Koon Yew Yin 9 May 2020
Trump is so desperate to win re-election in November and to avoid the blame for the U.S.’s COVID-19 disaster, he is going all out on China-bashing. As soon as Trump became US President, he declared a trade war with China because of US trade deficit with China.
In 2019, the U.S. trade deficit was $616.8 billion according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census. 1The U.S. imported $3.12 trillion of goods and services while exporting $2.5 trillion. The deficit is lower than in 2018 when it was $627.7 billion.
The fundamental cause of a trade deficit is an imbalance between a country’s savings and investment rates. The reason for the deficit can be boiled down to the United States as a whole spending more money than it makes, which results in a current account deficit.
Trump used the same strategy in 2016 which up-set Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. China was among Trump’s favourite scapegoats for why America had lost its competitiveness. That is why he is using the same strategy of bashing China.
Currently US has the greatest number, 1.32 million confirmed cases in the world and 78,200 deaths from Covid 19 and both these figures are increasing at an alarming rate. As a result, the new applications brought the total number of jobless claims since mid-March to 33.3 million- or about 20% of the US workforce. That means 1 in 5 people is jobless.
The number of new claims reported each week by the Department of Labour has subsided since hitting a peak of 6.9 million in March. But they remain extraordinarily high and the number of people collecting benefits has continued to rise, despite recent moves to start re-opening in some parts of the country. Since Covid 19 pandemic will continue for another 1 or more years, some experts predicted that the number of jobless claims will be the worst in history and a US recession is inevitable.
To avoid a recession, Trump does not implement the lockdown policy which has been a proven system to prevent the spreading of the virus. He does not even believe in wearing a face mask. It is so ridiculous to see Trump without a face mask while visiting the Arizona mask factory recently.
Trump is a quack apothecary
Unfortunately, Trump does not know what to do. He even suggested injecting disinfectant or using powerful lights to treat COVID-19 patients. That is why the former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd called him a “quack apothecary”.
Since Trump cannot resolved the Covid 19 problem and the huge unemployment claims, he thought bashing China would distract voters so that he can win the coming November election.
I do not think the American people are so stupid to re-elect Trump as President. I consider Trump is a moron and he should be recorded as the worst President in the US history.
