To my mind, the defining moments of the first Trump term are:

–reduction of the corporate tax rate to a level in line with other countries’, thereby stemming the shift of domestic company operations abroad,

–Trump choking when he was needed to lead the fight against the pandemic, causing large numbers of deaths that might have been avoided, and

–his attempt to falsify the outcome when he lost the 2020 election and, when that failed, his attempted coup to overthrow the government rather than accept the results.

Not exactly a HOF outing, more like one that puts him deep in the “worst ever” conversation.

Yet, despite this, and what appears to be a severe recent falloff in his cognitive ability, polls say Trump is in a dead heat with Kamala Harris in the current presidential race with less than two weeks to go before Election Day.

There’s more ugly personal stuff–his affinity for Putin and Hitler, the falsification of business records, a sexual assault conviction and the open question of whether he has sold top secret documents he was hiding to the country’s enemies…

Trump’s economic program has two main focuses:

—deportation of workers, recent immigrants in particular, and closing the border. Important social issues aside, the economic issue is this:

GDP growth comes from having more workers and from having workers be more productive. The latter comes from investment in education and from productivity-enhancing devices, like machinery and computer hardware/software. The domestic workforce is growing by a bit above 0.5% yearly from the existing population. That rate is slowing, however, as the overall population ages. New immigrants add another 0.5% or so to that. The overall rate of growth of real GDP is maybe 1.50% or so, with 1% coming from having more workers and 0.5% from productivity gains.

Immigrants make up 18%+ of the workforce, and a much larger number in areas like healthcare. If the US simply closes the border to immigrants, with everything else the same, real GDP growth drops to 1.0%, and begins to slow from there. If the government deports 10% of the existing immigrant workforce, the economy stagnates. If we continue to deport workers, we’re in a continuing recession.

—tariffs. The main thrust of economics over the past century has been the study the Great Depression of the 1930s, in the hope of preventing a recurrence of that terrible economic slump. The overall conclusion is that while tariffs may not have been the trigger for the lengthy meltdown they were certainly a principal cause of the depth and the long duration of the economic contraction.

The most recent US experience with tariffs is the decades-long protection of the domestic auto industry from foreign competition. The principal result became a famous business school case, the plunge in GM’s domestic market share from 50% of the domestic car market to the 15% or so it has now.

Economists’ early guesses about the Trump tariffs is that they will knock 1% off domestic GDP and roughly the same amount of damage to our trading partners’ economies.

The overall result would be a slow, continuous economic contraction in the US, with less serious harm done to the rest of the world. If we go back to the McKinley tariffs of two centuries ago that Trump often cites, Congress was cleared of Republicans in the election following their disastrous implementation. Btw, the tariff increases back then were designed to reduce government income, something that has doubtless escaped the notice of the guy who bet the family fortune on the idea that people would flock to frolic on the NJ beaches in the February snow.