Trump’s potential to be yuuuuge!

Photo © 2016 Paul L. Gleiser

Listen To You Tell Me Texas Friday 6/10/16

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Say whatever you want pro or con about Donald Trump. Lord knows there is plenty of material.

For me, it’s his penchant for airing his personal grievances and reflexively punching back at every little slight that makes me cringe. Now that he’s the nominee, he needs to understand that there are some fights that are beneath his station.

For all his faults, however, I am confident that we can say this: If elected, Donald Trump will end the war on business being waged by Barack Obama.

Trump will correctly point out that Obama has presided over the longest period of sub-par economic growth since the Great Depression. He will correctly connect that fact to the fact that Obama has been the most anti-business president since…well I don’t know, since ever.

It is clear from what Obama says on purpose and from what he lets slip that he doesn’t respect entrepreneurs and doesn’t much care for free enterprise. Obama believes in the state. For Barack Obama, it is government that makes enterprise possible, not the other way around.

In this regard, Donald Trump could not be more different. According to his 100-plus page financial disclosure statement, Donald Trump operates 185 income-producing companies. No one has to explain to Donald Trump that high taxes and suffocating regulations stifle business investment. He also fully understands that those burdens fall disproportionally upon small business owners.

Trump understands that Hillary Clinton’s support for high corporate tax rates, federally-mandated gender and racial preferences, more federal rules on how employees are paid, higher taxes on fossil fuels and tax policies that seek to coerce businesses to behave in a way deemed suitable by government; all conspire to suppress innovation, business expansion and hiring.

Donald Trump, if he understands anything, understands that for that great American invention called the middle class to thrive, small businesses must thrive.

Again, say what you will about him, it is indisputably true that Donald Trump has bought things, built things, run things and added value to things – all of which created jobs.

When it comes to business, and its indispensible role in growing the middle class, Trump gets it. And because he gets it, he resonates with middle class voters. Thus we see the record turnout in the GOP presidential primary that Trump has attracted.

For her part in all of this, Hillary Clinton is no different than Obama. She hasn’t a clue. She has never in her life done anything or produced anything of economic value. Hillary Clinton got rich giving speeches (read: peddling influence). She never invented, built, made, sold or fixed anything.

Wise heads among the political and pundit class are clucking gravely about – to their minds – the all-but-certain fiascoes, gaffes and embarrassments of a Trump presidency.

Perhaps they will be proved right.

But given things as they now are, if a President Trump were to do nothing but get government off the backs of business owners, and if the economy responded positively as it surely would, Trump’s presidency would be judged a yuuuge success.