Will There Still Be A Viable Economy Left When Trump Is Finally Kicked Out Of Office?

Señor Trumpanzee seems to think he's a better president than Reagan was. I doubt anyone would agree but he told right wing operatives Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, according to their just-released book, Trump Enermies that "The amazing thing is that you have certain people who are conservative Republicans that if my name weren’t Trump, if it were John Smith, they would say I’m the greatest president in history and I blow Ronald Reagan away... got the biggest regulation cuts in history in less than two years, judges, environmental stuff, getting out of the Paris horror show. If you said that conservative president John Smith did that, they would say he’s the greatest president. Far greater than Ronald Reagan."

His policies are chipping away at the successful economic engine that Obama left him and slowly but surely, the imbecile is destroying the economy. Steve Benen explained what's wrong: Trump doesn't understand the basics of his own economic policies. Benen, frustrated, was merciless:

A couple of months ago, Donald Trump boasted at a White House event that thanks to his tariffs, there’s “a lot of money coming into the coffers of the United States of America. A lot of money coming in.” Soon after, the president released a video via social media in which he said Americans are “taking in a lot of money” as a result of his tariffs.

A month later, the Republican reversed course, suggesting to the Wall Street Journal that the tariffs he’d spoken about for months may not actually exist. “We don’t even have tariffs,” Trump said, adding, “Where do we have tariffs? We don’t have tariffs anywhere.”

On Thanksgiving, he switched back to his original position.

“Now, as of already, we’re taking in-- right now, we’re taking in billions. China is-- people don’t understand this: China is right now paying us-- right now, paying us billions of dollars a month. That’s never happened before.”

It’s true that it’s never happened before, but it’s also true that it’s not happening now. Nearly a year after Trump launched a trade war, assuring Americans that the fight will be “easy” to win, the president is still confused about the basics of his own policy.

There is no foreign money “coming into the coffers of the United States” from China as a result of the tariffs. As Politico recently explained, “President Donald Trump said Monday that China is paying the U.S. billions of dollars in tariffs as he ramps up his trade war with Beijing. But that’s inaccurate: American consumers and businesses are the ones who will be paying higher costs for imports after he slapped penalties on $200 billion in Chinese goods.”

This is not some obscure triviality, only of interest to trade wonks. Rather, this is the principal presidential defense of his entire policy: Trump has told Americans, repeatedly over the course of several months, that “billions” of dollars are filling U.S. coffers from Beijing. It’s proof, according to the Republican, that his entire strategy has merit.

Reality, however, should still have some meaning. The actual amount of money China is paying us as a result of Trump’s tariffs is zero. When the American president boasted on Thanksgiving that China is “paying us billions of dollars,” he was off by billions of dollars.

Trump’s entire defense is based on payments that simply don’t exist outside his overactive imagination.

Either the president doesn’t know this, in which case his entire trade gambit is being driven by his profound ignorance, or Trump understands the details perfectly well, and he’s just brazenly lying to the public, hoping Americans won’t know the difference.

Either way, if the president sees this money as proof of his policy’s merit, shouldn’t the absence of that money be evidence of his policy’s failure?

Yes... as well as the bankruptcies his policies are causing across the Midwest-- not to mention the plant closings and job disappearances. Monday, local newspapers across the farm belt ran a report from the Associated Press. Short version: "84 farms filed for bankruptcy in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana in 12 months... That’s more than double the number over the same period in 2013 and 2014."

The number of farms filing for bankruptcy is increasing across the Upper Midwest, following low prices for corn, soybeans, milk and beef, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

“Current price levels and the trajectory of the current trends suggest that this trend has not yet seen a peak,” said Ron Wirtz, an analyst at the Minneapolis Fed.

The increase in Chapter 12 filings reflect low prices for corn, soybeans, milk and beef, the Star Tribune reported. The situation has gotten worse for farmers since June because of the retaliatory tariffs that have closed the Chinese market for soybeans and held back exports of milk and beef. Chapter 12 bankruptcy allows for repayment of debt over three years.

Minneapolis Fed analyst Ron Wirtz says the bankruptcy trend has not yet peaked.

“Dairy farmers are having the most problems right now,” said Mark Miedtke, the president of Citizens State Bank in Hayfield. “Grain farmers have had low prices for the past three years but high yields have helped them through. We’re just waiting for a turnaround. We’re waiting for the tariff problem to go away.”

Yesterday, at The Nation, John Nichols wrote that GM's closures confirm what we know-- Trump is a liar and a fool who never cared about the men and women who build cars in places like Michigan and Ohio. This was election year bullshit: "If I’m elected, you won’t lose one plant, you’ll have plants coming into this country, you’re going to have jobs again, you won’t lose one plant, I promise you that."

The heartbreaking reality is that Trump was never going to be a good president for the American workers who build cars and other vehicles in the nation’s historic factory towns. A reality-TV star with almost no understanding of the complex and demanding circumstance of domestic manufacturing in an age of globalization and automation, Trump peddled a combination of bumper-sticker slogans and past-their-expiration-date policy proposals on the 2016 campaign trail. That was enough to win narrow victories in a number of manufacturing states-- Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin-- that were hurting after years of bipartisan neglect. It is true that many voters who felt they had been let down by both parties took a chance on Trump. But Trump assumed the presidency without an agenda, and he embraced the schemes of a Congress led by two of the worst players in Washington on manufacturing issues: House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

It was only a matter of time before Trump’s facade of empty rhetoric and false premises crashed into the reality of 21st-century economics and technological change. The midterm elections revealed the extent to which confidence in Trump had already crumbled. In the three Great Lakes states that gave Trump the presidency by delivering the Electoral College votes he had needed two years ago-- Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin-- voters handed victories to the Democrats in three gubernatorial races and three US Senate races.

Despite Trump's gigantic tax cuts-- much of which went into big bonuses for top management-- GM is closing down 2 plants in southeast Michigan, one in Maryland and one in northeast Ohio. The idea is to boost profits by slashing 15% of the company's salaried workforce (about 8,000 people). GM sees a future defined by ride-sharing networks, self-driving cars and electric vehicles (though they're discontinuing the Volt). Trumpanzee, who, during his campaign consistently promised-- based on nothing but pure hot air and shameless guile-- that he would bring prosperity to the Rust Belt, had this to say: "This country has done a lot for General Motors. They better get back to Ohio and soon. So we have a lot of pressure on them." I'm sure that will scare them into action; not. And, what about Michigan?

The Sound of Music by Nancy Ohanian

UPDATE: Trump Has A Gut

During a Washington Post interview Tuesday, Señor Trumpanzee was asked about Wall Street's collapse and GM closing plants and laying off workers under his watch. He blamed Jerome Powell, his pick to run the Federal Reserve, with whom, he warned, he's "not even a little bit happy... I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed. They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me."