The Trump Tally: the President’s achievements in office outweigh his deep personal flaws

“If you were entitled to vote in the American election, who would you vote for?”, came the question.

“Donald Trump”, I replied.

I was being quizzed during a webinar discussion earlier this week, hosted by an Edinburgh based wealth planning consultancy.

“So, you would vote for a misogynist, tax dodging, unhinged racist?”

“Yup. Hobson’s choice. Biden would destroy the economy.”

My friend and sharp-as-a-tack interrogator, Benny Higgins, former head of Tesco Bank and, amongst myriad other interests, now guru to the Scottish Executive on economic matters, knew it was time to move on. “Fair enough”.

This column is not a Donald Trump “will he, won’t he” predictor. Enough already! It’s too late in the day for that. It is a sober assessment of the Trump administration’s record over the last four years; an attempt to discover if there is any reason, other than blind prejudice, to cast a vote for Donald Trump. Neither is it my purpose to dwell on the unhinged, woke agenda of the Democrat Left, voiced by their masked puppet candidate, who thinks the President’s name is George. As you will gather, I am not a fan.

It is my purpose to cut through the noise of battle – mostly, it must be said, self-generated by Donald Trump – and focus on the concrete issues that have a direct impact on voters. For instance, abandoning the Paris Climate Accord has had little effect in Main Street, Albuquerque, yet. Democrats may bleat that Main Street will be flooded by 2090, but many of those righteous, Trump-whacking issues pass voters by. “Back to basics”, as Sir John Major is wont to say. “Oh, yes.”

So let’s have a look at some of the key issues at stake in the Trump record:

The Economy

When Trump took office GDP growth was in decline – down by 1.31% in 2016. That turned around to growth rates of 2.22% in 2017; 3.18% in 2018; and 2.33% in 2019. Score!

Unemployment rates are down across all conventionally measured sectors over the four years: Men from 4.3% to 3.1%; Women 4.4% – 3.2%; African Americans 7.5% – 5.9%; Hispanics 5.8% – 4.2%; 16-19 year olds 14.6% – 12.6%. Score!

The Republicans are right to brag that these are record lows. Of course, Covid has wrought havoc since, as the 2020 figures will show, so the question on election day becomes, who has the better policies to cut through the Covid mess?

Coronavirus 

That question was answered in the last presidential debate, when Joe Biden lashed Trump for not imposing fiercer lockdowns – which in the USA’s federal structure he was in no position to do – and Trump refused to countenance measures that may not work but might inflict huge damage on the economy.

He took one look at preachy Europe, where a second Covid wave is now raging beyond control. The failure of policy there is painfully obvious – however bizarre or irresponsible were the remedies Trump touted early on in the pandemic. Beneath his hydroxychloroquine-fuelled idiot comments, the President’s instinct is sound: that control of Covid has to be balanced against the costs of economic destruction. Good attempt at a goal!

Taxes

When it comes to corporate taxes, the much-criticised Republican tax package passed into legislation in December 2017 is one of the Trump administration’s most consequential achievements for long term economic growth. Corporate tax is now a 21% flat rate, compared with a previous top rate of 35%.

Almost more significant than the headline rates, a vast array of complex allowances, which served only the interests of the great US tax mitigation industry, were swept away. No longer will corporates have to waste time and distort their activities to squeeze the last drop of juice out of an impenetrable allowance system. I’m a fan of flat taxes. They don’t allow politicians to pick favourites. This was the way to go.

Personal tax: Nothing spectacular here, but certainly no fleecing the poor to feather the nests of the rich. That Democrat claim is simply nonsense. The top rate has been reduced from 39.6% to 37%; the 33% bracket to 32%, the 28% bracket to 24%, the 25% bracket to 22%, and the 15% bracket to 12%. The lowest bracket remains at 10%, and the 35% bracket was also unchanged. So, it was the lower brackets that were reduced most.

In an H&R (statistics nerds) survey it was found the average taxpayer was $1,200 better off after the Trump package.

The argument that the lowest earners are paying more is true in the long run, however, but only after the package expires in 2025, because an increase in standard tax deductions – which were increased – are not permanently baked in. The sensible thing for Democrats to have done would have been to pledge to extend them.

For the record, the deductions were doubled for married couples to £24,000 and were also doubled for single-filers, and heads of households. What a quaint tax code term. How on earth in these PC days does one dare define a “head of household”? It’s probably safest to pick the cat.

Healthcare

The Trump administration did not scrap Obamacare, as casual UK observers listening to hyperventilating Democrats uncritically parroted in the UK media, have relentlessly been led to believe. Sadly, with a gridlocked Congress that was not possible. The shortcomings of Obamacare are best kept for a thesis on another – rainy – day.

What was addressed by the Trump administration was the iniquitous “penalty” imposed on citizens who failed to take out healthcare insurance. Think of it as a sort of BBC licence fee – or poll tax – levied across the whole population, requiring them to spend money on forms of health insurance they do not need. The penalty wasn’t even completely revoked. That could not pass Congress either. It was set at zero, so those defending the principle of the penalty could say they had won. Comical. Pyrrhus of Epirus still stalks the corridors on Capitol Hill.

The point was that the penalties were meant to help fund the Obamacare plan. It is exactly the same principle as making UK citizens pay for BBC programmes they don’t want to watch – but damned well should! The additional cost in lost penalties is $3.3bn a year – peanuts, in government spending terms.

Thwarted in a thoroughgoing reform of Obamacare, the administration framed more affordable healthcare options for Americans through association health plans and short-term duration plans. Not ideal, but as much as the realpolitik of Congress would allow.

The real surprise of the last four years was Trump taking on the pharma industry. His policy was Trumpifyingly simple. “We pay too much and will pay less……The four orders I’m signing today …. will completely restructure the prescription drug market.”

This was no window-dressing West Wing press operation. President Trump has long criticised “astronomical” drug prices. In principle, the reform is not complicated. It rests on a combination of generic prescribing – a policy for replacing expensive branded drugs with much cheaper, non-branded equivalents, and reference pricing – reimbursing at a rate-based basket of drug prices gathered from, ironically, European countries, rather than accepting the gouging prices pharma companies choose to charge.

The measures would also allow discounts and import of cheaper drugs from abroad. Pharma bosses were furious, but also contradictorily claimed that the policy would not have much effect. In that case, why were they furious? Because it was a fundamental tilt to the playing field on which they have scored open profit goals for generations.

I don’t know why these companies pay their K Street, Washington consultants anything at all. The industry rebuttal was terrible: “This administration has decided to pursue a radical and dangerous policy to set prices based on rates paid in countries that he [President Trump] has labelled as socialist, which will harm patients today and into the future”. The President has called their bluff.

This really matters. As Minister for Health, I was responsible for drug pricing in the UK in the mid 90s, so indulge me as I jump on my hobby horse and head for the horizon. According to economics consultancy, Oxera, in the UK, on average, generic selling prices over a four-year period after expired patent drugs enter the market are 70%–90% lower versus the branded equivalent.

As a consequence, in the US, the drugs bill was $345bn for 2019 – $1,200 for every adult. In the UK it was £20bn – £300 per head.

Was it the breast-beating anti-corporate Democrats who took on the greedy pharma giants? No, it was the stupid, loudmouthed, know-nothing property developer from New York who called time on their racket. No drug company CEO will risk sharing an elevator with Donald Trump anytime soon.

Foreign Policy

World War III, predicted to spin from an early confrontation with North Korea, did not happen. What did was an unlikely bromance. I suspect both North and South Korea took the view that Donald Trump was so quixotic they had better look to their own laurels and forge an inconclusive compromise between themselves. Whatever the case may be, the temperature on the peninsula is lower than in 2016 and North Korea’s missile muscle-flexing has reduced.

In the Middle East, the peace deals brokered by the Trump administration between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel (known as the “Abraham Accords”) can be marked up as a huge achievement. And this, even as the administration moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem – derided as a provocative move that would destroy all efforts at reconciliation.

The deal was long in the making. In June 2019, I was at a meeting in Bahrain and got dumped into an alternative hotel, because Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was in town, laying the basis of a Bahrain-Israel peace deal. I then witnessed a former senior Israeli minister hobnobbing in comfortable jocularity with senior Bahraini government ministers and took the view something was afoot. There was: the most historic advance in the Middle East Peace Process since the Camp David accord. For some reason, Trump knew it would not pay to be a blowhard on this one. He sold it, for him, relatively quietly.

Pointing out the blindingly obvious, that Iran was in breach of the 2015 nuclear deal framework – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – and withdrawing from that seriously flawed pact provoked hysteria amongst other signatories. Yet now the increased sanctions, the only discipline Iran’s leaders seem to understand, are biting hard.

As is the policy of killing terrorist leaders when the opportunity presents. ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Qasem Soleimani, who led a special extra-territorial forces unit – Quds – of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards and was responsible for planning countless murders, both felt the wrath of America’s Special Forces.

These sporadic shows of uncompromising strength have been accompanied by a policy of reducing the deployment of US military beyond home borders and avoiding fresh foreign commitments. Trump has not been the warmonger his enemies labelled him as.

And good old NATO, the guys who slip from the bar whenever the tab is due. The President’s withering disapproval has wrung $530bn from those countries not paying their fair share. This is a promising start to the redirecting of NATO’s major concerns, which should be a priority for any incoming administration.

“American Chaos”

Although it is not a policy achievement, no assessment of the administration would be complete without touching on its response to the increasing anarchy in America’s cities. Portland, Oregon, is a no-go area; many of San Francisco’s down-town street are plagued by aggressive panhandlers and vagrants urinate and defecate in public. Meanwhile the forces of law and order are crippled by Democrat mayors.

Restoring common civility to America’s cities will play big in this election and Joe Biden’s mealy-mouthed criticism of flagrant lawbreakers is aimed at pacifying woke Democrats who barely tolerate him, rather than dealing with the crisis.

Three Supreme Court Justices have been appointed. The Democrats’ protests and open planning to dump due process – by increasing the size of the Supreme Court so it can be stuffed with their own lackeys – is a bit rich, coming as it does after failed attempts by Barak Obama to persuade the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg to retire early, so he could appoint a liberal replacement.

The Trump Tally 

So, what is the Trump balance sheet? For an administration whose chief executive has instigated daily crises, seen off impeachment and seldom been short of Twitter scandals, the record may not have shot the lights out, but it is one of significant, some long term, achievements.

Both candidates in this election have personal character flaws that would in other eras have prevented them from even running for office. But today is different. Hobson must make a choice. My vote, based on the last four years, would be for Donald Trump. Ugh!