It's like watching a train that fails to see the giant rock on the tracks. Many voters said they were better off under Trump 1 so if the predicted Trump 2 inflation arrives they may wonder if they had it all wrong. Making America not great. On top of that some of the new agency heads are barely competent or have problematic backgrounds. During weighty pronouncements it will be hard not to think of worms in the brain or shooting puppies.

Then unelected unappointed people like Don Jnr give ultimatums to Zelensky. The world's richest person gets to gut the civil service. Farm labourers get rounded up reminiscent of WW2 Jews. And it doesn't even become official til Jan 20.

Make America Grate again!

You can be afraid, sensible people are overjoyed.

US employment grew every year under Trump. Serious error (deliberate?) in the article makes me question the accuracy of all his statements.

Both the sub-heading and the article inform us that " Trump saw job losses in every year of his presidency – 2017, 2018 and 2019".

That is factual and monumentally incorrect. The article links to a Forbes article that doesn't say what the author thinks it says. Although the Forbes article is a little convoluted and its easy to see how the ill-informed could have misunderstood it, it in facts confirms the exact opposite of what the author thinks it says.

In fact, job numbers increased every year of Trumps presidency other than the Covid year. Over the three years (2017-19) jobs numbers increased by 6.5 million. While it is true that the last three years of Obama saw more jobs added (8 million) this was from a low post-Great Recession base.

More importantly, unemployment fell under Trump which is why the black community which had record low unemployment under Trump, remembered those years with fondness.

I haven't checked all the authors other numbers but a cursory look suggests they are of the same low quality has his job numbers.

But the biggest problem with the article is that it utterly misunderstands the nature of the MAGA revolt and the proposed economic realignment. Globalism is rejected. Tariffs are embraced because free trade isn't free and the US, particularly working class US, are suffering because the US is allowing those who don't abide by free market rules to do so without resistance. No more.

So complaining that the MAGA economy won't abide by globalist rules and shibboleths misses the point. MAGA rejects those rules and truisms.

Bernie Masters you are right right.

There is much to fear in Trump’s economic policies, but the author does his argument no favours but having clearly misunderstood the NYT article he quotes as pointing to a decrease in employment under Trump compared to increases under Obama. Three successive years of decreasing employment levels would have been major headline news, but it didn’t happen. The decreases the article refers to are adjustments to estimates in the level of employment growth in each year, not to total employment levels. So, for example, where it says:

“2018: 2.679 million fell to 2.314 million, down 365,000 jobs (Trump’s best year)”

It means that employment rose in 2018 by 2.679 million, compared to an earlier estimate of growth of 2.314 million.

Anyone with even the remotest familiarity with economic statistics would not have made this error.

mhaze

I think Trump’s economic policies will be a disaster for the USA and bad news for the rest of us (if he actually carries them out – his record last time round was that his actions were not quite as bad as his pre-election policies). Tariffs hurt the poor and working people most and will increase prices. Mass deportation will wreak havoc with the labour market. Weakening the independence of the Fed will probably make inflation worse.

But you are right that that Davidson’s misunderstanding of the employment data is factually and monumentally incorrect.

For the record the has been only one period since WW2 in which the USA recorded three consecutive years of falling employment – at the time at the dot-com bubble/crash in 2010.

http://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/LNU02000000

I find it inconceivable that an academic whose job title is “Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University”

a) Doesn’t understand what a fairly basic article on economic statistics is actually saying;
b) Didn’t have a half-competent colleague, student or friend to help with some fact checking; and
c) Was so unfamiliar with the US economy – or the developed economies in general - that he didn’t realise immediately that this cannot be true.

What no-one seems to draw attention to is the fact that this election was the pivoting point point of symbiosis vs parasitism !
Symbiosis won & the parasitic abhor the democratic outcome !

There is much to fear in Trump’s economic policies,
Rhian,
Going by past performance, the dread you express is nothing in comparison to where the Woke Democrats were leading !
In Australia it's Labor = Woke democrats & Coalition = Republican. The really funny part is that just about all Australians in favour of having a republic here are in fact Labor supporters !
The speech muzzling proposed by Labor is to gauge the apathy of the Electorate. This is far more scary than the Trump economic policies you're unnecessarily worry about unless of course you are from the parasitic half of the Nation !