Donald Trump has taken credit for the Obama recovery ad nauseam, and like the sad Lilliputian he is, he’s now desperately looking for scapegoats in the event the economy goes south.
If we enter a recession in the next 18 months, it will be the fault of Jay Powell, or the Democrats, or our Western allies, or Obama, or the Clintons, or the Knights Templar, or whoever Alex Jones and Wayne Allyn Root can conjure in their tiny, febrile minds.
But after spending two and a half years claiming his magic fairy dust is all that’s kept us from a stock market crash and a Great Recession-sized collapse, Trump may have a hard time bullshitting his way through any kind of downturn.
Indeed, that’s what the current polling shows.
While polls have generally given him high marks for his handling of the economy — thanks to a pervasive misunderstanding of what he’s actually done — a new survey from Morning Consult shows just how underwater he’ll likely be if we suffer yet another patented GOP recession.
Trump might have good reason to feel anxious. Voters would overwhelmingly pin an economic recession on Trump, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll.
Sixty-nine percent of all voters would at least partially blame Trump for a recession, according to the poll, while 19 percent said he wouldn’t be responsible at all.
Notably, Trump faces pressure from his own supporters, as well. Just shy of half (49 percent) of those who voted for Trump in 2016 would hold him at least partially responsible for a major economic downturn, while 40 percent wouldn’t.
Of course, for all we know the economy may already be fatally gut shot, thanks in large part to Trump’s ill-conceived perpetual nut-kicking contest trade war with China. The yield curve has inverted, economic activity appears to be slowing both globally and domestically, and the stock market — which Trump can’t shut up about when it spikes — has mostly gone sideways for the past year and a half.
Worse, the GOP has already injected a budget-busting fiscal stimulus into our economy, leaving policymakers with one fewer tool at their disposal to handle a downturn when it comes. Can we really significantly increase deficit spending to address a lagging economy when the deficit is already projected to hit $1 trillion in 2020?
What does this mean for the 2020 election? It means that, barring a swift turnaround in our economic fortunes, Trump will have to rely on his charm and his innate ability to manage a crisis and unify the country.
In other words, he’ll lose. Big-league.
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