TRUMP’S SUCCESS: An Alternative View
By Nick Hubble, Editor, Southbank Investment Daily
I spent a lot of 2017 and 2018 writing about how Trump seems to have a strange ability to be right in the end, even when he couldn’t possible have known he would be right. The textbook case was when Trump tweeted about chaos in Sweden when there wasn’t any. Shortly after the ridicule descended upon him, chaos did break out on the streets of Malmo.
My point is that this sort of thing keeps happening for President Trump with a frightening consistency and frequency. Picking a fight with North Korea led to criticism of Trump’s foreign policy savvy and predictions of World War 3. Instead we got de-escalation and a weird bro-mance.
The much maligned Trump topic is in your inbox today because another example of his odd invulnerability just played out in the news. Not that it’s being portrayed in this way…
Trump recently ordered a drone strike in Iraq. The haters went wild.
Now I’m not sure what’s controversial about killing the leader of a group that was legally designated a terrorist group by the US government in 2007. But cue the headlines of just how horrifically mistaken it was:
“Donald Trump has just blown up his goal of isolating Iran”, claimed the Spectator.
“By killing Qassem Suleimani, Trump has achieved the impossible: uniting Iran”, according to the Guardian.
“His death has already spurred anti-American sentiment across the Middle East. It has unified Iran’s divided society,” claimed the New Yorker.
As always, precisely the opposite eventually happened. Trump unified his allies and triggered anti-government protests in Iran. In ways that were both foreseeable and not foreseeable.
Over the weekend there were protests against the government inside Iran, which were explicitly pro US and Israel and anti Suleimani. Germany came out in support of the drone strike. And there was international acknowledgement that the deal on Iran’s nuclear ambitions has failed.
Not only did Trump expose the Iranian government, leading to anti-government protests, he united Western governments against the Iran nuclear deal he’d criticised for so long – something else he was lambasted for.
Trump even scored a win on his impeachment drama thanks to the drone strike. The US’s allies in Australia and the UK were miffed they didn’t get a warning about the attack. They should’ve kept quiet because they’ve just been caught trying to get Trump impeached by helping to produce the Steele dossier upon which the impeachment is partly based. Trump has highlighted that the US’s allies hate him so much, they’re a security risk!
Trump’s attack got all the headlines, but his policy pales in comparison to Barack Obama’s drone strikes. For every criticism of Trump killing people using drones, Obama should’ve received more.
A similar thing happened on immigration detention over the past few years – Trump’s policy got plenty of headlines, but it pales in comparison to Obama’s. The media keeps getting caught out by this. Their pictures of children being separated from parents and sleeping in cages were often from the Obama years…
On trade deals, Trump keeps making progress where none consider it possible, using methods everyone ridicules. But the deals are rolling in steadily. His tactic of threatening people with a taste of their own medicine is working.
Abandoning the Iran nuclear deal is now an example of Trump’s foreign policy success. The recent drone strike led to Iran abandoning the deal too. This leaves Iran isolated because they’ve abandoned the nuclear deal which only Trump’s critics clung to. Now he’s got his way on that too.
Like much of the world, I’ve been waiting for something to go badly wrong for Trump. But he seems to be going from strength to strength if you measure how the dust settles after each controversy. Sure, the controversy in the meantime suggests there’s chaos. But he seems to be the one benefiting from the outcome each time. His critics only have the controversy to point to, not the consequences.
The fact that Trump continues to supply the controversy hides this. But imagine if he stopped. If he made no new blunders going into the election season. If the focus was on his track record of the past years, which is excellent.
It’s getting to the point where attempts to take down Trump have been so common and failed so badly that he seems invincible. Which is nice going into an election in a country where people vote in order to feel like they belong to a winning team.
Is there an investment angle on all this? Well, the US stockmarket has performed incredibly well under Trump. As he often reminds us. And especially so compared to other countries’ markets.
Can you imagine if we’d published a “Buy Trump” newsletter issue over at The Fleet Street Letter Monthly Alert a few years ago? It would’ve gone down like a bag of nails. But it would’ve worked very well.
At this point you’re probably thinking the Trump rally has come and gone by now. Or should we call it a Trump bubble?
But what if we get four more years of Trump doing brash things, followed by criticism, followed by him being vindicated? What if he continues to goose the stockmarket in the US and his foreign policy continues to log successes?
The inverse scenario is interesting too. If he’s brought down, leading to an economic and financial crisis as the Trump bubble pops, it’ll be time to assign the blame…
Or you could look at it another way. Who will replace Trump? Will he or she be able to keep financial markets in the US roaring? Unlikely…
But I think a bet on the Trump boom continuing is very promising.
Nick Hubble
Editor, Southbank Investment Daily