Increase Us Competitiveness Against China
In 2018, Trump imposed three tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese imports. In 2019, he levied a 25% tariff on an additional $200 billion worth of goods. China responded with tariffs on $110 billion of U.S. products.
In December 2019, Trump announced a trade deal between the U.S. and China. In the deal, China agreed to increase imports of certain U.S. goods by $200 billion annually.
The Federal Reserve estimated that tariffs on Chinese goods cost the average household $831 a year.
Trump pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, saying it would force U.S. workers to compete with lower-paid foreign workers, thus sending more jobs overseas. On the other hand, the TPP was formed to help the United States strengthen its ties with Asian countries that are struggling to compete with China. Without the TPP, proponents argue, these countries may rely more on China and less on the United States, making America less competitive.
‘putting Democracy To The Test’
Kathryn Brownell is a history professor at Purdue University, focusing on the relationships between media, politics, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the American presidency.
What’s Trump’s key legacy?
Broadly speaking: Donald Trump, and his enablers in the Republican Party and conservative media, have put American democracy to the test in an unprecedented way. As a historian who studies the intersection of media and the presidency, it is truly striking the ways in which he has convinced millions of people that his fabricated version of events is true.
What happened on 6 January at the US Capitol is a culmination of over four years during which President Trump actively advanced misinformation.
Just as Watergate and the impeachment inquiry dominated historical interpretations of Richard Nixon’s legacy for decades, I do think that this particular post-election moment will be at the forefront of historical assessments of his presidency.
What else stands out to you?
Kellyanne Conway’s first introduction of the notion of “alternative facts” just days into the Trump administration when disputing the size of the inaugural crowds between Trump and Barack Obama.
Trump harnessed the power of social media and blurred the lines between entertainment and politics in ways that allowed him to bypass critics and connect directly to his supporters in an unfiltered way.
Trump Passed A Significant Criminal Justice Reform Measure But His Administration Has Worked To Undo It
Standing before hundreds of Black and brown supporters earlier this month, Trump said that America has reached a historic reduction of violent crime during his presidency. We signed a landmark criminal justice reform bill that nobody thought was possible to think about. I did that. I did that. I got that done, he said.
In December 2018, Trump did indeed sign the First Step Act, which made the most substantial changes in a generation to tough on crime laws that increased the federal prison population by 700 percent since 1970.
Since Trump signed the measure into law, more than 3,000 people have been released from federal prison due to the laws good time credits, which provide early release for well-behaved inmates hundreds have beenreleased into the elderly home confinement pilot program, which places older federal inmates in home confinement before the end of their prison term and more than 2,000 people 91 percent of whom are Black received sentencing reductions because the First Step Act retroactively applied the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 , reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine charges.
While these changes are substantial, many have pointed to the areas where the act fails and why Trump cant take full credit for the initiative.
Proponents of the law have also pointed out that its effects on the size of the federal prison system will ultimately be minimal. Voxs German Lopez reported:
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Failure: Charlottesville And George Floyd
Trump’s response to a deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was one of the most controversial moments in his presidency.
It was emblematic of Trump’s struggle to bring the country together after tragedies, and more generally. His response also typified his controversial record on race relations and white supremacy.
Trump blamed “many sides” for the violence at the rally, which resulted in the death of a counterprotester, Heather Heyer. He later said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
The former president was excoriated by Republicans and Democrats alike over his response and his failure to offer a swift and forceful condemnation of white-supremacist violence.
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, often one of Trump’s fiercest defenders in Congress, at the time said the former president’s words were “dividing Americans, not healing them.”
“President Trump took a step backward by again suggesting there is moral equivalency between the white supremacist, neo-Nazis and KKK members,” Graham added.
In the wake of the brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and the nationwide protests that followed, Trump also failed to rise to the occasion. He’s done far more to divide the country than bring it together.
Historians have warned that Trump’s tactics mirror those of authoritarian regimes.
What Donald Trump Has Accomplished As President
On the cusp of the final debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden on Thursday night, many are expecting the records of both candidates to be raked over throughout the 90-minute head-to-head.
According to a list of topics announced by debate moderator Kristen Welker, Trump and Biden will be quizzed on race in America, climate change, American families, national security and leadership when they appear at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.
It is also likely that topics not on the approved list will come up over the course of the showdownparticularly the coronavirus pandemic, the state of U.S. employment and Hunter Biden‘s business dealings.
President Trump will be eager to defend his record over the past four years, and could be expected to tout his supposed achievements on matters of foreign policy, job creation and other economic matters during the course of his first term in the White House.
Here are five of Trump’s key accomplishments in the eyes of the administration, the president and his supporters.
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The Mechanism For Funding Hbcus Has Very Little To Do With Trump
Trump has also repeatedly mentioned how his administration has funded historically Black colleges and universities . They couldnt get funded. Nobody was funding them for years and years and decades, nobody was funding them, Trump said.
This is simply untrue: Under Obama, the federal government invested more than $4 billion in HBCUs over seven years.
And while federal funding for HBCUs has been renewed under Trumps presidency, Trump has not publicly acknowledged that the renewal is the result of congressional appropriations.
Congress does all this work and presents it to him in the budget, and he can choose to sign it. This year, he held off on signing some significant STEM funding, making HBCUs beg for it, Rutgers professor and leading HBCU authority Marybeth Gasman told the Washington Post. Trump has promised all kinds of things to HBCUs and has followed through on little. Under Trump, the White House Initiative for HBCUs was moved to the White House and is quite quiet compared to the work under President Obamas administration.
Trump Recently Signed 3 Bills To Benefit Native People One Gives Compensation To The Spokane Tribe For Loss Of Their Lands In The Mid
True, but tribal leaders credit bipartisan efforts in Congress for those bills. In 2019, Mr. Trump signed the Spokane Reservation Equitable Compensation Act for the loss of land that was flooded by the Grand Coulee Dam. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visited the reservation and pledged to support the bill. But Carol Evans, chairwoman of the Spokane Tribal Business Council, said most of the credit for the law goes to two members of Congress from Washington, Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat, and Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican. Mr. Trump also signed the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Programs Reauthorization Act, which revises an existing grant program. That bill was introduced by Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico. Lastly, Mr. Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019, which included a provision that gave long-overdue federal recognition to the Little Shell Tribe. Tribal Chairman Gerald Gray credits the bipartisan efforts of Senators Jon Tester, a Democrat, and Steve Daines, a Republican, both of Montana, for tucking the tribal recognition provision into the military spending bill.
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End Outsourcing And Bring Back Jobs From Overseas
America lost 31.4% of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2011 these were steady jobs that, on average, paid $28.85 per hour.
U.S. companies outsourced many of these jobs to save money. But robotics, artificial intelligence, and bio-engineering also made some jobs obsolete, so ending outsourcing may not bring back all the jobs that were lost. It’s possible that government-sponsored training for these specialties might create more jobs for U.S. workers than a trade war.
Trumps Claims On Poverty Dont Tell The Full Story Of Racial Disparity
Relatedly, Trump cites declining poverty rates before the pandemic as proof of his success. Last year, Black and Hispanic American poverty reached the lowest ever in the history of our country, Trump said at the White House event earlier this month.
According to census data, Trumps claim is correct but ignores the major disparities that remain. According to the data, the US poverty rate was 10.5 percent in 2019, the lowest since 1959, when data was first collected and released on this scale, with an 18.8 percent poverty rate for Black people and a 15.7 percent poverty rate for Hispanics.
Despite these historic lows, Black and Hispanic people are overrepresented in the poverty population relative to their representation in the overall population. According to the data, Black people represented 13.2 percent of the total population in the United States but 23.8 percent of the poverty group almost two times greater than their portion of the general population. Hispanics comprised 18.7 percent of the total population but 28.1 percent of the population in poverty 1.5 times more than their share of the population.
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Trump Signed The Biggest Wilderness Protection & Conservation Bill In A Decade And Designated 375000 Acres As Protected Land
This is misleading.While Mr. Trump did sign the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act of 2019, he has stripped protections from far more land than he has preserved. Most notably, he removed some two million acres in Utah that had been part of the Bears Ears National Monument and the Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah. According to a study published in May 2019 in Science, Mr. Trump is responsible for the largest reduction in the boundaries of protected land in U.S. history.
Stock Market Has Reached Record Highs
The highest closing record of the Dow Jones industrial average, the index of 30 top U.S. companies, was reached in February, after investors appeared to be encouraged that the trade wars initiated by Mr. Trump were being resolved. Recent interest-rate cuts in 2019 also contributed. This March, the Dow fell a record 2,013.76 points to 23,851.02, after it became clear that the U.S. economy would lock down because of the pandemic. That drop was followed by two more record-setting point drops.
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Return Of Americans From Overseas Prison
In May, Trump’s administration successfully negotiated the return of three Americans who were jailed in North Korea.
In the same month, one US national who was in prison in Venezuela was also allowed home.
According to the White House, a total of 17 Americans have been released from foreign jails during Trump’s two-year tenure.
He Signed A Bill This Year Allowing Some Drug Imports From Canada So That Prescription Prices Would Go Down
President Trump has signed a series of executive orders aimed at making it easier for states to import cheaper drugs from Canada. But it is far from clear whether these executive orders will succeed in that aim. This proposal bears no resemblance to Mr. Trumps 2016 promise to use the buying power of the federal government to negotiate lower prices for drugs for Medicare patients, which would save hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade. Mr. Trump has not kept that promise. If he were serious about doing so, he would push Republicans in the Senate to pass the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, which Democrats passed last year. Theres no evidence that he has done so.
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Tax Cut And Jobs Act Deregulation And National Debt
Even before the virus further exacerbated U.S. income inequality, some experts say Trumps economic policies favored the wealthy — and left the poor and middle class behind.
His Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017 provided major tax breaks to corporations and wealthy individuals. The policy, among other things, reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%.
Frankel called the policy “beyond ironic” for a president “who campaigned in 2016 on being the champion of the working man or working person and campaigned on ‘draining the swamp’ in Washington.”
Shierholz said this policy “absolutely increased inequality” and the “vast majority of the benefits of those tax cuts went to the already very wealthy.”
The economists also noted that the policy came at a time when unemployment was relatively low and the economy in good shape.
“That’s not the time to be giving away trillions of dollars to the wealthy,” Frankel said. “When you have a bad shock like the global financial crisis of 2008-09 or like the coronavirus crisis that we’re still going through — that’s the time to increase government spending and expansionary fiscal policy, but you lose the ability to do that if you gave it away.”
NYU’s Bowmaker noted that some “can make the case that the corporate tax rate was a little bit too high” and would welcome the tax cuts.
Despite his goal, the debt has ballooned under Trump. The total national debt has skyrocketed by more than $7 trillion during Trumps tenure.
Appointing Neil Gorsuch To The Supreme Court
One of Trumps first big moves as US President was appointing federal judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
The court is the most powerful in America and has the final say on many important issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
Trump supporters were overjoyed at the nomination of the conservative judge whose views include being staunchly against assisted suicide.
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