Donald Trump is about to lose the one thing that was still working in his favor
Donald Trump has had a tumultuous month – as scandals erupt by the day and his White House explodes in chaos – the result of his scandals and those of his corrupt officials. He’s on the defensive about the worst of the news to break in just this week, but they’re some pretty poor defenses. Rather than double down on his lies about Joe Biden, whom he attacked in a vile and indefensible tweet, he tried to claim he was actually standing up for him. Of course, he didn’t even go so far as trying to condemn Kim Jong-Un’s attack on a fellow American citizen.
Trump claims he never ordered the USS John McCain out of sight during his trip to Japan, despite emails proving that his people absolutely did. And now he claims he’s been exonerated again – even though Robert Mueller announced the exact opposite on television. Of course, despite all this, his base might point out that the economy is doing better than ever before, but that may not be the case for much longer. It’s also noteworthy to say that not just the economists are pointing this one out – it’s actually coming from the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Keith Hall.
The new tariffs haven’t been implemented for very long, but they’re already setting off a chain of panic, bad enough that the CBO may soon need to downgrade the rate of the country’s economic growth, a far cry from the “Trump bump” growth of three percent that many investors were counting on continuing. Even if the administration does reach a successful agreement with China, which is highly unlikely at this point, the relationship may never be the same again, as China has already sought a trading partner in Russia.
If this weren’t bad enough, Trump complicated the situation further by offering bailouts to the farmers hurt by his buffoonish standoff – compensation still worth less than what they could have made before he proclaimed himself “Tariff Man.” Hall is even going so far as to expect a drag on growth depending on how long the trade war continues, one that could begin to erase all the gains Donald Trump loves to brag about. Before long, he won’t have much of anything left to make a positive case for himself.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making