Trump’s Economic Delusions

If you listen to Trump, he has created the greatest economic success in the history of the world. Trump complains endlessly about how awful Obama’s economy was and how he turned the whole economy around during his term and even from his nomination in 2016. The charts below show Trump’s economic delusion with a bold, dark black line contrasted with economic reality from solid sources. The charts show the following critical economic indicators since 2009: Gross Domestic Product, Wage Growth, Unemployment Rate, Total Government Deficit as a Percentage of GDP and Major Market Moves on the DOW, the Nasdaq and the S&P 500.

Reality shows a very different picture than Trump’s delusions. It shows that the economic recovery started in 2009 under Obama’s presidency. Trump merely inherited Obama’s recovery and called it his own. Furthermore, he tells us how awful Obama’s economy was with nothing about the crash of G.W. Bush’s economy after six years of Republican’s domination of the Congress under Bush’s watch. Now his trade wars and unilateral, nationalistic, economic isolationism is starting to show volatility and weakness with ominous signs of recession approaching. It is incredibly narcissistic and predictably wimpy, whining when he blames everything bad on Democrats and Obama and takes credit for delusional accomplishments. When headlines go bad with folks like Jeffery Epstein, Paul Manafort and Anthony Scaramucci, he “barely knew them.” He even goes so far as to blame those whom he has appointed, as is the case with the Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, for weakness in the economy. On December 6, 2017 Trump told reporters, “So we’re at 3.3 percent GDP. I see no reason why we don’t go to 4 percent, 5 percent, and even 6 percent.” [ https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/06/trump-defies-data-with-6-percent-gdp-growth-forecast.html ] Here is a chart of actual GDP during his term which has gone nowhere near 6 percent:

[ https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product ]

For Trump and his sycophant, Director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, there is no mention that Trump’s long line of failed appointments reflects badly on Trump’s leadership failures to pick competent people in critical positions. Instead, Larry Kudlow tells us, “I am echoing the president’s view — he has not been bashful about that view — he would also like the Fed to cease shrinking its balance sheet,”[ https://moneyandmarkets.com/kudlow-fed-interest-rate-cut/ ]

Trump demands cultish allegiance from his devotees. He expects his followers to follow him as the Pied Piper into hallucinogenic phantasms of reality that tell them to not believe their eyes and ears but his manic rantings. Trump’s delusions are nothing other than lies which he uses to divorce people’s perceptions from reality. When voters can so easily be deluded by bold face lies, we are all in big trouble. It used to be that conservatives rhetorically prided themselves on being realists. Realism is necessarily based on reality – by definition. I do think the longer Trump weaves his tale, the more likely his voters will have a ‘crises of faith’ and the more likely the half of eligible voters which do not vote will tire of his endless negativity and hypocrisy. If we do not wake up soon, Trump’s delusion will become all our nightmares in reality!