You don’t need a cheat sheet on President Trump’s 2020 campaign strategy.
Step one — the previous “wartime president” now wants you to forget his stumbles on the battlefield of the coronavirus pandemic.
Next, playing the role of “CEO president,” Trump will stage pep rallies filled with promises of a fast economic recovery.
Polling gives the president good reason to campaign as a master of job creation and stock exchange highs.
While most Americans disapprove of his job performance as president, a poll released last week by Navigator has 51 percent of usa citizens approving — strongly or somewhat — of Trump’s handling of the economy.
And during a head-to-head comparison with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden during a recent Reuters poll, Trump held an enormous lead, 45 percent to 32 percent, because the better candidate to make jobs.
Trump’s campaign is already playing to his image as an economic leader by running television advertising declaring he’s the person to bring back jobs and high investment returns.
My only question is: How can any voter fall for it?
It is a repeat of an equivalent empty economic promises he made within the last campaign.
Even Trump’s most loyal backers know that despite his promise to make 4 percent or higher economic process when he became president, he has never produced such results.
The truth is that he has averaged about 2 percent growth.
And that was before the virus hit.
That 2 percent rate of growth is essentially an equivalent because the rate of growth under President Obama. Trump mocked that rate of growth as piddling albeit Obama began during a deep hole, handling the deep recession that took root under President George W. Bush. As Chuck Jones of Forbes noted earlier this year, “Trump’s economic process is slower than Obama’s last 3 years.”
Obama also reduced unemployment from 10 percent at the peak of the recession in 2009 to 4.7 percent by January 2017 when Trump took office. Yet, Trump brags that he took unemployment right down to 3.5 percent without mentioning that he inherited a growing economy.
Now that jobless claims have soared to depression-level highs, Trump is selling himself to voters once more as an upscale man who knows the way to pull the economy out of the ditch it fell into thanks to his failed handling of the pandemic.
But to shop for his sales talk , the voters will need to forget that January day when the ‘CEO President’ sold Americans on the thought that the virus is “totally in check ,” and no threat to Americans or the American economy.
Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, even predicted in January that the virus was good economic news because it had been bound to “accelerate the return of jobs to North America” from overseas.
In late February, Trump was bragging that he had the virus “very much in check within the USA… stock exchange beginning to look excellent to me!”
By mid-March, as businesses began to shut , Trump was still selling smoke and sizzle: “I think we’re getting to get through it alright .”
Trump’s happy talk ignored his failure to organize to contain the virus, specifically in terms of tests and medical supplies.
Without the tools to contain the spread of the virus within the U.S., the economy came to a near-halt as scientists and doctors advised people to stay their distance from one another and when possible stay home.
Let me preempt my Trump-supporting friends right here, because I can feel them preparing to interject.
No, i’m not saying that Trump caused the deadly virus. i’m saying that Trump’s failure of leadership, constant spewing of misinformation and lack of a coherent national strategy allowed the virus to try to to greater damage to the economy than it otherwise would.
Yet an upbeat vice chairman Pence remains selling the illusion that the state are going to be through with the punishing virus by the top of May. And Trump is forecasting a “phenomenal” economy in time for the November election.
Any voter applauding Trump’s bluster has got to close their eyes to the apparent . With the virus still spreading and lots of people out of labor , there’s not tons of consumer confidence in an economy that thrives on consumer spending.
Majorities of usa citizens tell pollsters they need no plans to spend money to travel to a movie, to travel bent dinner, to attend a ballgame or travel.
Biden must remind voters of the Obama administration’s success in pulling the country out of recession and specifically its success in pushing the stimulus plan that got the economy back on target .
There will be Trump supporters who ignore the candidates’ diary on the economy. They don’t wish to let simple facts stop them from endorsing — and enjoying — his latest sales talk .
