It’s not surprising that President Donald Trump has strongly expressed his displeasure at the leaked comments of Britain’s Ambassador to the US, Sir Kim Darroch. As one former ambassador to America said, any other president would have felt just as offended. For Darroch to have remained in his post would have been pointless after Trump had described him as a “wacky ambassador”, a “very stupid guy” and a “pompous fool” before ruling out ever dealing with him again. He realised his position had become untenable,” according to insiders.
The beleaguered ambassador, according to friends, had actually made up his mind to stand down — before Boris Johnson, candidate for UK’s next prime minister position, was accused of not backing him — when Sir Kim was locked out of a planned meeting with Ivanka Trump at the White House. It showed how swiftly Trump’s instruction were followed to freeze out the ambassador. According to Sir Simon McDonald, Foreign Office, Permanent Secretary and Head of Diplomatic Service, Trump could veto whoever was appointed as the next UK ambassador to Washington.
Trump’s focus is on a second term in office and he has begun his campaign. There is no doubt that he has support and with America’s economy booming, he is determined to take all the credit. The economy, which is about to break records for the longest expansion, looks like an asset for a president gearing up to seek re-election.
“If voters went to the ballot box today it would be the strongest economy in US election history,” said Justin Waring, an investment strategist at UBS in New York. Unemployment is close to a half-century low and inflation is very subdued. Two gauges added together are known as the “misery index”. Waring, who has crunched these numbers, says they show Americans are less miserable than they’ve ever been.
Which is exactly what Trump’s been telling them. Trump is taking credit for the economy’s performance, and he is getting strong approval ratings on the issue right now. That doesn’t mean it will automatically carry him to a second term. Other issues energise voters too, while the decade-long run of economic growth could come to an end before election day, still over a year off. And even if it doesn’t, there are reasons why this expansion may lack strength at the ballot box — as the Democrats found in 2016.
Trump’s trade war with China, which most economists say is a near-term threat to US growth, is another likely campaign issue in 2020. Joe Biden, vice president in the Obama administration and the early frontrunner among Democrats, has attacked Trump for hurting American business with his erratic use of tariffs. Trump inherited a strong economy, Biden told a rally recently, and “just like everything else he’s been given in his life, he’s in the process of squandering that.”
Still, many democrats agree on the need for a tough approach to China. Stephen Stanley, at Amherst Pierpont Securities, said there’s plenty of time for the president to resolve the dispute in a way that will give the economy — and his re-election prospects — a big boost. Truce talks so far have yet to bring a permanently satisfactory solution. Another angle of attack for Trump ‘s challengers is in equality. Economic growth numbers are aggregates, and say nothing about who benefitted.
Democrats to Biden’s left, like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are especially vocal in arguing too many Americans have been left out of the recovery. Most economists say Trump’s tax cuts were skewed toward the rich. But the uneven distribution of income was already a feature of the expansion when Obama was president. That continuity is true for many of the more upbeat trends in the economy too — like the jobs numbers often celebrated by Trump.
The decline in unemployment hardly seemed to alter with the change in president, although Trump supporters point out that it’s gone on for longer than many economists thought was possible. In the end, some analysts — including Jeffrey Frankel, a Harvard professor and member of the committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research that rules on when recessions began and ended — say the main reason why this expansion has lasted so long isn’t due to policies under either administration. It’s simply a function of the severity of the recession that hit the US between 2007 and 2009.
(The author is our foreign correspondent based in the UK. He can be reached at andyjali@aol.com)
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
