Stock market keeps rising
Millions of Americans are worried that Donald Trump is an ominous figure. Investors have another theory: Donald Trump so permeates the collective consciousness of the country that it is hard to imagine now living in a world without him.
But there is one place where the president seems to be relatively invisible—the U. On Thursday, the Dow has its tenth consecutive record closing in a row, at 20, This is happening, despite the fact that investors seemed terrified of a Trump presidency in the general election campaign. None of this is particularly favorable to multinational corporations.
It is rising now for the same reason it has been rising since , which is that the economy has been sneakily strong. But unemployment and energy prices are low, and wage growth has been decent for two years. Surely some of the growth in the last few months reflects a confidence that American consumers are doing better with each passing quarter.
Second, the stock market might be rising because investors are paying more attention to the people surrounding Trump than to the president, himself. The federal government looks mostly like a conventionally conservative pro-business institution, if you ignore the idiosyncrasies of the Oval Office.
Republicans have promised to cut taxes, particularly for rich Americans and business, and there is broad agreement among the GOP to deregulate the financial and energy industries, including rolling back Dodd-Frank. After occasionally skewering Goldman Sachs in the campaign, the president has surrounded himself with Goldman Sachs veterans, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and the economic adviser Gary Cohn not to mention Steve Bannon.
The stock market rally: Too far, too fast - Feb. 22,
Does it make sense to pretend that Trump is a typical Republican—or that the typical Republicans around him will ultimately govern U. Macroeconomic conditions and global energy markets are mostly outside of their purview.
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Meanwhile the power to tax and spend requires Congress. It's possible that investors are right and that Trump will either do little to change the upward trajectory of the economy or even that his nativist policies pass less likely and boost economic growth less likely still.
Stock markets are international clearinghouses of information, but the investing community is an insular bubble itself, often composed of like-minded people following similar narratives and animal spirits. To oversimplify slightly, you could say that the divide between the apoplectic Main Street and cheery Wall Street is the difference between a Big Trump hypothesis and a Little Trump hypothesis.
The Little Trump hypothesis regards these fears and declares: Rather than rule like a populist demagogue, he will mostly sign bills written by his pro-business staffers and approved by a pro-business Congress. There are extremely smart people who believe in each hypothesis.
But the theories are mutually exclusive. They cannot both be true. No matter what happens in the next few years, a lot of people are already wrong about Donald Trump. To understand how the standoff between Pyongyang and the world became so dire, it helps to go back to the country's founding.
ATLANTA—Around midnight, hours after their candidate conceded he had lost the Most Important Special Election in History, the last remaining supporters of Jon Ossoff took over the stage where he had recently stood. One of them waved a bottle of vodka in the air. Together, they took up the time-honored leftist chant: But after a frenzied two-month runoff campaign between Ossoff and his Republican opponent, Karen Handel, the Democrat wound up with about the same proportion of the vote—48 percent—as Hillary Clinton got here in November.
If this race was a referendum on Trump, the president won it. Castile was licensed to carry a gun. He carefully informed Officer Jeronimo Yanez—exceeding his legal requirements under Minnesota law, though following the advice some gun-rights advocates offer for concealed carriers when stopped by police.
And yet Yanez almost instantly shot him. That aspect made the case a central focus not just for Black Lives Matter activists, but for some gun owners, too. Even setting aside the questionable grounds under which Yanez had pulled Castile over a malfunctioning taillight is a classic pretextual stop police use to question black drivers , Castile had done everything right.
If the party cares about winning, it needs to learn how to appeal to the white working class. The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage.
The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities.
Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.
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But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher.
The presidency was everything. The Republican triumph in an affluent, educated Georgia congressional district showed GOP voters standing by their president. Notwithstanding national polls suggesting about 39 percent approval for the Republican president, a more-or-less standard-issue Republican candidate won by about 4 percentage points in exactly the kind of affluent, educated district supposedly most at risk in the Trump era. But a big win is not the same thing as good news. The special elections of May and June offered Republicans a last chance for a course correction before the election cycle starts in earnest.
A loss in Georgia would have sent a message of caution. The victory discredits that argument, and empowers those who want Trumpism without restraint, starting with the president himself.
The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June , we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it.
If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today. Listen to the audio version of this article: Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles. With the powers in Pyongyang working doggedly toward making this possible—building an ICBM and shrinking a nuke to fit on it—analysts now predict that Kim Jong Un will have the capability before Donald Trump completes one four-year term.
Though given to reckless oaths, Trump is not in this case saying anything that departs significantly from the past half century of futile American policy toward North Korea. Preventing the Kim dynasty from having a nuclear device was an American priority long before Pyongyang exploded its first nuke, in , during the administration of George W.
The Kim regime detonated four more while Barack Obama was in the White House. In the more than four decades since Richard Nixon held office, the U. Over time, leaders lose mental capacities—most notably for reading other people—that were essential to their rise.
If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. But can it cause brain damage? When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5, employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5, a commendably small number.
A new book points to the importance of strong conservative parties—and warns about the consequences when they fall short. Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy is written in fire. It delves deep into long-forgotten electoral histories to emerge with insights of Tocquevillian power, to illuminate not only the past but also the present and future.
The non-rich always outnumber the rich. Democracy enables the many to outvote the few: If the few possess power and wealth, they may respond to this prospect by resisting democracy before it arrives—or sabotaging it afterward. The quality and variety of food in the U. The business seems to be struggling.
But in cities across the U. Summertime in Washington, D.
There are swampy heatwaves in a region where the standard dress-code includes a blazer. And a metro that always seems to be catching fire. The squirrel leaped onto his chest, then quickly bounded off onto a nearby tree. They accounted for 86 percent of rodent-transmitted rabies cases reported to the CDC over a year period ending in the s. You probably know this, but just in case: Humans aren't the only mammals who kill each other.
So how do we stack up to lions, tigers, and bears? Lacey Schwartz grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish household, and never once questioned her whiteness—despite not looking like anyone in her family. Global News Notes Photo Video Events Writers Projects. Magazine Current issue All issues Manage subscription Subscribe.
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Search Search Quick Links James Fallows Ta Nehisi Coates Manage subscription. Search The Atlantic Quick Links James Fallows Ta Nehisi Coates Manage subscription. What on Earth Is Going On With the Stock Market? Most Popular Why Ossoff Lost Molly Ball 7: Franklin Foer Jun 20, It's Trump's Party Now David Frum Latest Video How North Korea Became a Crisis To understand how the standoff between Pyongyang and the world became so dire, it helps to go back to the country's founding Daniel Lombroso , Jackie Lay , and Mark Bowden Jun 19, About the Author Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, labor markets, and the media.
He is the author of the book Hit Makers. Most Popular Presented by. In the past decade, liberals have avoided inconvenient truths about the issue.
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