The left would vilify anyone with a R with the insanity of a 1000 Karens. They despise RDS and labeled his reasonable bill, "don't say gay". Look no further than Stoney and what he thinks of his governor.
The question is would another R candidate try to fix trade and the US deficit spending? If history is the great dictator of the future, the answer is no. The safe path for any president is to walk around large difficult issues even to the detriment of the US, especially a first term POTUS. Trump thrives in controversy and chaos for better or for worse. He is probably the only one that would have charged that hill. Do I love his strategy there? No, but he had the courage to do it and I believe we will be better off long term for it. Do I believe Trump plays 4D chess? No, but he does appear to follow the advice of those he believes in.
Question for you....If Trump successfully resets international trade over the next 120 days to be more favorable to the US and the markets go back up to where they were and start their eb and flow upward above that, what will you think of him historically for the US. It appears there are a number of companies investing back in the US now and prices are coming down.
Let's answer your question with a longer and more exacting commentary than you might like. If you know only one country, you know no countries.
You are looking for Trump to "successfully reset international trade" (and frankly, are giving him too tight of a timeline here). But what if people educated on the topic understand that this is a farcical concept. A month ago, American exports averaged roughly 3-4% tariffs when arriving on foreign shores. Again ... 3-4%. Our tariff rates are about 2.5% on goods hitting our shores. There are specific examples of greater protectionism (often the auto industry is one and sometimes the steel industry is as well). But we are overwhelmingly a free trading nation, both in terms of goods coming in and goods going out. To put a 3-4% tariff rate on exports in context, that's less than half of what I pay in sales tax in Dallas County, Texas.
You want Trump to remake a system in which we overwhelmingly have free trade. I'm not going to lie, until "Liberation Day," I didn't have to know what the tariff rates generally were on American exports. When I saw what they are, I just thought "this is typical."
There's a secondary issue that I probably need to address - trade deficits. First, I will be frank, I don't find these to be a big deal (Trump does). There are many reasons the US has a significant trade deficit, but big ones include that fact that the USA is (a) really big (3rd largest population in the world and (b) really rich. Lots of consumers with lots of money attracts foreign goods. It also attracts foreign investment (which is also included in the "trade deficit"). While I think there's a fair argument that the US should do a better job of nurturing a handful of industries where excessive reliance on foreign manufacturing can heighten national security or other risk, most of the reason other countries want to sell in the US is that we can buy a whole lot (and most other countries can't).
Here's where the comment on not knowing other countries comes in. If you look around the world at peer nations (China isn't one, it's GDP per capita is probably 20% of the USA, with India lagging far behind China), Americans have been winning the economic race for a few decades now. Despite the massive growth in the former "Third World," America's share of the world economy is roughly the same as it was in 1990. While most major European countries had workers that were about 20% less well off than American workers a generation ago, today American incomes are 50-60% higher than those in places like Germany, France, and the UK. Interestingly, the countries that also doing well tend to be either petro states (Norway is actually one) or dynamic free market, extremely free trade economies (Switzerland, Ireland, the rest of Scandinavia).
I need to wrap this up ... but here's the other thing. I think Trump is an incompetent at actually doing things. The large majority of his success in owning real estate comes from being the heir to a guy who, in today's world, would have easily been a billionaire. The bankruptcies of a number of those operations were never shrewd business strategy, they are a feature of a guy who ran a multitude of businesses into the ground. Trump's last real construction project - Trump Tower Chicago, a legitimately beautiful building - was an epic financial mess (look it up, and it's also almost certainly why he hasn't released his taxes, he was taking losses from that project as an income setoff for years). I won't keep piling on, because Trump has proved incredible at one thing - marketing. When he shifted his brand from actually doing stuff to marketing the "Trump" name, that actually worked. It worked on TV, it worked in hoteling (he doesn't own many of the hotels that say "Trump" on them but he's collected some nice fees for the name), and it worked incredibly well in politics.
So bottom line, US trade policy didn't need a major reset. A guy who isn't good at substance couldn't disabuse himself of the notion it did, because apparently Dems liked tariffs in the 1980s (when he certainly wasn't a R). There is no shangri la on trade we are going to reach, we were already in a great position on trade generally (this isn't to say that Trump couldn't tinker around the edges, but it's not what he's done).
tradingeconomics.com
