As Donald Trump flew to Florida on Saturday for a pair of political events, he could look back on what had been the best and worst of weeks. On Wednesday, he returned from a summit in London to mark the seventieth anniversary of NATO, where a hot mike captured some of his fellow world leaders mocking him. Less than twenty-four hours later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that the House Judiciary Committee will proceed with drafting articles of impeachment against Trump, which all but assured that he will become only the fourth President in history—along with Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton—to have an impeachment proceeding against him be approved by committee and referred to the full House for a vote. But, after all this, Trump received a big political boost on Friday when the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy had created two hundred and sixty-six thousand jobs in November, far more than expected. The unemployment rate last month was just 3.5 per cent, which matched the lowest it had been in fifty years.
Trump was jubilant. “GREAT JOBS REPORT!,” he tweeted on Friday morning. Even allowing for the facts that the monthly job figures bounce around and come with a sizable margin of error attached, it was hard to argue with his assessment. On Wall Street, the consensus forecast had been for job growth of a hundred and eighty-seven thousand, which in itself would have been a pretty strong number. It reflected strong hiring across the huge services sector, which these days employs about eighty per cent of all working Americans. The biggest job gains came in health care, leisure and hospitality, and professional services. But even the manufacturing sector, which has been hit hard by Trump’s trade wars, added fifty-four thousand jobs, only some of which were accounted for by the end of a strike at General Motors.
Of course, Trump’s claim to have created the strong labor market is baseless. The current economic expansion began in 2009, under Barack Obama, and employment growth has been remarkably steady since then. But all Presidents tend to receive credit when the economy does well and criticism when it does badly, even if their policies have little to do with it. At the end of 2018, the rate of G.D.P. growth dipped, the stock market fell, and it seemed possible that Trump would be going into next year’s election campaign saddled with an economy that was weakening sharply—a fear heightened by the continuation of his trade wars. These concerns have now receded. “Today’s job report, more than any other report in recent months, squashed any lingering concerns about an imminent recession in the U.S. economy,” Gad Levanon, an economist at the Conference Board, told CNBC on Friday. “Employment growth also shows no signs of slowing further despite the historically low unemployment rate.”
The Labor Department also reported that wages are still rising. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have risen by 3.1 per cent, while the rate of consumer-price inflation is just 1.8 per cent. And lately, wage gains have picked up further. According to Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, hourly wages for non-supervisory/production workers increased at an annual rate of 4.1 per cent in the past three months. That’s the highest rate since September, 2008, which was the month Lehman Brothers collapsed. So workers’ purchasing power is going up, and so are over-all household incomes. Indeed, Bloomberg News pointed out that, by one measure of wages, the rate of wage growth is now higher than the average interest rate on thirty-year mortgages—the first time this has been true since Nixon was President. To be sure, many Americans still haven’t benefitted much, if at all, from the long recovery. And there are enormous public concerns about issues like the costs of health care and housing, as well as rising inequality and corporate greed, which the Democrats will rightly emphasize in the general election. But, at this stage, the headline economic figures are positive.
What is the likely political impact of all this? Chris Cillizza, of CNN, showed no doubt on Friday. “The latest economic numbers . . . make one thing very clear: President Donald Trump has a path to win a second term next year,” he wrote. After reciting some of the good economic news, which includes the stock market hitting new highs, Cillizza delivered a little history lesson. Setting aside Gerald Ford, who is a special case because he took over after Nixon resigned—and then later pardoned him, to disastrous political effects—only two Presidents since the Second World War have lost reëlection contest. They were Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and George H. W. Bush, in 1992: both of them were handicapped by a weak economy. “The data then is clear,” Cillizza concluded. “It’s very, very hard to beat an incumbent president unless the economy is seen by a majority of the public to be weakening badly.”
But that isn’t the end of the story—a fact that Cillizza acknowledged in the second half of his piece. For one thing, in our polarized political environment, the economy seems to play less of a role than it used to do in determining voters’ attitudes toward the President and politics in general. This trend was evident during the last Administration, when Obama’s approval ratings remained middling despite a slow but steady recovery from the Great Recession. Since Trump entered the White House, the trend has been even more evident. “His approval numbers are 15 points lower than where you’d have expected them to be,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who has studied this issue closely, told Greg Ip, of the Wall Street Journal. In a sharp column, Ip noted that the strong economy didn’t prevent the Democrats from making big gains in the 2018 midterm elections and in local elections last month, in Virginia and other states. Moreover, many of these gains came in affluent suburbs, where the value of people’s houses and retirement portfolios have been rising strongly.
In another of his tweets on Friday, Trump paraphrased the famous quote from the political consultant James Carville, writing, “It’s the economy, stupid.” These days, it isn’t only the economy, though. Inevitably, the 2020 election will also be a referendum on Trump’s conduct as President. Some voters may be willing to set aside Trump’s scandals, aberrant behavior, and controversial policies and focus exclusively on the state of the economy, but many, many others won’t. This implies that the ongoing political battles, particularly those over impeachment, may well have more impact on the election than some commentators have argued. For example, the Democrats, simply by going through with their threat to deploy the ultimate constitutional weapon that is available to Congress against Trump, will rally many of the local activists whose enthusiasm and involvement they will need next year. In that sense, as I noted in a column on Friday, impeachment is already a win for the Democrats.
But it also matters how things play out over the next few weeks, as the House Judiciary Committee files articles of impeachment, the full House votes on them, and the action moves to the Senate for a trial under the purview of the Chief Justice, John Roberts. On Friday, the White House indicated that it will continue to boycott the House proceedings. In a letter to Jerry Nadler, the Democratic head of the Judiciary Committee, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, said, “You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings.” This brazen defiance was only the latest example of the White House’s refusal to coöperate in any way with the impeachment inquiry, a stance that is itself grounds for impeachment, the Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman pointed out during his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. “A President who will not coöperate with an impeachment inquiry is putting himself above the law,” Feldman said. “Putting yourself above the law as President is the core of an impeachable offense because if a President could not be impeached for that, he would in fact not be responsible to anybody.”
While Trump and his aides were scoffing at the impeachment inquiry from the White House, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and a key figure in the Ukraine scandal, was taking his defiance even further, essentially raising his middle finger from Kyiv. Even though his business dealings are now under federal investigation, and one of his Ukrainian associates—Lev Parnas—is reportedly coöperating with the Feds, Giuliani returned this week to the Ukrainian capital, where he is said to be helping a right-wing U.S. media outlet, One America News Network, put together a documentary about his discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, was responsible for hacking the e-mails of Democrats during the 2016 election. “The fact that Giuliani is back in Ukraine is like a murder suspect returning to the crime scene to live-stream themselves moon dancing,” Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and Trump supporter, told the Washington Post. “It’s brazen on a galactic level.” And so, the madness goes on.
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December 08, 2019 at 04:13AM
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