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Good day Mr President, what mischief do you have up your sleeve for us today?

Good day Mr President, what mischief do you have up your sleeve for us today?

Hollywood, academics and mainstream journalists do not like the American President, Mr Donald Trump. The bias against him is so strong and so pervasive that many who express an opinion on the US administration, no longer bother to check facts, or to face reality. Trump bashing is the new American national sport, provided you are part of the luny left.

Yet, it is difficult to argue around the fact that the man is gradually notching up a growing list of remarkable achievements. As an African and an American outsider, I often find it difficult to understand the undercurrents in American politics, much less what motivates the ordinary, average American to be for or against Trump.

However, there is no misunderstanding on my side when it comes to crunching numbers, and these speak overwhelmingly in support of an administration that has for the first time in decades, achieved something meaningful, both for the American economy and for the world. Most important, I believe, the Trump administration is slowly resetting an economy that has become drugged on cheap credit and highly geared instruments, all of which has the potential to lead the rest of the world to an economic precipice, again.

You may like Mr Trump or you may despise him. Whichever way, I don’t think he loses sleep over your opinion. He systematically and persistently forges ahead with his agenda, and that agenda is very easy to follow and to understand. In his own words, his task is to make America great again.

Not only is his agenda transparent, he aggressively pursues it through what appears to be a well-planned process of forming strategic alliances wherever these promote his fundamental cause of turning the American economy away from a complete meltdown and ultimately, starving the already-sowed seeds for outright civil war.

I believe not many people realise how strong the divisions are in the broader American population. It is not a topic that a reader will come upon in any of the large state newspapers or on television channels. But delve into the alternative media, mostly digital, and it reveals the existence of large groups of Americans who hate each other. Casting a spark into that keg will ignite differences which until recently, I perceived to be tolerable.

What I have come to admire most about Mr Trump is his tenacity. If congress or even his own Republicans block him on a certain issue, he lets it go, for the time being, only to resume his agenda later in a somewhat modified format. All the while, it seems he is guided by only one rule: Getting the American economy back on track.

He is straightforward, in your face, in a manner of speaking. Immediately after his election, I could not be bothered less by who runs the farce that we see as the American economy. But as the list of positive developments started growing, even I had to start paying attention to what Mr Trump does.

At this point it is entirely speculative what he will achieve over the next six and a half years but if the first 18 months are any indication, I will not be surprised if he simply continues to surprise us around every corner, in the process gradually saving the financial world from its own folly.

I love it when he says or does something and markets go haywire. The world needs a big deflate, but in a measured and managed way, and the catalyst of late has mostly been the US President.
Nobody knows whether he will be able to reset the global economy but he has certainly made good progress on his own economy.
His opponents whine about interest rates and the lack of resilience in the economy, conveniently forgetting that we are all living on borrowed time. The American economy and the world economy have become so distorted few people care to remind themselves what sound economic values, prudence and trust are.

When I look at his most recent policies to protect American manufacturers, I realise that those are policies we also pursue. It is market distortion, I hear a choir of American academics shout, but not offering a true analysis how hugely distorted it already was before Trump promised to ‘undistort’ it. I see it as market protection, a concept we in Africa are all too familiar with, and one which we will still have to address in our much-vaunted goals to integrate the Southern African Development Community. In the end, as we encounter real-life obstacles, I believe we will find many solutions by looking how the Trump administration handled the issue.

If I were American, there will not be the slightest hesitation in my soul, to vote for Trump for a second term.


Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Times


 

About The Author

Daniel Steinmann

Educated at the University of Pretoria: BA (hons), BD. Postgraduate degrees in Philosophy and Divinity. Publisher and Editor of the Namibia Economist since February 1991. Daniel Steinmann has steered the Economist as editor for the past 32 years. The Economist started as a monthly free-sheet, then moved to a weekly paper edition (1996 to 2016), and on 01 December 2016 to a daily digital newspaper at www.economist.com.na. It is the first Namibian newspaper to go fully digital. He is an authority on macro-economics having established a sound record of budget analysis, strategic planning and assessing the impact of policy formulation. For eight years, he hosted a weekly talk-show on NBC Radio, explaining complex economic concepts to a lay audience in a relaxed, conversational manner. He was a founding member of the Editors' Forum of Namibia. Over the years, he has mentored hundreds of journalism students as interns and as young professional journalists. From time to time he helps economics students, both graduate and post-graduate, to prepare for examinations and moderator reviews. He is the Namibian respondent for the World Economic Survey conducted every quarter for the Ifo Center for Business Cycle Analysis and Surveys at the University of Munich in Germany. Since October 2021, he conducts a weekly talkshow on Radio Energy, again for a lay audience. On 04 September 2022, he was ordained as a Minister of the Dutch Reformed Church of Africa (NHKA). Send comments or enquiries to [email protected]