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This week in Trumponomics

Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman joins The Final Round to discuss what can be expected from Trump’s second term should he be re-elected in November as well as give this week’s Trumpometer reading.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to "The Final Round." This week, in Trumponomics, we're taking a look at President Trump's agenda, if he were to win a second term. Rick, we've heard from President Trump time and time again. He more so criticizes, I guess it's fair to say, Joe Biden's policies. He's always warning that the alternative is going to be much worse. But what can we expect from President Trump if he does win a second term from a policy perspective?

RICK NEWMAN: Trump himself has not really had much to say about that. He will throw something out at a rally, but he doesn't really have much of a proposal behind it.

So some of the analysts, what they've been trying to do is, instead of looking to Trump's campaign website, look at Republican proposals in Congress or prominent people in the Trump administration and the kind of things they want to see in the next couple of years, and maybe say that that would end up being Trump's agenda so he would basically just adopt some Republican proposals off the shelf.

So the first thing you have to think about-- we've been talking about this every day for the last two months-- is the stimulus plan. What if Trump wins? What does the stimulus plan look like in that case? And I think that if he wins with Republicans retaining control of Congress, I think that's a real disappointment for markets.

Because unlike the $2 trillion plus plan we'd probably get if Biden won with Democrats in control of Congress, Trump is going to be-- he's going to be controlled to some extent by Senate Republicans. And they've indicated they only want a $500 billion plan. So, you know, I don't think the end of the election would change the dynamic much in the Senate. So probably, it means a smaller stimulus plan than we would get otherwise.

And then I think you'd see a lot more of the same of based on what we know from Trump's first term. The one thing we know he can do quite a lot on without Congress is trade. So look for Trump to resume his trade war with China.

That's basically been in a kind of pause for the last several months as we've been in the election. But he did say he wanted a phase two trade deal. We might get to that. Probably more tariffs involved in that if Trump wins.

And then just look for more of the same on restricting immigration, appointing conservative judges, and deregulating. But it's all guesswork, Seana. He hasn't said it himself.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, is this something that we've seen before? Because when you take a look at the past presidential campaigns, I mean, the president-- the candidate, at least, usually is forced or voluntarily does lay out what their plans are. Is this anything that we've seen in the past?

RICK NEWMAN: I think it's safe to say this is a novel approach for an incumbent. I mean, Trump is running as if he's the challenger rather the incumbent-- rather than the incumbent. And he's basically running against Joe Biden's record, which is what the outsider usually does against the incumbent.

And, you know, Joe Biden's record is actually Barack Obama's record. So Donald Trump is an interesting position of basically running against the Obama-Biden presidency that ran from 2008 to 2016. Now Biden's different. He's actually got a different set of proposals than Obama might have had in 2012.

But Trump has been running almost an exclusively negative campaign, which is really unusual. And I think that's for a couple of reasons. Obviously, he does not want to talk about coronavirus. He was going to run on the economy. But all he can do is talk about the economy before the coronavirus.

So the final Trumpometer score, Seana, before election day, it's not a very good one. But it seems to be kind of appropriate for where the economy is-- failing. Failing grade. That's the second lowest.

And look, we have an economy that's still in a big hole. Trump was crowing about that weird GDP number. We had a big improvement, but that was after a huge decline. And we're still behind where we were before coronavirus. So, you know, Trump is behind going into the last few days before the election.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, and Rick, going off of that, is this all reflected in the polls up until this point? Because it seems like, at least, as of a couple of weeks ago, Trump continued to lag in the polls on a lot of these issues that were pretty pressing to the election.

RICK NEWMAN: To my mind, Trump is actually doing better in the polls than you would expect, given that we are either in a deep recession or in the immediate aftermath of a recession. I mean, obviously, there are extenuating factors here with coronavirus. But the nearest scenario you can draw to what we're seeing now is in 1979 when the economy kind of sank in Jimmy Carter's last year. And he got absolutely crushed.

So, you know, presidents just don't win re-election during a recession. I mean, it really does not happen. And yet, polls show that Trump could pull out-- he's close in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania. He's behind, but he's close enough in enough swing states to be hanging in there. So he's-- I think he's actually over performing in the polls, at least, based on what the economy would otherwise tell us.

SEANA SMITH: We'll see. Only four days away at this point. And we'll see what November 3 has in store. But Rick Newman, the last Trumpometer score, failing here, ahead of the election.

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