Lest we forget how well we knew, before he was elected, that Trump was a sleazebag, the above item, published in Time magazine in October 2016 – less than a month before his election – is just one small reminder. Trump had been forced to sell the Miss Universe Organization – which included Miss USA – a year earlier, after his incendiary comments about Mexicans drove away its broadcasters: NBC and Univision. At the time, Trump had owned the pageants for nearly two decades, during which time he would have had the opportunity to come into contact with nearly 4,000 beauty queens.
While this was a very minor matter in the light of his behavior since becoming president, this story did demonstrate Trump’s complete disregard for any norms of decency and respect for others, as well as his pleasure in causing humiliation. As one of the contestants reported “He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked.” She said “the people that worked for him [told] us to go fawn all over him … ”
Fast forward to last week. The disgusting fawning over Trump at the Republican convention, presenting him as a selfless and compassionate family man who had beaten the pandemic and is admired by the world – as well as his shameless use of the White House as a prop for his dictatorial ambitions – simply confirms Michelle Obama’s famous quote: “Being president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”
Many pundits have dealt with the countless lies told last week about what Trump has achieved during his presidency. However, his constantly repeated claim that he assumed an economy that Obama had left in shambles and created the strongest economy in American history – has largely remained unchallenged. So, because – unlike Trump, who has done so over twenty thousand times during his presidency – the numbers don’t lie. let’s look at the record:
Obama took decisive action at the outset of his presidency to stabilize the economy, which recovered during his presidency and continued to grow at a roughly comparable rate for the first three years of the Trump Presidency.
The stock market grew rapidly during the Obama presidency. It has grown very strongly during the Trump presidency, partly because the profits resulting from Trump’s huge tax cuts for large corporations were used for stock buy-backs instead of job creation activities.
Unemployment has fallen at a slower rate during the Trump presidency than it did during the Obama presidency.
As these charts show, until Covid-19 hit –and before he severely fumbled the response to it – Trump was actually riding the wave of an expanding economy that President Obama had created. It was Obama, not Trump, who had turned around the disastrous “Great Recession” that he inherited from George W Bush. In the face of strong resistance from a Republican-controlled congress Obama managed to get a stimulus bill passed, albeit at a number lower – and with more emphasis on tax reduction than stimulative spending than he wanted. He also virtually saved the automobile industry and enabled passage of the Dodd-Frank law, which greatly reduced the risk of a similar disaster occurring again.
Trump’s contributions to the economy have mainly been to remove regulations, many of which were put in place to do such things as protect the environment and reduce the huge income disparity between the top one percent and the bottom eighty percent of the population. He has also tried to “do a number” (his words) on Dodd-Frank, but so far with only limited success.Rather than helping the poor and middle class, his actions have had the effect of making it easier for the very wealthy and large corporations to make more money.
So the reality is that the one strength Trump shows over Biden in the polls – his handling of the economy – is fictional. What is fact is that he took over a thriving economy and turned it into a much worse disaster than it had to be by completely mismanaging the Covid-19 disaster
Trump’s inheriting a mess from Obama and turning it into the greatest economy in American history is, in fact, Myth USA – and Trump owns it.
Cross posted here: gerrylewisblog.wordpress.com/...
