Presidential elections are about the future and that is what the November elections are about. The 2016 election was about the future also and the voters choose Donald Trump to lead the country for the next four years, and 39 months of that future have already past. So the future has already been written for 2017, 2018,2019 and four months of 2020. So let us examine that 39 month future that was trusted to the Trump presidency both pre coronavirus and after. It is the story of a republican administration that followed in the footsteps of former republican administrations.
Job creation fell behind job creation of the previous President and Trump will end his four years in office with the worst job creation record since the great depression. America will have the highest double digit unemployment rate since the great depression. It was 4.7% when Trump took office. America has lost 26,000,000 jobs onTrump's watch, a record number. America lost 8.5 million jobs on George W. Bush's watch during that republican recession. The federal deficit has been increasing since Trump took office and now the Congressional Budget Office reports the Federal deficit for this fiscal year ending 9/30/20 will be approximately $3.6 trillion topping the previous record of $1.4 trillion that took place in Bush's last fiscal year. The national debt is exploding and Trump's un-necessary tax cuts reduced federal revenue there by raising the deficit and reducing America's ability to deal with the financial challenges presented by the coronavirus epidemic .
Trump inherited an economy in its 7th straight year of economic expansion and job creation and had no economic policy agenda to keep it going such as infrastructure rebuilding and repair. Like Reagan and Bush before him, Trump played the trickle down economic tax game that did not work. Trump's trade wars with China has cost America and those trade talks are off the table with China until after the November elections according to Trump. That trade war also cost America billions of aid to farmers that were harmed which helped to balloon the deficit also.
Trump's governing by ideology and a absent economic policy has retarded Americas ability to respond to the coronavirus which was made worse by his failure to act timely and recognize the dangers of his inaction. And his lies and ever changing stories has exhausted all credibility. The GDP will not achieve the consistent 3-4% yearly growth Trump promised and in fact fall into negative growth. The 25 million new jobs that Trump promised will never come to be even if there were no coronavirus. The Congressional Budget Office also projected that the unemployment rate would reach 15% this year, a number no one has heard of in the past 60 years. The Reagan administration is the current champ where the unemployment rate stayed over 10% for 10 straight months from September 1982 to June 1983.
Everything Trump has touched became toxic, even his foreign policy. Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, the nuclear treaty with Iran, weakening America's environmental laws and business regulation His willingness to work with Russia to undermine America's democratic process was a betrayal of the country and its people.
The future that the people thought they voted for in 2016 never came to be. The future of the past 39 months was actually predictable because it followed past republican administrations failure. And the economic recession that is playing out now keeps the recession record intact. Every republican administration has presided over an economic recession since the republican administration of President Theodore Roosevelt who served from 1901-1909. That is over 111 years ago. Does any one really believe that is just a co-incident? Looking at it up close, in the last 40 years there has been four republican administrations. Reagans, both Bush administrations and Trump. All four presided over economic recessions and three of them had one thing is common, they passed massive tax cuts that added trillions to the deficit and the national debt. And none of the four balanced one federal budget in the 23 years they served. It was all deficit spending.
The 2016 vote for Trump to guide America and its people's future has turned out to be 39 months of betrayal, lies, a fiscal and economic disaster, a blatant disregard for the rule of law, the constitution and our institutions. Reckless governing that respects no one and a extreme ideology. It is all about Trump and his blame game and division.
America and its people's best future interest would be to vote Trump out of office in the November elections.
Note: Above information on republican recessions taken from a story by Sam Stovall, Chief investment strategist for CFRA.
This commentary written by Joe Lorio
