Stable Genius Will Fix Economy He F*cked Up By ... Just Kidding, He Has No Plan

Trump 2020! For people who really ARE sick of winning!

More bad "economy" news happened to Donald Trump today:

Trump's economic record took another turn into dangerous territory Tuesday with a widely tracked gauge of the U.S. manufacturing sector contracting for the first time in more than three years, walloping the stock market and reigniting fears of a recession. It added to mounting concerns about a global economic slowdown under the weight of Trump's trade war.

Does Wonkette know exactly what that means? Of course not, we're not ECONOMY NERDS. But it sounds bad! Especially for all the factory workers Donald Trump swore up and down he was going to protect and revive and Make Great Again.

That line comes as the opening salvo in a new Politico piece on how more and more people are talking about how Donald Trump sucks these days, and as he enters the final year of hisfirst termpresidency, things are not looking good for him to have any sort of economic record to run on in 2020, owing to how he is a failure. From what Politico says, it sounds like all the king's horses and all the king's men know what a Trumpty Dumpty the president really is, and are losing hope they'll ever be able to put him together again.

The general thrust of the article is that these next few months are a "make-or-break" stretch for the Trump economy, and what does Donald Trump do to things when he touches them? Hesexually assaultsbreaks them.

Let's tick off the boxes:

• Trade war with China: Apparently it's not easy to win! And the thing is, China has no reason not to sit on its hands and let Trump whine and cry while they wait for a sane person to be inaugurated president in 2021.

• Trump's recession cometh: "Added to the pressure is the fact that three out of four economists believe a recession will hit in the next two years, according to a recent survey by the National Association for Business Economics — with 38 percent of economists predicting a downturn will arrive during the 2020 election year." Politico quotes Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, who says if Trump keeps ratcheting up his goddamn trade war with China, a recession is definitely happening. And what does Trump do when he's failing and can't find a way out? He fails HARDER. In other words, the trade war will escalate, therefore thoughts 'n' prayers for your 401K for the foreseeable future!

• Trump's new NAFTA gotta pass Congress, and it sounds like some Trump administration people think that might happen this fall, but as with all other things, Trump will obviously fail at this. Therefore, Trump won't be able to campaign on replacing old NAFTA with a new NAFTA. Or a China trade deal. Or building the wall. Or really anything else.

And as we said at the top, a manufacturing thing happened, one of those "leading indicators" thingies or whatever they are, and it has the White House shook :

Trump internal and external advisers know one of their biggest vulnerabilities is weakness in American manufacturing, a sector the president promised to revive with his aggressive trade policy. The pledges helped Trump secure surprising — and quite narrow — wins in key states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.

But the manufacturing numbers are moving in the wrong direction for the president. The Institute for Supply Management, a group of purchasing managers, on Tuesday said manufacturing contracted in August and a gauge of export orders, slammed by the trade war, crashed to the lowest level since April 2009 — when the economy was in a severe recession. The ISM's employment gauge declined, suggesting manufacturers are shedding workers.

Ruh roh. And it was caused by Trump's trade war? Elizabeth Warren/Kamala Harris/whoever is going to have such an easy time making ads in the Rust Belt next year, they won't even have to hire Brad Parscale's wife! 

Politico adds that the bad manufacturing numbers probably wouldn't just straighten up and fly right if Trump acted like Not A Idiot and actually made a deal with China. But the chances of Trump acting like Not A Idiot or making an Art Of The Deal with China are slim to none, so we guess that's not relevant.

Let's talk to a former Trump official about what a dumb fuckjob Trump really is:

Current and former administration officials acknowledge the ultimate fate of the tariffs against China lie solely with the president, who has not been swayed by the pleas of business leaders, or even his own advisers, to cut a deal with China. [...]

"Frankly I don't think he really understands any of this,"[a former White House official] said of the economic impact of the trade fights. "The manufacturing slowdown, the lack of corporate investment, what's happening to confidence —all of this was totally predictable based on what he's done.But he sees it as a political advantage, that he can tell people he got tough on China and needs to finish the job."

The official added that there are few senior advisers left in the White House who will push back strongly on Trump's pugnacious approach to trade."The sad reality is that in the first 1,000 days of his presidency he managed to get rid of everybody who would tell him the truth or anything he didn't want to hear."

Emphasis ours, to highlight one of Trump's own former officials calling Trump an idiot and saying things are hopeless now, because there's nobody left to fix Trump's stupid wagon.

Trump lies and says his tariffs are good for Americans, when in reality they are a tax that all Americans (even his own supporters!) are paying for, with their dollars. He lies and says everything is hunky dory, when farmers are well and truly fucked .

So, all of this just sounds GREAT.

One question, as Greg Sargent notes in the Washington Post , is whether Trump is really just lying about how bad things are (as he so often does), or whether he truly does not understand how or why his brilliant touch hasn't led to record-breaking peace and economic prosperity. Apparently he's been losing his temper at his own people quite a bit lately, and Sargent says this suggests that the Occam's Razor theory of the Trump presidency -- the idiot has no fucking idea what he's doing, there is no plan, please stop overthinking this -- is the correct one.

It's a theory we also tend to hold at Wonkette.

Enjoy the 2020 race, mister president!

[ Politico ]

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