Is Trump's election campaign unravelling?

THE US Commerce Department released the figures on July 30 - and the economic news was bad: gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the goods and services produced in the US, grew at an annual rate of just 1.2 per cent in the second quarter.

US economic growth has been stagnating at a 1 per cent pace this year, the weakest start to a year since 2011, while the average rate of 2.1 per cent growth since the end of the Great Recession was the slowest economic expansion since 1949.

All of that pointed to a decline in business investment and raised major concerns about the strength of the American economy, just a few days after President Barack Obama had hailed the durability of the economic recovery attained during his presidency. He was addressing the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he called on Americans to elect his former secretary of state Hillary Clinton as his successor in the White House.