Donald Trump leaves on Christmas vacation Friday after a series of legislative victories gave him one of his best weeks in office — apart from becoming only the third US president ever impeached.
Surprisingly, for a capital paralyzed by Democratic-Republican gridlock and a presidency mired in scandal, a whole string of major breakthroughs came through at once.
While Democrats and Republicans tussle over how his Senate impeachment trial will unfold, possibly in January, he is fighting to refocus voters’ minds on the brighter side of his presidency ahead of the 2020 election.
And as he packed his bags for a golf holiday through the New Year at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Congress handed him ammunition.
The Senate passed a giant $1.4 trillion government spending deal on Thursday, with Trump expected to add his signature on Friday — hours before the deadline to avoid leaving the federal government with empty coffers.
Also Thursday, the House of Representatives, where the Democratic majority had voted for impeachment a day earlier, finally approved a new US-Canada-Mexico free trade deal, known as USMCA.
That will go the Republican-controlled Senate and on to Trump.
To top it all, Trump is scheduled Friday to sign a $738 billion defense spending bill that includes funding for creation of one of his pet projects — a new branch of the military called Space Force.
– Economic boom, election boost? –
Not bad for a president who some 48 hours ago was being pilloried by Democrats in the House for betraying his oath of office and impeached on two counts.
Republicans exasperated by Trump’s erratic foreign policy, bombastic style and habit of insulting people in public have long wished he’d stick to touting the country’s roaring economy.
Unemployment is rock bottom, the stock market is hitting record highs, and, usually, an incumbent president with a good economy gets a straightforward path to reelection.
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The fact that despite these advantages Trump’s approval rating is stuck in the low 40 percent range and almost half the country backs impeachment shows his inherent weaknesses.
But Trump appears to be making more effort to stay on message since his impeachment.
AFP / Frederic J. BrownDemocrats are lining up to take on President Donald Trump, but he thinks the economy will make him hard to defeatAt a rally on Wednesday in the swing state of Michigan — held right as the House was voting his impeachment — Trump explained that the economy will be his shield against any assault from the eventual Democratic challenger in 2020.
“When I’m on the debate stage with one of these characters and they try and say negative stuff, I’ll just say, ‘Well, here’s the story: In the history of our country, this group is doing the best, and that group is doing the best, and the women are doing the best, and everybody’s doing,'” he told the crowd.
“The whole country is doing the best.”
Democrats, who are yet to pick a candidate from the big field of hopefuls, say Trump’s economic boom and the rosy macro-economic statistics ignore reality for swaths of the country.
At the candidates’ latest debate, Thursday, entrepreneur Andrew Yang said his party should focus on those voters, not the drama in Washington.
“We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment, which unfortunately strikes many Americans like a ballgame where you know what the score is going to be,” he said.
Democrats should “start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place.”
AFP NEWS
