Donald Trump takes on President Obama and promptly loses

| 3:18 pm EDT April 7, 2018
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The great irony of Donald Trump’s illegitimate presidency is that for all his ongoing anti-Obama bluster, he’s been consistently willing to coast along on President Obama’s economic coat tails. Sure, Trump has exploded the deficit with a tax giveaway to the wealthy, and he’s ensured an eventual crash by deregulating Wall Street. But Trump has largely tried to avoid messing with the roaring Obama Economy, so he could take credit for it – until now.

After fourteen months of riding Obama’s economic coattails, for reasons still only fully understood to him, Donald Trump has finally decided to grab the reins and take on Obama’s economic legacy. Trump has started a very loud and very weird trade war with many of the most important economic partners the United States has. This has had immediate negative results for Trump, as China has fought back with tariffs, some Republicans in Congress are publicly lashing out at him for it, and his own top economic adviser Gary Cohn resigned over it.

But the real story is on the scoreboard. The deeper Donald Trump gets into his trade war, the further the stock market falls. At this point the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down roughly ten percent from its high in late January. For his first year in office, all Trump did was brag about the stock market. But if this new pattern keeps up for another four months, the stock market will be lower than when Trump took office. This is after the stock market roughly tripled during President Obama’s watch.

So after all his bluster against President Obama, Donald Trump finally decided to take on Obama for real, with his trade war. Not only is Trump quickly losing that battle, it’s also serving as a timely reminder that Obama knew what he was doing, and Trump simply does not. Contribute to Palmer Report