Op-Ed: Republicans want to win — and Trump’s now a loser.
President Donald Trump and his closest aides are so desperate to win that they’re willing to do anything to get it, including, of all things, a new round of nuclear threats and a full-scale war with North Korea.
That’s a real problem for Trump and his top advisers.
They’ve made clear for months that they’re willing to deal away the United States’ security for the sake of winning. This approach has helped lead to an unprecedented period of U.S. economic strength in the first year of Trump’s presidency, along with the biggest tax cuts in history, a full-blown tariff war with China and more than 100 new regulations rolling out every day to the American people.
But it’s failed to produce the economic results or the political momentum that Trump and his supporters had hoped for. With unemployment currently at its lowest level in more than 25 years and other job-creation measures such as job openings and the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment growing every month since Trump took office, the president and his closest circle see the economy as the real prize.
“My goal is to make this country great again,” Trump said in an August speech. “And so I’m not interested in anything else. I don’t care about polls. I don’t care about anything but making our country great again.”
But no one is making America great again.
When Trump took office, the economy was experiencing its longest streak of job growth since World War II. The unemployment rate was lower than it had been at any time since 1967. And the economy’s fundamentals were strong. The stock market was at a record level, unemployment was about half the levels of the Great Depression, and the U.S. dollar was trading at the lowest
