Last week, after a year in which he did everything he could to transform governing into a partisan conflict, stoked the fires of bigotry, gave comfort to white supremacists and nativists and talked out of both sides of his mouth about immigration while dissing foreigners and our own immigrants, Donald Trump appealed for unity in his State of the Union address.
This reminded me of a report a couple of years ago of a firefighter who was convicted of setting multiple fires to earn overtime pay and impress his peers.
The firefighter was sent to prison for five years.
Sadly, Mr. Trump continues to occupy the Oval Office.
And the fires of disunity continue to burn across our nation.
The American economy has done well during Mr. Trump’s White House residency, a development for which he naturally took too much credit.
While the economy has added 2.4 million jobs, or about 169,000 a month since his election, that’s actually a little slower than the 185,000 jobs a month that the economy added over the previous seven years under Barack Obama.
And more jobs were added in the 14 months before the election than in the 14 months since then. January’s job growth showed only a modest improvement over December.
Mr. Trump also boasted about the gains in the stock market, but the stock market posted bigger gains in the first year of the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama administrations.
And that was before the stock market suffered its worst setback in two years last week.
After last week, I wonder whether Mr. Trump still wants to talk about the stock market’s performance.
Mr. Trump continued to claim, falsely, that he had enacted the biggest tax cuts in American history.
Actually, the Ronald Reagan tax cuts were larger as a share of the economy and their effects on federal revenues. In fact, it seems that the Trump tax cuts rank 12th as a share of the economy.
But, this was Mr. Trump’s only major legislative achievement, so we can understand his need to exaggerate.
Of course, he failed to note the impetus the tax bill gave to increasing income and wealth inequality between the superrich and ordinary Americans, not to mention the $1.5 trillion blow to our deficit. Even the Reagan tax cuts were nominally revenue neutral.
Mr. Trump likes to say that he, and only he, is bringing manufacturing jobs back, claiming that many car companies are now building and expanding plants here, “something we have not seen for decades.”
For decades? Toyota, for one, opened a plant in Mississippi in 2011 and there has been no surge in automotive employment under Mr. Trump.
In fact, automotive employment is down from a year ago.
Mr. Trump took credit for the wage increases and bonuses that some companies have announced, but they are more accurately attributable to the strengthening of the labor market which began well before his election and the passage of the tax bill.
These companies have a public relations incentive to attribute these wage increases to the tax plan, particularly when economists generally agree that most of the tax cuts will go to shareholders in the form of dividends, stock buybacks and higher share prices.
And, it should be noted, wage growth actually slowed during Mr. Trump’s first year.
Yes, the January jobs report showed an uptick in wage growth. However, economists are cautioning against reading too much into a single month of data, which is preliminary and will be revised at least twice. Also, other measures of wage growth have not yet shown the same acceleration.
Mr. Trump said he has a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan which “our economy needs and our people deserve,” but didn’t he say this a year ago?
Actually, the White House indicates that Mr. Trump is willing to spend only $200 billion in federal money over the next 10 years and expects the remaining $1.3 trillion to come from cities, states and the private sector.
And he’s leaving it to Congress to put this plan together.
I suppose Mr. Trump is too busy tweeting to come up with a plan.
As one interested observer, the president of the AFL-CIO, said: “That’s not a plan. That’s a hope. It’s sort of pathetic.”
Mr. Trump even claims that the television audience for his State of the Union speech was “the highest number in history.”
Wrong. Just as he exaggerated the size of the crowd for his inauguration, Mr. Trump lied about the extent of the audience for his speech.
Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address drew about 2 million more viewers. In fact, Mr. Trump’s audience was only the ninth largest for the annual addresses since 1993.
I guess Mr. Trump just can’t stand being one-upped by President Obama.
So much for Mr. Trump’s appeal for unity.
Jay N. Feldman
Port Washington
