This is a great piece by Mark Penn. Penn’s non-partisan, rational analysis of the current political landscape is the best I’ve read.
Mark Penn:
“…The Harvard Caps/Harris Poll this month show two rather remarkable figures on President Trump. On the one hand, 57 percent approve of the job that he is doing on the economy, even before the upbeat jobs numbers on Friday, yet when asked if they personally like Trump, only 27 percent said “yes” in a remarkable divergence between policy and personality that will play itself out in the final midterm vote tallies.
When working for President Clinton, we developed the theory of a Saturday night Clinton and an Oval Office Clinton. It was the Saturday night side of him that caused all the trouble. Today there is obviously an economic Trump, more knowledgeable than any recent president about what makes the market tick, and a Twitter Trump, who throws verbal bombs that explode daily in the public square, dragging down his image.
Of course, there is an entire complex of billionaires, partisans, and some in the media devoted to bringing down Trump. So, in fairness, it is not all him, though he seems to revel in the combat that holds him back. It is important to remember that George Bush, the guy everyone wanted to have a beer with, sank down to the 20s in his job approval and was labeled a war criminal and an idiot, shunned even at the Republican Party convention. Almost no one in politics today has a net positive image, and both Trump and Hillary Clinton are viewed rather harshly, almost unchanged, and possibly even worse than during the campaign.
Objectively, the economic Trump has racked up surprising results in a short time, adding more than 5 million jobs after a long expansion that started under President Obama but had stalled. Wages are rising and millions have gone back to the labor force, and an expanded base of workers has a multiplier effect of expanding the consumer and tax base of the country. Trump promised to bring back the coal industry and he did.
Trump even renegotiated NAFTA, and most observers laughed at the idea that he could use threats of tariffs as negotiating chits to get results for American workers who had been abandoned by previous presidents. Obama scoffed at bringing back manufacturing jobs to America as a fantasy, yet hundreds of thousands of such jobs have returned.
Trump also deployed a new kind of economic warfare. When the Turkish government refused to hand over a political prisoner, he imposed sanctions that wrecked the Turkish currency. It took only a few months for the Turkish prime minister to rethink his relationship with the United States and send back Pastor Andrew Brunson. The Chinese first laughed at the demands by Trump to stop stealing our intellectual property. Several hundred billions of tariffs later, and a nearly 30 percent decline in the value of Chinese assets, and Beijing is ready to come to the table…”
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/414880-the-paradox-of-trump-and-midterms