This doesn’t look good for Donald Trump
What’s remarkable is that the U.S. economy has continued to grow over the past three years, and Donald Trump still has an underwater approval rating of around 40%. In theory it shouldn’t be possible for a U.S. President to be this unpopular when the economy is this strong. But Trump is one of the most uniquely objectionable people on the entire planet. And now he’s in danger of losing the one thing that had been propping him up.
This week Wall Street investors decided that the guaranteed negative impact of the coronavirus on the world economy, and the worsening fear that Trump will botch a U.S. outbreak of the virus, were good enough reason to start selling off in ferocious fashion. Over the past four days the stock market has dropped by around twelve percent. Trump has to be hoping that investors will soon decide they’ve overreacted, and dive back in.
The trouble: the Dow Futures performed so poorly late on Thursday night, CNBC is now predicting that the Dow Jones will open down another six hundred points when it first opens on Friday morning. That’s on top of the more than three thousand points it’s lost so far this week. This means that unless the market somehow ends up rallying on Friday afternoon, the entire week will have been a disaster. Considering the coronavirus news is only likely to get worse over the weekend, the market could head to an even uglier place next week.
Donald Trump knows full well that the only reason he still has any any chance in 2020 at all is because he hasn’t yet managed to destroy the roaring Obama economy. Now that’s apparently about to go out the window. No wonder he’s been up all night panicking about it.
