USA 2020

It’s early days yet but already US President DonaldTrump and former vice-president Joe Biden are squaring off to go head for next year’s US presidential election.

President Trump is banking on a second term. He’s been campaigning for it ever since he took office.

He has tweeted that two years of his current term were “stollen” (sic) due to the investigation into his 2016 campaign by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Furthermore, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks that Trump will refuse to leave the White House unless the Democrats win by a "big" enough margin in 2020 as he might contest the results and prolong his presidency.

It’s been an incessant flow of campaign stomping by the president; between golfing holidays, highly questionable forays into foreign affairs, inflammatory utterances, controversial domestic policies, personal crises, the Mueller investigation, calls for his impeachment, being seemingly obsessed with erasing any trace of achievement during the Obama presidency…and that wall.

In spite of all that, the US economy is showing considerable growth with record-level employment rates.

President Trump basks in the spotlight and takes credit for it, almost as expected.

And there's no question that the 'Trump factor' has had a positive impact on the profit-pursuit in America's business boardrooms.

But some economists and many Democrats have deep reservations about the sustainability of the current trend in the US economy, and more importantly, are worried about the size of the ballooning national debt.

For the Democrats, once they figure out which one of the twenty and counting declared candidates will challenge him at the polls, they will need to brace for the onslaught of the Trump re-election juggernaut.

Former vice-president Joe Biden, who some tout as the most likely of the Democrats to wade through their field of candidates and face off with Trump, is getting in a few early blows.

In addition to calling the president ‘a clown’, he claims that any economic gains Trump is taking credit for are the result of a foundation laid before by the Obama-Biden administration.

President Trump, not known to shy away from a confrontation, calls 76-years-old Biden ‘ Sleepy Joe’.

Mr Trump who is 72 recently said he feels "young" and "vibrant", adding that "I'm so young I can't believe it" and that he could easily beat Biden (at the polls).

And that’s only in the prospect of a Trump-Biden showdown.

Considering other Democrats in the line-up for the presidential bid, Trump has already labelled Senator Kamala Harris “a nasty wit” over her excoriation of his Attorney General William Barr at the Congressional hearing into the Mueller report.

She is now stepping up the pressure by calling for a probe into whether President Trump himself urged the Attorney General to investigate his opponents.

About his old nemesis 77-year-old Bernie Sanders, the 72 years-old Trump says he “talks a lot and doesn’t get it done” and brushes aside young rising star Beto O’Rourke as soon to be “a thing of the past”.

But it’s the popular, youthful, 36 years old gay candidate Pete Buttigieg who is in a same-sex marriage, that Mr Trump seems to have a watchful eye on.

While he says that Buttigieg might not make it past the primaries, Trump has surprisingly declared that he is “rooting” for him and that he would like to run against the young mayor.

Could it be that he thinks the US might not be ready for a same-sex couple in the White House so Buttigieg might be an easy walkover?

If so, then which does fear most; opposition from a female candidate or another septuagenarian?

Mr Trump is now invoking God, claiming that his belief carried him through "the ordeal" of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

At the same time though, he was firing off tweets in support of individuals banned by Facebook for hate-speech.

The US 2020 presidential election is already shaping up to be quite a show.