From Esteban:
A casual friend of mine recently expressed shock upon learning that I was voting to re-elect President Trump. Since we know each other pretty well and she thought I was a decent human being this caused her much consternation, because she is convinced that Trump is evil. Sorry, I should have typed EVIL.
To her credit, after expressing her shock she asked how I could do such a thing. I started with his economic record (I’ll touch on a couple of other issues in additional articles). Before the pandemic and lockdowns were visited upon us, we had:
1. The lowest black unemployment rate ever recorded
2. The lowest Hispanic unemployment rate ever recorded
3. The lowest unemployment rate for women in 70 years
4. The lowest poverty rate in 60 years
5. The stock market was at record highs
6. We were energy independent for the first time in 60 years
7. Blue collar wages were rising faster than white collar wages
That last point is particularly significant politically – one reason President Trump got elected in 2016 is the perception (at least partially true) among many Americans that politicians don’t care about them or their communities. If Silicon Valley and Wall Street are prospering and the lobbyist money is flowing in, who cares about what’s happening in rural Ohio or Pennsylvania? You may believe that this is largely a misconception, but politically it’s powerful. If you’re unfamiliar with it, you might want to read about “Abracadabra MF”, it’s Exhibit A of what this is about.
She, of course, had not heard any of this. I told her to look it up, please let me know if she finds any if it wasn’t true. She did let me know a couple of days later that as far as she could tell none of it was false, although she did find a lot of “yes, but” responses. As in, “sure, President Trump has improved the economy, making life better for millions of black people, but…”. FWIW, I don’t know how much this changed her thinking but she definitely learned a bit.
So, my first point in favor of re-electing President Trump is his economic performance – or more accurately, the performance of the U.S. economy under his administration. I readily concede that he’s off base in some areas (“fair trade” versus free trade, for example). However, the alternative is far, far worse.
About a year into Trump’s presidency another friend stated that he’d be a one-term President. “You don’t think the great economic news will matter?” I asked. He muttered (a bit surly, I must say) “the economy is a bubble”. I ran into him a couple of weeks later, he had just been to one of our local shopping centers & noted that every shop had Help Wanted signs in the window. I didn’t bother to ask him what this might say about the state of the economy, I really didn’t want to annoy him, but it underscores the significance of bullet point #7 above. People in middle America were seeing the benefits of an Administration that wasn’t antagonistic to businesses.
Under Hopey McChange the U.S. economy never grew by 3% in a single year. Not one. Zero for eight. First President since WWII to pull that off. Even Jimmy freaking Carter – Captain Malaise – got there once. A couple of years into Hopey’s first term Democrats started explaining that things have changed and low economic growth was the “new normal”, those old days were gone forever, forget the campaign promises about good times coming, embrace the suck – it could be worse, etc.
Honestly, I’ve been a little surprised that U.S. economic growth hasn’t been even stronger, but still, the choice is a booming economy or “embrace the suck”.
A lot of people have wearied of Trump’s personal behavior, so Biden could probably win simply by saying that he’ll try to behave reasonably normally and won’t rock the boat. Instead the Democrats seem to determined to make the country understand that they intend to transform it, and many people interpret transform as meaning they’re going to get screwed over royally. So, the polls are tightening and Trump appears to be coming on strong, but by some estimates a third of the votes have already been mailed in. We’ll see what happens. If Biden wins and he Senate remains Republican,… Read more »
Many highlight “Trump’s personal behavior” and not Biden’s hair-sniffing and shaking down foreign governments, because many have bought the Democratic line. Given the economic accomplishments Esteban sets out, Trump’s personal behavior seems downright tolerable. The problem is that public-health careerists have aligned with the worldwide lockdown craze and mostly neutralized the economy as a campaign issue.
PS – If a President Biden does “snooze through the next four years,” isn’t a horrifying Harris presidency what we’ve got? No one in Washington promoting Biden is in favor of things “continuing as they have been.”
Agreed. The Dems are not arguing that Biden is in favor things continuing as they have been, which keeps Trump competitive. If Biden snoozes can Harris issue executive orders? I suppose only if she puts them under his nose and he signs them by rote. A possibility I suppose. The media has gone back to the days of yellow journalism. About the only mainstream press I read regularly these days is the WSJ, my local paper for local news, and with the occasional comment on the wacky Guardian. You are correct about the eastern counties of west coast states. They… Read more »
What Harris can do depends on what you mean by “snoozes.” If he simply sleeps a lot, the Vice President has no power except that delegated by the President (except to preside over the Senate, a Constitutional power that no recent President has let his VP exercise for the sake of team unity). The real problem is that a lot of people, mostly socialists including Harris, will be tugging on Biden, and he has no core principles on which to resist them. If he snoozes for more than a couple days running, the Cabinet could vote incapacity under the 25th… Read more »
‘A lot of people have wearied of Trump’s personal behavior…’
Only Trump?
Do you think a lot of people might have wearied of the Media’s behaviours and the Dems behaving like toddlers and throwing their toys about, backing BLM, street violence, removal of freedom… or is there a one-way mirror when it comes to observing what these days is US politics? For near 4 years Congress has hardly been involved in actual government, preoccupied with their tirade of hatred and Russian conspiracy theories. Did We The People notice, I wonder?
Urban violence, the appeasement of state and local officials, and Biden’s refusal to condemn it but only assert that there is a conservative counterpart to it, have put Wisconsin and Minnesota into play.
In the western states, the only effect I’ve heard about is that the eastern counties want out, which won’t happen.
Realistically, given how well so many people have done over the past four years if Trump loses it will be because of his personal behavior not because people are enamoured of Biden or Harris.
Picking fights on Twitter is not really important. A loss would not be “because of his personal behavior” but because lefties succeeded in portraying the behavior as more important than peace, the economy, Biden/Harris’s problems, etc.
Were Trump to give up Twitter (his unfiltered link to the American people) (were Trump to agree to stop being Trump) to please lefties, lefties would invent another “fatal” problem, until he was as crippled as G.W. Bush was when he left office.
Alternatively; re-elect PDJT to make sure the same political party doesn’t own the white house and the congress, and continue electing outsiders forever to make sure there is always going to be a fundamental bias towards disagreement and therefore less legislation passed.
Which very much fits a patter here, divided government. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I get the feeling that a lot of people *don’t* want more jobs for people, they want people dependant on state handouts.
It is impossible to provide a rational explanation for something that is not rational, and ant-Trumpers are not rational. Trump Derangement Syndrome was just a bit of a jibe I thought at first, but having corresponded with US friends over the last few years I know it to be a real intractable psychological condition. I asked recently had they considered what Biden and the Dems might do to the US economy given their flirtation with Socialism, Green Deal, increasing taxes, transferring $billions out of the USA to fund the Paris Accord boondoggle… the reply is they don’t care as long… Read more »
The UK has exactly the same with Brexit Derangement Syndrome, which poisons (for the sufferer) not just the entire process, but also anyone associated with it. Which is why it’s morphed into Boris Derangement Syndrome (aka BLOND MAN BAD). This explains why so many newspapers (and not just the Grauniad) insist that Boris is somehow an extreme right-wing Tory, when all his instincts and policies are well to the left of the party. With the sole exception of issues relating to the EU, you couldn’t get a cigarette paper between the views of Boris and those of a Heseltine or… Read more »
POTUS has the USA’s Nuclear Launch Codes (also known as the Gold Codes). Included in the Wikipedia description of said Codes is the following text: “For an extra level of security, the list of codes on the card includes codes that have no meaning, and therefore the president must memorize where on the list the correct code is located.” I wonder how well that works for all potential winners in the current election? Are any of them planning to improve their chance of recollection by ‘sharing’ that option (of which Codes are active) with a close family member, with a… Read more »
Might not matter. Ron Kessler writes in the Washington Times that VP Biden insisted that most of his motorcade, including the vehicle with his “nuclear football,” stay a mile away when he was tooling around Wilmington.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/23/the-real-joe-biden-scandal-fumbling-the-nuclear-fo/
This article displays the standard voting delusion – voting depending on how things are rather than what the candidate achieved. It makes people vote for the incumbent if conditions are good, and against them if conditions are bad. A sensible vote is cast based instead on what the incumbent is responsible for, as a good ruler might have had to contend with a difficult environment resulting in a poor outcome despite them being very good. And, of course, a bad ruler might blunder their way through very good circumstances to a good result which caused by the environment despite their… Read more »