For the Trump presidency: The worst of times, the best of times

WHAT a week it has been, ending as it did with the US House of Representatives voting to impeach US President Donald Trump, making him the third president in American history to receive that sanction.

President Trump may have tried to put the best spin he could on his impeachment, telling reporters last week that the vote was "very sad for our country, but it seems to be very good for me politically", calling it "flimsy, pathetic, ridiculous" and predicting that it would produce a political backlash against the Democrats and help him rally his troops as he prepared for the 2020 presidential race.

But even Mr Trump probably recognises that becoming the third US president to be impeached by Congress would leave a permanent stain on his legacy even if the American economy would continue to roar and new nuclear deals would be signed with North Korea and Iran, and perhaps (who knows?) even if the Donald suddenly becomes "presidential" in his last year in office and finds a cure for cancer.

After all, Democratic President Bill Clinton - who had governed during an era of world peace and economic prosperity and who, judging by opinion polls, was considered to be a very popular president - will always be remembered as the second impeached president in American history.

President Trump and his supporters are nevertheless confident that impeachment or no impeachment, against the backdrop of a booming American economy and a changing political zeitgeist, the current White House occupant is in a position to counter successfully the Democratic assault on him.

First to the political zeitgeist: Recall that when the British voters approved of bidding farewell to the European Union (EU) on June 23, 2016, about four months before the US presidential election, many political analysts noted that the same social-political forces that helped produce the Brexit victory - blue-collar workers in the de-industrialised regions of the country - were also backing the populist Republican nationalist running for office, and that Brexit could therefore herald a potential electoral triumph by Candidate Trump.

Those predictions proved to be right, with middle America following middle England in moving the political right. If anything, since then, and in the run-up to last week's British parliamentary election, Brexit and Trumpism seemed to be mashing, at least if you count the number of op-eds suggesting that Conservative leader Boris Johnson and President Trump were political clones and that the electoral fate of one would inevitably have an effect on that of the other.

From that perspective, the "stonking mandate", to quote the Financial Times, that Prime Minister Johnson and the Tories received last week from British voters amounts to bad news for the Democratic Resistance and good news for the Trumpists. It highlighted the failure of the political left in Britain to mobilise the support of working-class voters in the Midlands and northern England - the kind of working class voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan who had helped deliver President Trump the electoral victory in 2016.

There is no doubt that there are important differences between the American and British political systems, and Mr Johnson is not exactly "like" the Donald, in the same way that the Democratic presidential candidate would probably not be "like" the losing Labour Party's PM candidate, Jeremy Corbyn.

But then the Democratic Party - very much like the British Labour Party - has been shifting to the political left in recent years, and has embraced positions on issues like identity politics, multiculturalism and immigration that are anathema to the voters whom the Democrats are hoping to win over next year.

And then there is the growing American economy which seemed to be thriving more than ever this month. And even if you reject the notion of a "Trump Economy" and maintain (as the Democrats and some economists do) that President Trump should not be given credit for the contracting unemployment numbers, increasing consumer demand, and a bullish stock market, you need to recognise that sometimes perception is what counts in politics.

And when it comes to the legislative and policy fronts in Washington, the perception is that the White House has been helping energise the economy while reaching deals with the same Democrats who are trying to impeach him.

Hence President Trump was able to announce last week that he has won Democratic support for a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada and that Congressional negotiators approved a US$1.3 trillion federal spending bill for 2020 that will avert a government shutdown.

Coming after the release of upbeat jobs reports, the news that a passage was created for a re-negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) now known as the USMCA, and that American and Chinese negotiators have reached a truce in the trade battles between the two economies, have all helped provide an uplift to the stock market. Leading economists now conclude that contrary to earlier fears, the American economy will not experience a recession next year, and that it might actually grow by 2 per cent or more on the eve of the presidential election.

Republicans are confident that the good economic news and the perception that President Trump was the driving force behind the rising employment rate and the buoyant mood in Wall Street, not to mention his new role in getting trade deals done, as opposed to undermining them, will counterbalance the negative impact that the impeachment drama may have on his political standing.

It is doubtful, however, that many Democrats are going to switch their votes to Mr Trump even if the Dow Jones rockets to the stratosphere. In fact, most opinion polls suggest that the majority of Democrats reject the notion that he was responsible for the roaring economy while Republicans believe that it was all the president's doing.

But then all Republicans also agree that President Trump should not be impeached and that the future looks bright with their man in the White House, while all Democrats maintain that Mr Trump should be convicted and ousted from office in order to prevent the fall of the American Republic.

In a way, on both sides: "It's the narrative, stupid!"