The 2020 presidential race...
...will forever be remembered as the pandemic election
More than 200,000 Americans are dead...
...millions unemployed...
...and America’s national debt is more than 100% of GDP
Little surprise that President Trump’s handling of the pandemic...
...has been the defining issue of the election
It has also been an election framed by the policies...
...and the personality of a man who has wrecked political norms...
...and undermined institutions
But what’s the real legacy of the past four years?
The Economist’s US team has been following...
...the twists and turns of Trump’s presidency
Here’s their analysis
In 2019 Donald Trump presided over...
...America’s lowest unemployment rate in 50 years...
...a buoyant stockmarket and fast annual-wage growth...
...among the lowest paid workers
The economy was booming...
...just as he’d promised
I have made billions of dollars in business making deals...
...now I’m going to make our country rich again
Trump’s tax-cut bill was signed within a year of taking office
Cutting corporate tax from 35% to 21%...
...and decreasing taxes for around 65% of working Americans in 2018...
...but particularly for the rich
If you look at the tax cuts and what they actually did...
...they were fairly regressive
I think it’s certainly the case that if you inject funds...
...into the economy by cutting taxes...
...then that’s going to give the economy some juice
That had something to do with...
...the economy’s health in the run up to the pandemic
Trump’s tax-cut splurge helped America’s GDP grow faster than expected...
...compared with the rest of the rich world
It also meant it had a bigger budget deficit...
...going into the covid-19 crisis
When the pandemic hit...
...Congress implemented the world's largest fiscal package
The Senate did unanimously approve...
...an historic $2trn relief bill
I’ve signed the single biggest economic relief package
At the moment, while the economy is...
...really struggling, there’s no sign of inflation
And interest rates are very, very low
There are no signals really out there...
...saying that you need to stop borrowing right now
America’s grim experience of covid-19...
...triggered a deep recession
But it will still probably be...
...the best performing G7 economy in 2020
The future does not belong to globalists...
...the future belongs to patriots...
...the future belongs to sovereign and independent nations
President Trump promised to put America first...
...an anti-globalist stance which he wasted no time in implementing
Pulling America out of ten international organisations or treaties
He promised to renegotiate all of America’s trade deals
His tactics seemed to be threatening other countries with tariffs...
...and essentially trying to squeeze concessions out of them
The fact is NAFTA has been a disaster...
...for the United States, a complete and total disaster
His critics said...
...that this is a very, very dangerous strategy...
...because the risk is you toxify politics...
...in the other countries that you’re dealing with
And so if you enter a negotiation...
...essentially promising to bully the other side into submission...
...the risk is it just kind of blows up in your face
Yet, clearly, there were all these deals
He renegotiated a deal with Mexico and Canada
And a deal with South Korea
And then there’s China
Starting in 2018, America waged a trade war with China
The average tariff rate on goods...
...travelling between America and China has since more than tripled
If Trump came in promising to, in some ways, reset...
...the relationship with China, when it comes to trade...
...he has managed to do that
We can disagree about whether...
...all of it is in a good way, but he’s reset it
The two countries agreed the first phase...
...of a trade deal in January 2020...
...which included an agreement from China...
...to lift some trade barriers...
...and to buy certain American products...
...but right now it doesn’t look like China will meet those commitments
The other thing...
...there are still tariffs on hundreds of billions of...
...dollars-worth of Chinese exports to America...
...and looking ahead I think those will be quite difficult...
...to roll back entirely
The US-China relationship has been changed...
...and in a way that is not going to be very easy to reverse
Certainly not politically
We will build a great wall along the southern border
And Mexico will pay for the wall
It’s one of the pledges that launched Trump’s campaign...
...and helped win him the White House
So how much impact has Trump had on immigration?
And so Mexico has not paid for the wall...
...and he has not built much new wall
But the wall on the southern border is real...
...and he has taken funds from the Defence Department to pay for it
He has also changed the asylum system
He has made it much harder for people fleeing persecution...
...to claim asylum at the southern border
I think last year, for the first time...
...Canada overtook the United States...
...as the country that settles the most refugees
Trump’s administration slashed the number of refugee admissions...
...from 108,000 by the end of 2016, to 24,000 by the end of 2019
Under Trump the number of migrants in detention centres...
...has increased
The tone and intention of his policies...
...has been clear and unwavering
Children and adults are seen huddled together in the building...
...that’s divided up into chain-link fencing...
...that looks like a cage
It was a statement that immigration...
...was something that was not desirable
And that has been the main focus of his presidency
Many of the policies that grabbed the headlines...
...were enacted by executive orders
Signed by the president...
...without needing to be passed through Congress
This is border security...
...immigration enforcement and improvements
Very important, we’ve been talking about this right from the beginning
Which means, in theory...
...they could be reversed by the same process
That may be true as a technical matter...
...but the extent to which he has...
...changed America’s stance on immigration...
...the extent to which he has turned the Republican Party away...
...from the long-standing bipartisan consensus...
...that we are a nation of immigrants...
...and that’s a source of strength and pride...
...can’t be so easily undone
Also, the sheer number of changes he’s made...
...is going to be really hard for a Biden administration...
...if indeed that’s what we have...
...to contend with because it’s going to be coming into office...
...and having to deal with a depressed economy...
...with a pandemic with, probably calls for government reform
There’s just a limited amount of political capital
So Obama’s talking about all of this with global warming
A lot of it’s a hoax. It’s a hoax, a lot of it
Trump announced America would withdraw...
...from the Paris climate agreement
Though other countries have sought to move away...
...from fossil fuels...
...Trump set about reigniting America’s oil, natural gas and coal industries
The Environmental Protection Agency...
...and the Department of the Interior...
...have really been firing on all cylinders in terms of removing regulations...
...on coal plants, not only, but also methane...
...pipelines and exploration of wilderness
The cumulative effect that there’s, you know...
...some people have measured that this would...
...increase carbon-dioxide emissions roughly by 3% in a year over time...
...which is substantial
It’s at a time when, you know...
...you want America to be going in the opposite direction...
...especially because you want other countries...
...to feel obliged to also follow in that direction
In total, Trump has reversed 79 environmental rules...
...including the Clean Power Plan...
...which had set limits on carbon emissions from electricity plants...
...replacing it with a more lenient rule
Many of the rollbacks are facing legal challenges...
...by states and environmental groups
But these might fail
The thing that’s tricky about this...
...if Trump were to be elected and litigation continues...
...then there’s a chance that some of Trump’s changes...
...would become permanent and perhaps more damaging than that...
...the Supreme Court could rule to limit the EPA’s authority...
...to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions
So the Environmental Protection Agency...
...which serves under the president...
...would be limited under all future presidents...
...even a Democratic one from having...
...really bold environmental regulations
You know when I got in, we had over 100 federal judges...
...that weren’t appointed
It was like a big beautiful present to all of us
Trump has appointed 217 federal judges...
...including 161 to district courts...
...53 to courts of appeal...
...and three to the Supreme Court
It is my honour to nominate...
...Amy Coney Barrett
In all, Trump has appointed more than a quarter of the judiciary
He’s moved faster than any president in their first term for 40 years
The appointment or elevation of so many conservative judges...
...is already reshaping American law
Many will sit for life, so the impact – not least in limiting the scale...
...and scope of government legislation...
...could be felt for decades to come
Probably most pronounced are going to be at the Supreme Court
There’s this sort of long-standing worry that Roe versus Wade...
...which is the Supreme Court case that gave women...
...a constitutional right to an abortion...
...will be limited even further
Some people think it might even be repealed entirely
There's another challenge to the Affordable Care Act...
...up before them on November 10th
There’s also a lot of fear about things happening...
...along any of these dimensions that could hamper...
...a sort of subsequent Democratic administration...
...which is likely to try and use the machinery...
...of the administrative state to sort of achieve its policy ambitions
And the idea is that a very sort of Trump-heavy...
...Supreme Court and Trump-heavy courts generally...
...are just going to limit that quite a lot
Perhaps Trump’s most enduring legacy will go far beyond policy
You report fake news
You are the enemy of the people
Four years of lies and bullying...
...have enflamed political discourse in America
Partisanship and polarisation have been increasing...
...for many decades before Trump came onto the scene
You can say that Trump is sort of a symptom of that polarisation...
...but that he’s also accelerated it in some ways
Obama was seen as hugely divisive
Trump is seen as divisive
The difference is that Barack Obama...
...made conscious efforts to reach out to people...
...who disagreed with him
Donald Trump has not done that
And so even to the extent that every president is divisive...
...he has revelled in the divisiveness...
...in a way that past presidents have not
I’d like to punch him in the face I’ll tell you
So if you look at...
...measures of about how Republicans feel about Democrats...
...and Democrats feel about Republicans
You look at whether people talk about the other party as evil...
...or immoral or all these sorts of extreme measures
They all go up during the Trump administration
A recent survey found that one in five Americans...
...believed violence could be justified to some extent...
...if the other party wins the impending election
But America isn’t just fractured along political lines
And you see that the Republican Party increasingly...
...become a party of white identity
If you identify as having racially conservative views...
...on African-Americans you’re much more likely...
...to become a Republican now than ever before
Trump has just accelerated the polarisation along these identity lines
And even if he loses, it will still be the case
If he wins, obviously...
...we have another four years to assess his legacy
If he loses, I think that he exposed...
...and invigorated a part of American culture...
...that some had ignored in the past
And I don’t think that that’s going away