely changed it at all.
He ran on trying to help struggling farmers, but farmers have been devastated by the Trump presidency because his tariffs have sent commodities markets into chaos. He ran on trying to bring jobs back to America and stop outsourcing, and he completely failed.
He ran on trying to fix the national debt, and then signed a huge tax cut that doubled the Obama-era deficits. And in spite of this, his GDP growth per year was smaller than Obama's.
And when the pandemic hit, he couldn't care less about workers and made zero effort to get them the funding they needed to go back to work safely. Instead he just tried to bully everyone into going back to work under unsafe conditions, and then cried like a bitch when unemployment stayed high because people didn't want to die.
Has the rust belt been revitalized? Has coal country been revitalized? Are blue collar workers better off now than they were four years ago? Did Trump stop the illegal immigrants from taking our jobs? Did Trump stop China from manipulating currency, stealing intellectual property, and flooding our markets with cheap knock-offs? Are farmers and manufacturers better off now than they were four years ago? The answer to all of these questions is no.
Trump was never an economic populist.
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