Trump awarded TIME’s ‘Person of the year’: Yay or Nay?

“They (migrants)  were brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. They’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen

Washington: Trump remained vulgarian and carnival barker, a showman with big flash and little substance for years. He invited disrespect and used it to grab more tabloid headlines.

He may soon command history’s most lethal military which may affect million and the people he has to thank are those he calls “the forgotten,” millions of American voters who get paid by the hour in shoes that will never touch his lavish carpets.

“What amazes a lot of people is that I’m sitting in an apartment the likes of which nobody’s ever seen,” Trump said, smiling.

Call this a fortune but, Trump got the presidential seat even after boasting several videos of sexually assaulting women. Immediately after his victory, hundreds of incidents of harassment, many using his name against women, Muslims, immigrants and racial minorities have reportedly increased across the country.

The Inside System:

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren once said that “the system is rigged” by the banks, and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders got so much traction denouncing the greed of “millionaires and billionaires.” It’s what Marco Rubio meant when he said, “We are losing the American Dream,” and why Jeb Bush claimed everyone has a “right to rise.”

President Barack Obama identified it early, back in 2005.“You know what this new challenge is. You’ve seen it,” he said.

“The fact that when you drive by the old Maytag plant around lunchtime, no one walks out anymore … It’s as if someone changed the rules in the middle of the game and no one bothered to tell these folks, ” said Obama, as a newly elected Senator delivering a commencement speech at tiny Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.

Obama started some pilot projects for manufacturing hubs, increased incomes marginally in the past couple of years and led the nation to recover from a vicious recession, with the federal government directly creating or saving millions of jobs. An unemployment rate that peaked at 10% in October 2009 has been halved to 4.6% now, at the end of his term.

Post Recession:

As American productivity and gross domestic product grew in the first decade of the new century, median wages for all Americans broke away, effectively flatlining. Most Americans making less than the median income, but not so little as to qualify for poverty benefits, suffered income losses of about 5% between 2007 and 2013, according to research by Branko Milanovic, a former World Bank economist.

Trump’s Victory:

In counties where Chinese imports grew between 2002 and 2014, the vote for Trump increased over the vote George W. Bush won in 2000. For every percentage-point increase in imports, the economists found an average 2-point increase for the Republican nominee.

In some places, the shift was even steeper. In Branch County, Michigan, near the Indiana border, about halfway between Detroit and Chicago, a 3% increase in Chinese imports coincided with an 11% bump for Trump over Bush.

The Presidency Vows:

On Dec. 1, just weeks after his victory, Trump traveled to Indiana to announce that United Technologies, the 45th largest company in the country, had agreed to his demands and would retain 800 Carrier manufacturing jobs in Indianapolis. This mostly fulfilled a campaign promise he had made after the factory became national news when video shot inside showed the despair of workers discovering their work was headed to Mexico. “Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences,” he declared at the plant.

US – Russia Relations:

Trump seems to find common cause with Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian President of Russia. For reasons that remain unclear, Trump still refuses to acknowledge the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s agencies were responsible for stealing the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails released on WikiLeaks.

“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they interfered,” Trump says. Asked if he thought the conclusion of America’s spies was politically driven, Trump says, “I think so.” Since the election, Trump has chosen not to consistently make himself available for intelligence briefings, say aides.

He has also so far refused to acknowledge established diplomatic boundaries.

When the Pakistani government gave a President’s call with Trump, India’s leaders reacted with strained nerves. Then Trump accepted a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, intentionally discarding a policy enforced since Jimmy Carter, which prompted an official complaint from China. In response, he sent out a tweet suggesting that such formalities, a bow to Chinese sensibilities, were ridiculous. “Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call,” it read.

Last year, Trump boasted about the great instincts that led him to support forced deportation for all undocumented immigrants and a ban on Muslims from entering the country. He has since backed off both positions. “I mean, I’ve had some bad moments in the campaign,” he says. But then he notes that his poll numbers seemed to rise after several of them, including his insults of Arizona Senator John McCain’s war service.

Trump’s Business Mystery:

Trump claims that his unpredictability will be his strength in office. It certainly has left the political world guessing. He has so far refused to describe how he will separate himself from the conflict of owning a company and employing his children who do regular business with foreigners. On the one hand, he supports a broad policy platform shared by conservatives in Congress: a reduction in regulations, lower taxes, a pull back from the fight against global warming, and a cabinet filled with free-market ideologues. On the other hand, he has signaled that he is willing to break from Republican doctrine. His designated Treasury Secretary, the former Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin, has said Trump would back off his campaign suggestion that he would give large net tax windfalls to the wealthiest. “Any reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions,” Mnuchin said.

Trump has little patience for the organizing principle of the Tea Party: the idea that the federal government must live within its means and lower its debts. Instead, he seems to favor expensive new infrastructure spending and tax cuts as economic stimulus, much like Obama did in 2009.

“Well, sometimes you have to prime the pump,” he says.“Sometimes in order to get jobs going and the country going, because, look, we’re at 1% growth.”

The next day, the third-quarter gross-domestic-product estimates would be released, showing an increase of 3.2%, up from 1.4% earlier in the year.

He also suggests that some stock analysts may have misread his intentions. The value of biotechnology stocks, for example, which enjoy large profit margins under current law, rose 9% in the day after Trump’s election, a rally of relief that the price controls Clinton had proposed would not happen. But Trump says his goal has not wavered. “I’m going to bring down drug prices,” he says. “I don’t like what has happened with drug prices.”

Illegal Migrants:

As for the people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as youths and now have work visas under Obama, Trump did not back off his pledge to end Obama’s executive orders. But he made clear he would like to find some future accommodation for them.

“We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud,” he said.

“They were brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”