It’s official: Trump has wrecked the economy

| 6:04 pm EDT October 15, 2018
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Sears filed for bankruptcy today, marking the end of an American icon. The company has been struggling for so long, this has seemed inevitable for awhile. How much of the demise of Sears is attributable to years of losing to Amazon, and how much of it can be blamed on Donald Trump’s economic missteps? That’s up for debate. The thing is, it’s not just Sears.

Donald Trump took over an Obama economy that was roaring overall, but failing in certain areas. In simplistic terms, manufacturing was down because of cheap overseas labor, the coal market was down because natural gas has become cheaper. These are the kinds of jobs that Trump’s rural white supporters tend to rely on. Trump promised he’d magically bring these jobs back, even though that was never realistically possible.

Trump has done real damage to the overall economy with tariffs and other moves that were supposed to save manufacturing and coal. Instead those markets are now struggling particularly badly. Ford, which has the dual distinction of being a major player in the manufacturing industry and a favorite brand name among rural white people, has lost a billion dollars due to Trump’s tariffs, and will begin huge layoffs. And now a major coal mine in West Virginia is closing down, because you can’t artificially save an industry that’s dying due to the natural headwinds of capitalism.

The stock market has lost fifteen hundred points in the past two weeks, which in any other news environment would garner major headlines. It’s too early to say if the market is about to crash. But as we’ve learned from other major crashes, the stock market takes its cues from real-world economic events and not the other way around. It’s the accumulation of stories like Sears going under, Ford laying people off, and coal mines shutting down that causes stock market investors to pull out.

There’s no way of predicting the market will collapse, but it will. Donald Trump has sabotaged the overall economy in the name of trying to specifically help his own supporters, and all he’s done is damage the underpinnings of the economy across the board. Trump can brag all he wants about having replaced NAFTA with a similar-but-slightly-worse new trade deal, and other superficial moves. But the bottom line is that layoffs and bankruptcies don’t lie. Trump has wrecked the economy, and we’ll see when it falls to pieces.