Four years
Donald Trump are around. Did the U.S. president, who on Tuesday faced off against his challenger Joe Biden running for re-election, kept his promises? Fifty-six percent of Americans in a Gallup poll say they are better off today than they were in 2016. On closer inspection, the results are mixed: Rays of light, but also a lot of shadow.
Plus: Trump's
job upswing inherited from the eight Obama years (2008 to 2016), and growth has been fueled by radical tax reform and mass Deregulation RAPIDLY ACCELERATED. He achieves improved trade agreements with neighbors Canada and Mexico, as well as South Korea and Japan. Until spring 2020, there was record employment. Unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, its lowest level in 50 years.
Higher wages were paid for menial labor as well. The number of food stamp recipients dropped by about six million in 2018. On the stock market climbed the Dow Jones stock index By February to record heights around 30.000 points. Then came the corona virus. Almost all economic gains have been erased.
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Plus: Trump promised to restock the federal courts with conservative jurists in a bid to ideologically reorder what his core voters see as a liberal-leaning judiciary. He delivered. Nearly 220 new justices in influential lower courts and three Supreme Court justices on the highest court represent an outstanding record that will have an impact for decades to come. Supporters of
Abortion, government health care and same-sex marriage, all ies that could soon be up for debate, see it differently.
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Plus: Against opposition in Congress, Trump has pushed through funding to build fences on the border with Mexico. So far
700 kilometers of border fence been replaced, just under 40 kilometers are actually new, according to the Department of Homeland Security. This is to curb illegal immigration and drug trafficking.
Contrary to Trump's claims, it's not Mexico paying for the multibillion-dollar project – it's the U.S. taxpayer. Agreements with countries such as Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have reduced the number of illegal immigrants by over 70 percent.
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Trump has partially followed through on announced troop withdrawals
Plus: Trump has not started any new wars. Announced troop withdrawals were partially enforced. In the Middle East conflict he brought new movement and strengthened Israel. While ignoring the concerns of the Palestinians, diplomatic relations were established between Israel and several Arab countries (United Arab Emirates, Bahrain).
Trump had Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and General Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, killed, two extremists the U.S. has classified as terrorists. Through massive pushing, the president has gotten members of NATO to spend more ($130 billion) on the defense alliance, including Germany's.
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Plus: Trump has highlighted the failures of quite a few previous administrations in terms of
Globalization made visible. Sufferers of industrial job losses to low-wage countries – over 5.5 million since the late 1990s – have long been ignored by Republicans and Democrats alike.
To date, the situation in many industrially dominated states has been correspondingly catastrophic. Trump has not helped these "forgotten workers" into new livelihoods across the board. But he has given it space and voice in the national self-talk hitherto dominated by liberal elites on the East and West coasts.
Trump has downplayed and exacerbated the coronavirus epidemic
Minus: Trump has taken the
Coronavirus epidemic downplayed, worsened by mismanagement and thus, according to epidemic experts, led to the deaths of about 230 people so far.000 people contributed. The president has countered advice from his experts (mask protection), promoted unsafe cures, and torpedoed strategies that could have curbed the spread of the pathogen early on.
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The government, which he had announced before the election Vaccine remains unfulfilled. Infection figures have been rising for weeks – most recently to 100.000 a day. Epidemiologists fear another 100 by February.000 dead. America's economy recovering sluggishly. Twelve million unemployed and hundreds of thousands of families relying on food donations await government aid package.
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Minus: Foreign trade deficit has been rising since before Corona, not falling as promised. Employment and production in the steel, aluminum, coal and auto industries have not grown substantially by bringing companies back from abroad. Trump's announcement to grow the economy by up to 6 percent annually went unfulfilled. In 2019, before Corona, GDP grew by 2.3 percent.
The national debt grew to $27 trillion during his tenure, more than major industrialized nations like China, Germany and Japan combined generate in a year. Tax reform did not result in U.S. companies creating more jobs. Many corporations preferred to buy back their own shares.
The United Nations and the WTO are weakened
Minus: Trump has accelerated the U.S. retreat as a driver of a world order based on alliances and multilateral organizations. The World Trade Organization
WTO is just as weakened as the United Nations. Trump is attacking the European Union and has at least begun to pull out of the NATO Flirted.
Minus: Through two meetings with dictator Kim Jong Un, Trump raised expectations for a rapprochement with North Korea. Pyongyang, however, won't give up nuclear weapons. Trump unilaterally scrapped the nuclear deal with Tehran and imposed massive sanctions on the mullahs' regime. Religious hardliners were strengthened.
Despite the murder of U.S. journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump strengthened his ties with Saudi Arabia's autocratic leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Although Trump has made noises to President Vladimir Putin cozies up, relationship with Russia is troubled. Disarmament treaties have been canceled or put on hold.
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Moscow continues to meddle in U.S. elections. Relationship with China damaged by Trump's battle with punitive tariff club. U.S. taxpayers are bearing the lion's share of the cost of the economic war he instigated with Beijing through higher consumer prices.
Societal divisiveness has become extremely advanced under Trump
Minus: Domestically, Trump has many scandals caused. Russia affair, Ukraine affair, Impeachment proceedings are the keywords. Sympathetic statements about neo-Nazis (Charlottesville), hush-money payments to a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and dubious financial dealings (tax returns), along with over 22.000 documented false statements and lies permanently generated negative headlines.
Under Trump, the social disruption of the U.S. has become extremely advanced. Left versus right, blacks versus whites, globalists versus economic nationalists, racists versus multiculturalists, elites versus workers – existing lines of conflict sharpened in word and deed. There is more violence, more hate crimes. Also because the president never wanted to take the role of bridge builder and reconciler.