Trump America, Part 2- Obama, Economics, and Statistics

Sometimes you can be right, but not be right. You can be factually correct, but no one believes you. You can tell people how something has improved, but if it hasn't where they are, and they know no one seeing the benefits, they deny it's true. We just lived through that. President Obama's Administration is statistically one of the best we've ever seen. He brought us back from the brink of economic collapse, and leaves his successor with a booming job market, shrinking deficit, growing green energy economy, and falling uninsured rate. Markets boomed. Industries were saved. We prospered.

Of course, that's not true in every community in America. Also of course, that's not President Obama's fault. Decades ago, America stopped fighting the push for a global market, one that consolidates good-paying, high-skilled labor into "clusters," which of course end up being the big cities. As America has recovered over the past eight years since the market crash, much of the benefits have gone towards America's wealthiest urban areas- New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, Dallas, Boston, and others- and not much has gone to rural regions who continue to decline. People in rural Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio legitimately complain that they aren't feeling the benefits. They aren't. That's not because they are right and they don't exist though.

President Obama's America is real, and it's doing very well. It's a nation with a rising stock market and falling unemployment, with rising renewable energies and falling deficits. It's a place where 20 million people are getting health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. It's a place where the economic recovery sees building, innovation, and progress, where social progress is moving at an unprecedented rate. More and more students are going to college, and the question is really mostly one of how to make that more affordable. President Obama's America is progressing towards better days ahead.

This is where Donald Trump's America differentiates. In his America, the overwhelming majority of the land mass of America, but a minority of the people, things are not getting better. Heroin addiction is up, but the coal mine is gone. The factory in town is still abandoned, and the rust is overtaking it. The school system is failing. The bills keep going up, but the paychecks don't get bigger. While this sounds like a very rural description, it's important you realize that a lot of this is suburban even. Sometimes you can see the down towns of major cities, but even there the conditions are feeling hopeless.

No statistic makes Northwest Ohio feel like the benefits of recovery are their's, or the same in suburban Detroit, or in Northwest Wisconsin. No statistic makes Johnstown, PA feel like they aren't forgotten. Of course you govern by statistics, and the reality of the economy you have. To not do so would be stupid. It also seems ridiculous when you tell people not reaping the benefits that they are actually in a good situation. They won't and can't believe you.

Hence, Make America Great Again. Trump promised the return of the mines, the factories, and the jobs of the past, or basically the glory day. He promised that he understood that the economy was bad, not like those "out of touch elites" in the big cities. He promised to attend to their needs, and their problems, and stop attending to those other folks, like President Obama was. It was a pure reaction, and one that is incredibly divisive. It is a movement of resources towards a minority of the public that isn't doing well, while more are doing well. That causes deep divisions that go well beyond even the personality of Trump.

It's important to understand the Trump era as a "Two Americas" tale, one where those not benefiting from the nation's prosperity have essentially ripped power from the hands of those who have prospered. Politics has become a hunger-games style battle for resources, and the advantage has shifted. That has consequences that we are all just now understanding.