Can Trump ride a full-throttle economy to get away from Mueller?
Donald Trump’s reelection hinges on which side of the split-screen portrayal of his presidency voters will focus on.
On the left-hand side of the screen, one finds the Mueller report, a detailed 448-page chronicle of an administration run amok. While the special prosecutor did not find evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in the 2016 presidential election, he meticulously laid out the case that Trump had indeed attempted to obstruct justice. Although Mueller said he didn’t think he had the authority to bring charges against a sitting president — a view he may have to explain before the House Judiciary Committee — for those who have actually read his report, including Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, it’s difficult to come away with a lofty opinion of the man in the Oval Office. If anything, Mueller’s tome confirms the central thrust of earlier works by Michael Wolff and Bob Woodward — that Trump has no respect for the law.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren became the first Democrat seeking to succeed Trump in 2020 to make the case that the behavior described in the Mueller report rose to the level of impeachment.
According to an NPR/PBS News Hour/ Marist poll released Wednesday, 53 percent of Americans do not think Congress should begin impeachment proceedings, while 39 percent said it should. Those figures are strikingly similar to views expressed in 1973 about Richard Nixon’s possible impeachment after the Watergate scandal had become daily front-page news. One year later, before his resignation in August 1974, polls showed that more than 70 percent of Americans favored his impeachment.
Just 33 percent of those polled in this week’s NPR/PBS/Marist survey said Mueller’s report cleared Trump of wrongdoing, whereas 58 percent said questions still remained.
And yet, for all those gloomy clouds, on the right-hand side of the screen, the country’s economic outlook is decidedly brighter.
The U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs in April, the 103rd straight month, dating back to President Barack Obama’s first term, of job gains, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, the lowest since 1969.
The only real disappointment in Friday’s figures was in the manufacturing sector, which saw a tepid gain of just 4,000 jobs created.
Still, for Trump, who has declared victory on the economy at nearly every possible opportunity over the past two years, April’s strong jobs figures gave him something else to tout.
Last Friday the Commerce Department announced that the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) grew at a 3.2 percent annualized rate in the first quarter of 2019, another impressive showing.
Indeed, Trump’s approval rating on the economy hit a new high of 56 percent in a CNN poll released Thursday. So why isn’t he a shoo-in for another four-year term?
Perhaps it’s because, according to a Monmouth University poll released Monday, more than half of Americans say that they haven’t benefitted much from the robust economy. That echoes a Gallup poll taken two weeks ago that 49 percent of Americans continue to have negative views of Trump’s signature tax-cut legislation, while 40 percent approve.
Throughout the political tumult of the past year, Trump’s approval ratings have remained remarkably steady. At FiveThirtyEight, his aggregate approval number stands at just 42.3 percent, whereas 52.6 percent disapprove of his job performance.
Voters’ opinions about Trump have hardened, and it remains to be seen whether he can move the needle by shifting attention from Mueller’s findings to the economy.
Although other issues — health care, abortion, climate change and immigration, to name a few — will also bear on whether Trump remains in the White House past Jan. 20, 2021, there is little doubt that our split-screen reality contrasting Russian interference and economic vitality won’t be replaced any time soon.
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