This week in Trumponomics

Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the riots in D.C. this week and what it means for the last few days of Trump's presidency.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Let's bring in Rick Newman. We had hoped to talk to you, and we will, about your latest Trumpometer. But got to get your reaction to this. Because there were a couple of Republicans who were going to sign on to this, like Kinzinger, the representative from Illinois. But what do you think? This isn't going to go anywhere, is it?

RICK NEWMAN: My first reaction is, why wait till Monday? Introduce it tonight. I think every member of the House and Senate should vote to impeach and convict President Trump as a way to send the strongest possible signal to criminals, terrorists, and anarchists that we don't tolerate this.

Now is that going to happen? Probably not. I think the House is likely to pass it. And then, the Senate is, once again, in a very awkward position. So I think Mitch McConnell probably could just let the clock run out and not even bring it up to a vote. The question is, will he? I mean, is it possible that Mitch McConnell would try to hold a conviction vote maybe because he really wants to see Trump convicted? Maybe he wants to do it as a way of reasserting the rule of law.

But if he did that, he would be putting all the Republican members of the Senate in this terrible position they were in the last time around, which is they would have to make a vote, either convict him or not convict him, that they have to live with for the rest of their political lives. So I think that is the thing that is standing in the way of this actually getting to a conviction in the Senate. But it's going to be very lively again next week on Capitol Hill.

SEANA SMITH: And Rick, all this obviously a result of what has happened this week. We've been talking to you over the last several weeks over the last couple of years, just about President Trump's performance each week. You're looking at the events of what happened this week, capped off with that jobs report this morning. So how did you grade him?

RICK NEWMAN: Well, Trump's performance this week was so bad that I had to create a new super low category on the Trumpometer, because the old lowest category, sad, is not bad enough. So the lowest category now is deplorable. And that's the rating the Trumpometer gives to President Trump this week.

Whoops, I got the wrong one. I'm sorry. Here's the deplorable. And I'm sorry that I can't offer everybody some better graphics. But, you know, it's been a whiz-bang of a week.

You know, do the riots that he incited at the Capitol affect the economy directly? No, not really. But everything Trump has done complaining about the legitimate election results since he lost on November 3rd, it reflects his total negligence of everything that matters in the country right now and that needs presidential attention and government attention.

So the economy is, obviously, one of them. We saw backsliding in the economy. We've been talking all day about the job report losing 140,000 jobs. We're now going backward again for the first time since May in the number of jobs. And we've now hit new records of more than 4,000 coronavirus deaths per day.

I mean, this is all going in the wrong direction. And President Trump has not done a single thing about the coronavirus recession or about the state of the economy in the two months since he won the election. So that's why we had to create a new lower category for him this week.