Trump’s America: the good, the bad and the ugly
While some of the president-elect’s campaign claims have been vague and contradictory, others may turn out to be surprisingly welcome for the US and Asia
The detailed reasons Hillary Clinton missed what should have been a slam dunk, allowing Donald Trump to capture the White House, will be picked over by pundits for months to come. Right now they hardly matter.
Whatever the exact explanation, Trump succeeded in tapping into a current of popular feeling in America’s swing states, while Clinton failed to mobilise sufficient support where she most needed it. The result is that Americans now have as their president-elect an uncouth reality television celebrity of dubious morals and questionable business ethics, whose companies have filed for bankruptcy six times and been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, and whose campaign policy pronouncements, when not completely incoherent, were often vague and contradictory.
Trump’s protectionism threatens to unravel decades of trade liberalisation
In these circumstances, it is hard to chart with any precision what a Trump presidency will mean for the United States, let alone for the rest of the world. However, on some matters of economic and foreign policy, Trump and his advisors have been reasonably consistent, although they have offered little detail. In these areas at least, it is possible to draw up a sketch map of the directions that a Trump administration might take over the next four years.
Most obviously, the success of the Republican party in taking control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House will enable the administration to embark on much-needed tax reforms, which for years have been blocked by Washington’s legislative gridlock. Trump has promised to simplify the insanely complicated US tax code, which he may yet succeed in doing. But in reality tax reform is shorthand for tax cuts, with Trump proposing to lower personal taxes, slash the US corporate tax rate from 35 per cent to just 15 per cent, and offer tax breaks to encourage US corporations to repatriate some US$2.5 trillion in cash held abroad.