I think you can hate the guy's policies, which hurt America, while also hate the unprincipled and immoral man too.
Apart from working to "contain" Russia, he's undermining everything to the benefit of Russia. Trump is driving the experts on Russia out of the State Dept. Trump uses an unsecured personal cellphone to make official calls, that you can bet Putin gets a transcript immediately. While your quibble about the cost of NATO, as if that's really the import issue, Trump is undermining NATO -- the prime defense against Russian militarism.
Almost exactly one year has passed since Donald Trump declared "trade wars are good and easy to win." Since then, the stock markets have rallied in the belief that Trump was winding down his trade war, only to face announcements that a much-anticipated deal wasn’t happening or that tariffs were being slapped on a new set of products or countries. Recently, it happened again: Markets bet on an outbreak of trade peace between the U.S. and China, only to get body slammed by Trump’s declaration that there might be no deal before the election and by his new tariffs on Brazil and Argentina. We already lived through tariffs on allies, like Canada, on "national security" grounds. Really?
The results of his trade war have been consistently bad, both economically and politically. How so?
A peculiar aspect of the Trump economy is that while overall growth has been solid, the areas of weakness have come precisely in those things Trump tried to stimulate.
Remember, Trump’s only major legislative accomplishment was a huge tax cut for corporations that was supposed to lead to a surge in investment. Instead, corporations pocketed the money, and business investment has been falling.
At the same time, his trade war was supposed to shrink the trade deficit and revive U.S. manufacturing. But the trade deficit has widened, and
manufacturing output is shrinking. It's devastated farming -- requiring taxpayers to give farmers $16 billion in Trump-welfare to bail them out.
Economists are generally surprised how badly the tariffs and tax-cuts worked out. The most commonly given explanation for these bad results is that Trumpian tariff policy is creating a lot of uncertainty, which is giving businesses a strong incentive to postpone any plans they might have for building new factories and adding jobs.
Why does Trump do this if it's actually shooting ourselves in the foot? One answer is that Trump has long had a fixation on the idea that tariffs are the answer to America’s problems, and he’s not the kind of man who reconsiders his prejudices in the light of evidence. But there’s also something else: U.S. trade law offers Trump more freedom of action -- more ability to do whatever he wants -- than any other policy area.
