page_title: Donald Trump
section_title: Economy and trade
hierarchical_section_title: Donald Trump / Presidency / Domestic policy / Economy and trade
caption_attribution_description: President Donald Trump delivers remarks on Wednesday, March 15, 2017, at the American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti, Michigan. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
context_page_description: Donald John Trump is the 45th and current president of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.
  Trump was born and raised in Queens, a borough of New York City. He attended Fordham University for two years and received a bachelor's degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He became president of his father's real-estate business in 1971, renamed it The Trump Organization, and expanded its operations to building or renovating skyscrapers, hotels, casinos, and golf courses. Trump later started various side ventures, mostly by licensing his name. He bought the Miss Universe brand of beauty pageants in 1996 and sold it in 2015. Trump and his businesses have been involved in more than 4,000 state and federal legal actions, including six bankruptcies. He produced and hosted The Apprentice, a reality television series, from 2003 to 2015. As of April 2020, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $2.1 billion.
  Trump's political positions have been described as populist, protectionist, and nationalist.
context_section_description: The economic expansion that began in June 2009 continued through Trump's first three years in office. This ended in February 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a recession. Throughout his presidency, Trump has repeatedly and falsely characterized the economy as the best in American history (at least four U.S. presidents have presided over better economies).
  In December 2017, Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which permanently cut the corporate tax rate to 21 percent, temporarily lowered personal tax brackets until 2025, increased child tax credit, doubled the estate tax exemption to $11.2 million, and limited the state and local tax deduction to $10,000.
  Trump is a skeptic of multilateral trade deals, as he believes they indirectly incentivize unfair trade practices that then tend to go unpoliced. He favors bilateral trade deals, as they allow one party to pull out if the other party is believed to be behaving unfairly. Trump favors neutral or positive balances of trade over negative balances of trade, also known as a "trade deficit". Trump adopted his current skeptical views toward trade liberalization in the 1980s, and he sharply criticized NAFTA during the Republican primary campaign in 2015. He withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and launched a trade war with China by sharply increasing tariffs on 818 categories (worth $50 billion) of Chinese goods imported into the U.S. On several occasions, Trump has said incorrectly that these import tariffs are paid by China into the U.S. Treasury.
  Despite a campaign promise to eliminate the national debt in eight years, Trump as president has approved large increases in government spending, as well as the 2017 tax cut. As a result, the American government's budget deficit has increased by almost 50%, to nearly $1 trillion in 2019. In 2016, the year before Trump took office, the U.S. national debt was around $19 trillion; by mid-2020, it had increased to $26 trillion under the Trump administration.
  In April 2020, the official unemployment rate shot up to 14.7% due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was an underestimation of the actual unemployment rate, but still was the highest level of unemployment since 1939.
caption: Trump speaks to automobile workers in Michigan, March 2017.
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