2y ago

Donald Trump Has the Worst Economic Record in Modern U.S. History

democrats.org Donald Trump Has the Worst Economic Record in Modern U.S. History - Democrats

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The amount of people here commenting authoritatively about this is disheartening.
Trump's economic policies were insane. I remember looking at his campaign platform and seeing tax cuts everywhere and with no way to pay for anything.
I remember him shuttering valuable tools like the pandemic response teams because he wanted to tear down the success of previous administrations.
I still remember him mocking our military, displaying state secrets on national tv, trade wars that destroyed American jobs, diplomatic decisions that ruined international relationships.
I remember immigrant children locked in cages.
I remember the rule of law being absolutely trampled in order to achieve nothing. Just norms and institutions being torn down.
Trump accomplished nothing and made literally every facet of our government, politics and economic life worse.
He performed a political pump and dump and the entire world is still picking up the pieces.
He is a fascist and categorically the worst president we've ever had and every person here saying, "well actually..." should be ashamed.
- While I agree I'd be careful with "I remember immigrant children locked in cages." If you don't want all the "ObAmA StArTeD iT aNd BiDeN CoNtInUeD!" comments lol
  
  Obama is gonna close Gitmo any day now like he promised.
  And surely Joe "I'm a Zionist" Biden wouldn't do worse things to brown children than lock them in cages.
  And Biden taxed the rich and the economy is fine now. Not like the private sector owns all housing funded by unlimited free money loaning like in 2008 or anthing.
  Both sides Schmoth sides everyone!
- "Slow the testing down, please!"
  he should have been immediately arrested and thrown in the fucking Hague with that statement.
- He is a fascist and the worst president we could've possibly had that didn't commit straight up genocide.*
- I call this recency bias. Trump was terrible, but not the worst.
  
  So Andrew Jackson?
  
  In your opinion, who is worse?
  
  Who's worse?

Trump was the worst President in U.S. History.
- I would say second-worst after Andrew Jackson. Hard to beat genocide in order to make a massive land grab.
  
  Personally, I'm very bitter about the completely awful effects of Reagan's tenure. Literally turned the office into a Hollywood act; you know damn well he wasn't calling the shots. He was there to draw people's attention.
  
  If Drumpf gets a second term, I think he'll be going for the high score.
  
  Tbh Andrew Johnson (became president after Lincoln was assassinated) is pretty high up there, too. I might actually put him ahead of Trump in terribleness, because a lot of the regressive societal shit we are dealing with now - and have been dealing with for around 150 years - can be directly attributed to Johnson’s softball treatment of the Confeds during reintegration.
  
  Trump/Kushner did try to weaponize the COVID response against blue regions that voted Democrat. That's pretty bad
  
  I mean, among the most evil maybe, but he was successful in what he did at least.
  Can't forget that Trump if anything killed millions not even because he was trying to, but outright negligence.
  
  Trump activity attempting to overthrow the Federal Government pushes him beyond Jackson. Moving the Southeast Tribes to Oklahoma was a fall out of the War of 1812 against the Tribes who joined the British. It doesn't remove how horrible that was. Moving so many people during a pandemic of Yellow Fever was inexcusable. Obviously Jackson didn't care.
  I still think Trump attempts to overthrow the government is worse as well as losing 20 million jobs, making the Covid pandemic worse by inaction, and all his criminal activity.
  
  I'm surprised at the amount of disagreement your comment is getting.
  I don't want to downplay Jackson's displacement of American Indians, but there was one real FUBAR thing Jackson did that no one remembers:
  He paid off the national debt.
  Completely and entirely. The federal government existed debt free for some months (I forget exactly how long, I want to say it was a year or so before borrowing exceeded income).
  On the face of it, this probably sounds like a good thing, but it hard crashed the economy. Obv wasn't alive at the time, but it's my understanding that it was the worst economic disaster until the Great Depression (and The Great Depression was only worse because the country and world were far more connected than the world of Jackson's day).
  That said, I hear inauguration party was a real rager.
  
  The difference for me comes down to the relative power both men had. If the US had been the sole hyperpower on the planet, Jackson may well have out-Hitlered Hitler. If Trump’s administration wasn’t actively engaged in sabotaging his deranged orders to attack Venezuela and Iran, we’d probably still be at war. Trump exercised authority over 300M people and has, probably for the remainder of our lifetimes, permanently altered politics in the US and around the world, while Jackson’s ability, monster that he was, was constrained that the US was not a significant world power at the time.
  
  I'd say those two and Wilson are fairly neck and neck
- Reagan and Bush Jr. were far worse imo. Thankfully Trump was pretty incompetent.
- So far.
- Buchanan literally sat on the fence so he could do nothing while the country fell apart into a civil war.
  Trump sucked and it would be a disaster to elect him again, but he has a long way to go to beat Buchanan for worst.

Let's be clear though, it wasn't because of his economic policy, it was his thorough mishandling of covid that got one million Americans killed which was the problem.
- More significantly yes but let's not forget the massive tax cuts and regulation destruction he did
  
  I wish I'd bought a new washer/dryer before he pissed off China with that pointless trade war. Prices doubled overnight and have not come back down.
- I don't that his brainless decisions regarding economic policy did anything but make it worse.
  
  Remember his trade wars with...everyone? And then he renegotiated the same agreements but worse?
- I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but the man didn’t do anything without the combination of someone telling him to do it and somehow that thing being made worth his while.
  So, why the hell would he decide/be-told to disband the US Pandemic Response team in May 2018?
  https://x.com/atomicanalyst/status/994696175575068672?s=46&t=g3yM8UdEINqcLyXIxWs-lg
  
  Apparently, Trump had a beef with his National Security advisor, and that advisor was good friends with the admiral in charge of the pandemic office. So, to punish the Advisor, Trump closed down his buddy's office.
- I think they handled it all according to the plan. It allowed them to sow distrust in everyone from doctors just trying to save people's lives, to the very government he was in charge of. It basically set the hook for his cult of "you can only trust me". And his cult believes that millions are going to die from the vaccine, and at the same time that people dying from COVID is "fake news".
  
  It’s called cognitive dissonance and Putin is a master class at it…
- His economic policies did cause severe damage, though. Yes, the pandemic made it even worse. But I disagree with saying it "wasn't" his economic policies. That implies his policies were productive; they were not.
- And the fact the whole world shut down for a few months. I’m sure that had something to do with it.
  
  Which could have been drastically mitigated to an extent if he actually got his base to jump on board and support the vaccine and mask agenda. It wouldn't have spread anywhere near the extent that it did, nor would we have had the need to shut so many things down and isolate.
  His mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, and his anti-sciencw rhetoric really screwed things up. Hell, there's still ignorant loons out there that think COVID was a lie and that the vaccines are just for the government to inject a world-ending virus that will get triggered by 5G signals when the Global Cabal decides to end the World. It's absolutely comical.
  
  I mean yeah, Trump can't be blamed for COVID, but his response to it is another matter entirely.
  Over 1 million dead. That's a pretty damn big chunk of the population to lose in the space of two years.
  Now I'm not saying he's alone in the blame, there are state level republicans responsible too, but boy did he try to hamstring those who were trying to do the right thing.
  If I looked purely at his actions, I'd say that he wanted COVID to be some great filter or something to wash through the masses and take out lots of people.

To be fair, even if Trump did manage the pandemic like a sane person, the economy likely would’ve still taken a massive pandemic hit.
Other nations, with better public health policies and lower losses of life, also saw a bonkers hit to economic indicators.
- You can’t say that about the rampant spending that took place during his administration. Conservative fiscal policy be damned!
  
  They are only concerned with spending when they are not in power.
  It's been that way for years.
  
  He gave small business owners instant full depreciation for large assets - specifically vehicles. It was an outright bribe because they all just went and bought luxury personal vehicles and claim they are for work. Sorry, no one uses a Land Rover for work.

Well, he got half of his term playing golf. If he had been all day in office I am sure that he'd tanked it even more.

What if I told you that people who vote for Trump aren't doing so for his fiscal policy? 🤔
- I've watched interviews of MAGAts being asked what specific Trump policy made their lives better and their answers are always "the economy".
  
  They know that the real reason isn't popular so they won't say it most of the time.
  "He's hurting the wrong people!"
  That's all one needs to know, to determine that they are only about needless suffering, for needless suffering's sake. They are not interested in helping anyone. They want to ensure that you have to suffer at least as much, and preferably more than they did.
  This particular ideology is literally counter to every previous ideology. They finally managed to create more than enough for everyone, and for the first time in human history a generation decided to be so greedy that their descendants are less well off than their parents.
  Welcome to late stage capitalism.
  
  You shouldn't believe them.
- Or any policy
  
  I just saw a headline that most Republicans think he should be the candidate regardless of if he gets convicted of his various crimes.
  I didn't actually read it so take it with a grain of salt lol.
- ... But they sure are quick to attack Biden on that front. Facts be damned
  
  They don't care about facts. Their feelings are what makes their policy. That is specifically why they touted the "facts not feelings" meme. They don't have to abide by it, and it restrics everyone else. They have no shame, they have no sense of hypocrisy. Every single accusation is nothing more than a confession, and we should start ignoring their bullshit red herrings.

His policies were standard republican fare. The difference maker was covid.

Because he's a criminal mental invalid with followers of the same ilk.

But my gas and eggs are so expensive now and I still have to pay my student loans, surely Biden is the worst president ever?
- And my mother thought the same of Carter for the same reasons.
- They're actually not really at the moment. Lumber was also down as of a couple weeks ago.

Just economic record?

All we want is just for one side to be perfect. Not like it's hard or anything 😂
- Well then you'll be waiting forever.
  Personally I'd rather try to institute changes, starting at the local level, and moving upwards.

At least he didn't start a new war, beating, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and many more...
- Syria would beg to differ.
  Iran would beg to differ.
  Yemen would beg to differ.
  
  Keyword is "start"
- You know they physically removed his presidential order to attack Venezuela, and that they’d frequently do similar tactics because he’d forgot that he signed an order that would have started a war, right?
  
  First time i've heard of it, you got a link with that?
  
  But those are two separate events, you claimed that "they physically removed his presidential order to attack Venezuela". None of those links claim that...
- Syria was a continuation from Obama https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35806229 A US-led global coalition has also carried out air strikes and deployed special forces in Syria since 2014 to help an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias
  Iran, was a buildup of troops in Saudi Arabia, says so in your own linked article...
  Yemen, was also a continuation from Obama
  
  Why are you getting downvoted lmao people really don't want to hear this.

He certainly didn't help, but I think it would've been the worst Economic record in modern U.S. history no matter who you put at the helm.
It'd be like blaming any one person for The Great Depression, it was gonna hit either way by the time it happened, whoever was there could only mitigate it.
Though again, he did nothing to help it, and probably did exacerbate the issues....
- Anyone else in charge wouldn't have dismantled pandemic response teams, sold off emergency medical supplies for cash, and dragged their feet on testing and containment, all of which contributed to an epidemic turning into a pandemic. So no. Anyone else would probably not have done just as poorly.
  
  I probably won't ever forget New Zealand having football/soccer matches in a big-ass stadium like normal. Many other countries got back to normal way, way before we did.

I think Trump did a horrible job and his COVID response was probably the single worst possible part of his administration, but I do wonder, what difference would a Clinton response have made with how everything played out? Certainly there likely wouldn't have been as much panic and misinformation spreading, BUT right-wingers would still have called the whole thing a left-wing hoax and had been just as vigilant against masking up and taking precautions as under Trump, maybe even worse under Clinton.
If anything, I wonder if we wouldn't have delayed how widespread COVID would have been throughout the US, like how we saw with China experiencing a surge in COVID cases after they opened back up, well after everyone else had already been through the worst of it. COVID doesn't really care who's in charge, it's more akin to a natural disaster and still may have played out the same way, once the genie was out of the bottle, it wasn't going back in. Maybe the numbers of dead Americans would have been significantly less, but I'm not sure what could've been done differently by the medical establishment to save lives. Obviously preventing infections in the first place would've been the best defense, but assuming it was always going to be an out-of-control pandemic and all those that got infected were going to get infected at some point, could doctors have treated those patients differently and actually saved more lives? I'm guessing we learned alot after those first few chaotic months when the outbreak first happened, so we probably do have better treatments now, and maybe we would've gotten those sooner under a less stupidly malicious administration.
- Says "I'm not sure what anyone could have done better" while explicitly stating several things that probably would have been done better by someone else 🤦
  
  But I wouldn't have this preventative light bulb up my ass right now and I don't know how I feel about that.
- Clinton would have handled the epidemic better before it blew up into a pandemic due to total lack of prevention and response.

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