RANKING: 01

2017 RANKING: 05

In the weeks before this fall’s midterm elections, Donald Trump crisscrossed the country in support of Republican congressional and gubernatorial candidates. The themes he used to motivate GOP voters were pretty alarming. An immigrant horde replete with hardened criminals and “Middle Easterners” was marching toward our southern border; Democrats aimed to steal the election by perpetuating widespread voter fraud; the Democrats had also turned into an “angry left-wing mob” determined to promote socialist policies while simultaneously taking away Americans’ health insurance. None of this is what you could call “true,” and as it turned out, it wasn’t effective either, as the Democrats picked up 39 seats in the House and won the popular vote by eight percentage points.

Numerous commentators have already debated the ethics of such appeals, but there’s another point to make about Trump’s approach: He could have campaigned on a positive message. He had the material. The president could have gone to American voters and said, “When I was running for office, I made promises to this country—and to the world—about what I would do as president, and I have kept those promises. The economy is strong, unemployment is down, economic growth is up, your taxes are lower. Happy days are here again—and if you want them to stick around, vote for the people who support my agenda.”

That argument would also have prompted debate—everything does, these days—but it is certainly as viable a campaign proposition as many that are currently made, and has the benefit of being true, unlike the stuff and nonsense that Trump did campaign on.

In no area is this more the case than finance. Trump promised voters a tax cut. In January 2018, they got one. (Some folks more than others, but still.) He promised to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—it was “an attack on America’s business” that will “lead to even greater unemployment,” he tweeted in 2015—and he did. He promised to renegotiate NAFTA, and he did, embarrassing Canada by threatening to omit that country from a deal and forcing the Canadians to scramble back to the negotiating table. He vowed to fight Chinese protectionism, and by applying about $500 billion worth of tariffs to various Chinese goods, he has. He promised to crack down on both legal and illegal immigration. He’s certainly done the former, and no one could deny that he is passionately trying to execute on the latter. He appointed a new Fed chair and also won the successful nomination of two conservative Supreme Court justices, who will have a profound impact on the regulation of American business for decades to come.

As is typically the case with Trump, there are elements of uncertainty and hyperbole to all of this. The U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal—it’s called the USMCA—is basically NAFTA with a few tweaks. Trump is softening the impact of the tariffs with a $16 billion giveaway to U.S. farmers. He’s attacked Jerome Powell, his new Fed chair, saying that “he looks like he’s happy raising interest rates.” The tax cut has had such a profound impact on tax collections, it’s adding about $100 billion a year to the federal budget deficit with no end in sight.

Trump fans and critics can argue the pros and cons of these moves. What isn’t in doubt is that Donald Trump is having an enormous impact on the American and global economies. He is forcing Chinese president Xi Jinping to deal with the reality of tariffs and the threat of more; he made Canada’s Justin Trudeau bend his country’s collective knee for fear of being excluded from a North American trade deal; he has alternately embraced and rebuffed the EU. When on the campaign trail he started talking up the idea of a middle-class tax cut, members of the administration and Republicans in Congress scrambled to concoct one.

The consequences of Trump’s unpredictable behavior—many economists fear that Trump’s moves are actually harmful to economic growth—haven’t seemed to matter too much because they come against a backdrop of a booming economy, low unemployment and, until recently, a steadily rising stock market.

The question for Donald Trump is, what happens if the good times stop rolling? What will you do then?