I don’t want to tell people not to believe what they saw with their own eyes, that’s Trump’s terrain, and I don’t want to seem Trumpian. But if I hear one more time about how great the economy was under Donald Jessica Trump and that he’s good for the economy because he’s a business guy I’m going to… well I don’t know what I’m going to do, I’m trying to stay calm over here.
In any case, it’s bullshit, just like everything else surrounding Trump. Before I get to the economy, Trump is like the worst businessman ever. If he had put everything his dad had given him in the bank and just lived off of the interest he’d be better off today than whatever that trail of nonsense and failed enterprise has left him with. Which, BTW, we have no idea what he’s worth because he only releases scattered distorted accounts to mainly cheat on his taxes. What we do know is that he was once again on the verge of a massive financial collapse and struggling to raise money when the Apprentice producers picked him up and made him look like a successful businessman for the sake of ratings. And that bit of luck is what saved his sorry ass and doomed the rest of us. If you don’t know that history it’s very knowable just look up Bill Pruit’s essay in Slate where after an NDA finally expired he was able to speak freely about his time in creating The Apprentice. An excerpt:
“He was not, by any stretch, a successful New York real estate tycoon like we made him out to be,” he says. “We needed to legitimize Donald Trump as someone who all these young, capable people would be clamoring over one another trying to get a job working for.”
Or the book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success by Ross Buettner and Susan Craig, where they detail the ins and outs of Trump’s failed career. Basically, The Apprentice could have been called The Biggest Loser if the producers had not scripted it to make Trump look like he knew what he was doing. Those are two shows I never saw even a moment of actually, just to clarify, I just know their names because that stuff has a way of creeping into your psyche even when you’re trying to avoid it. I hate that about pop culture, it just seeps into every crevice.
Well anyway, because of The Apprentice Trump was able to get licensing deals that did indeed make him millions of dollars, probably the most he ever made in his whole life up until that point. Like I said, lucky for him, and terrible for us.
So the economy. Everyone wants to say that the economy was great under Trump, and by a lot of measures, it was pretty good, but not on solid ground by any means. And by every measure, the first three years of Trump’s Presidency were no different than the last 4 years of Obama’s. That’s the reality. So if you want to blame a Vice President for an economy then I guess you should also give Joe Biden credit for the 4 years leading up to Trump. Anyone up for that? Anyone? No?
Moving on. Trump inherited a good economy, but like I said, one on shaky ground. Decades of trickle-down economics, NAFTA, not taking the banks to task after the financial crisis, a mounting housing crisis that was not being addressed, growing deficits, an aging infrastructure, and a general lack of investing in the middle class were like a tsunami barrelling toward us and ready to strike at any moment like a caravan of illegals depicted on Fox News. Now to be fair, Obama did some things, not enough in my opinion but some, and also he was being thwarted by the Republicans like crazy. Mitch McConnel was stymieing every attempt at doing almost anything. But still, Obama did–mostly through executive action and private/public partnership agreements because he couldn’t get any of this stuff past Mitch McConnel–cut some of the bleeding on the ongoing march of manufacturing jobs disappearing across the country. A lot of new manufacturing jobs were created to counter the ones that were leaving. If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you know the deep state operatives lying to you, manufacturing jobs steadily rose throughout the Obama years and then tapered off under the first three years of Trump.
Trump’s only claim to fame was his tax cuts, which did put a few extra dollars in everyone’s pockets but also was designed to help multi-millionaires buy an extra jet. Seriously, his tax cut had write-offs for private jets. The consensus of economists, you know, know-it-all losers out to get Trump, was that the tax cuts led to Trillions in more debt and increased inequality. Trump’s tax cuts did nothing substantial for the middle class. If anything the Obama economy was starting to stall even before COVID, and then of course, COVID exposed all of our weaknesses that had been building for years. Weaknesses the Republicans have completely ignored, and will continue to completely ignore, and that the Democrats have only half-heartedly tried to address. That is until Biden. Biden passed a series of bills that are the biggest investment into the middle class in decades. I’m like a frickin broken record on this.
But this is the pattern. Obama cleaned up Bush’s mess, against massive opposition by Republicans, and then Biden cleaned up Trump’s massive failure in handling COVID like a sane person would have, and once again against massive opposition by the Republicans. And now, if Trump stupidly gets put back into office by a bunch of knuckleheads who have bought into this idea that he’s somehow good for the economy, he will inherit the benefits of these Biden bills, all of which are starting to kick in now. I get it, inflation makes us all think it was better back then, but the inflation wasn’t caused by anything Biden did, and it would have happened no matter what. It has been pointed out over and over that the United States fared better under Biden than any other developed nation when dealing with inflation. And now, because we can’t shake that perception, Just like with The Apprentice, lucky loser Trump will walk in and try to take credit for doing something he didn’t do like he always does. And then he won’t do anything to help the middle class, he’ll likely be the final nail in the coffin.
Lucky for Trump, and really sucks for the rest of us.