Trump blames Biden and Harris for economic hell he created
As the post-COVID economy continues to struggle and inflation remains at some of the highest levels recorded in decades, Donald Trump has tried to place the blame for recent bad economic news squarely on the shoulders of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris even though he’s the one responsible for America’s current economic hell due to his economic policies: specifically, his trade war and the use of tariffs.
Even some of the talking heads in the so-called conservative media have latched on to the hyperbolic nonsense coming from the Trump camp:
Correct, if you don’t think America was better from 2017-19 on every front than it is right now, you’re either a communist or have Trump-induced retardation. https://t.co/gF2Psdu4gw
— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) August 5, 2024
“Trump-induced retardation” is an interesting use of words considering how Deace used to be adamantly opposed to Cheeto Jesus. But alas, Trumpism has replaced conservatism over at BlazeTV much like it has the Republican Party.
Unfortunately for Trump and his army of sycophants, the truth of the matter is that the economic hell America currently finds herself in came to us courtesy of the Donald Trump administration.
Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, Federal Reserve officials expressed concern over his economic policies and how his aggressive changes in the areas of taxes, spending, and trade could have a negative effect on the economy and become inflationary.
Trump began the first round of his trade war in January 2018 when he placed tariffs on solar panel and washing machine imports — causing significant and immediate price increases — and he launched the second round in March 2018 when he placed across-the-board tariffs on steel and aluminum, a move directly responsible for doubling the price of steel on US manufacturers and price-gouging by steel providers.
After boasting about that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump claimed that “the steel industry [was] in bad shape” even though over 70 percent of the steel used in America at the time came from U.S. providers.
When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2018
Trump’s misguided approach to free trade was destined to have a devastating impact on the economy, and while he is currently blaming Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for that devastation, it was his trade war tariffs that laid the foundation for the economic mess because we began seeing consequences of his trade war policies only one year after he launched them, well before Joe Biden became president.
According to estimates made by the National Taxpayer’s Union Foundation at the time, the total annual cost of Trump’s tariffs on consumers was $41.65 billion, an amount that exceeded the taxes Americans had paid for Obamacare ($34.6 billion).
Heading into the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s trade war turned out just as predicted: the farm industry was decimated, manufacturing was in a recession, and 100% of the cost of tariffs had fallen directly on American businesses and consumers.
Another important factor contributing to Trump’s role in the explosion of today’s economic hell is the trillions of dollars he and the Republican Party spent to stimulate the economy following their overreaction to COVID. There’s plenty of evidence to show how Trump’s economic policies got the ball rolling, but his handling of the COVID “pandemic” finished the job.
After initially accusing Democrats of politicizing the COVID “pandemic,” Trump released his guidelines for “15 days to slow the spread” on March 16, 2020, instructing “Governors of states with evidence of community transmission [to] close schools in affected and surrounding areas.” The guidelines also called for people to work from home “whenever possible,” avoid restaurants except for takeout, and avoid discretionary travel and shopping. Trump later extended the guidelines to 30 days, urging the public to “listen and follow all directions from [their] state and local authorities.”
With a recession all-but-certain following his tyrannical COVID response, Trump launched Operation Warp Speed (OWS) in May 2020, a private/public program funded with $10 billion made available by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The CARES Act was a $2.2 trillion behemoth designed to stave off the threat that government’s tyrannical response to coronavirus was about to create a second Great Depression.
The CARES Act was only part of Trump’s spending spree in the early days of the so-called pandemic; additional spending included the Families First Coronavirus Response Act ($350 billion) and a CARES Act fix to the SBA Paycheck Protection Program ($500 billion).
Another economic promise made by Trump in 2016 was a promise to shrink the trade deficit, but in an October 2020 Department of Commerce report, the economic hell Trump created by ill-advised economic policies and trade wars actually caused the trade deficit to reach a record high while also destroying over 300,000 jobs.
The U.S. trade deficit expanded in August to a 14-year record, a blow to Donald Trump who had made reducing the debt a central goal of his administration. Data from the Department of Commerce indicates that the trade deficit had grown by almost 6% to $67.1 billion.
The trade war caused harm on both sides of the Pacific and an overall transfer of activity away from U.S. and Chinese markets, but U.S. companies got hit worse. A September 2019 study from Moody’s Analytics placed the damage to the U.S. economy at 300,000 jobs and 0.3% gross domestic product. Other studies estimated that GDP losses could be double that.
Trump was elected in 2016, in part, due to his track record of so-called business success, even though he’d had at the time more business failures than successes — including four bankruptcies — while achieving the self-proclaimed status of “the king of debt.”
Desperate to salvage his crumbling reelection prospects, Trump has continued to crow about the successes of his trade war, the awesome economy he has built, and the millions of jobs he’s created. Unfortunately for Trump, his claims are diametrically opposed to the reality being lived by the voters he needs to win.
For the record, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris share some of the blame for our current economic hell: they refused to rescind Donald Trump’s trade war tariffs, and they piled trillions of dollars on top of Trump’s trillions of dollars to stimulate an economy nearly destroyed by COVID tyranny. Quite likely, Harris will follow Biden and continue his economic policies. However, this fact only proves one thing: there’s simply no difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Donald Trump and his trade war tariffs started the economic hell America finds herself in today — not Joe Biden or Kamala Harris — and that’s simply the economic truth of the situation.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He is the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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