President Trump's strategy is on track to sustain a 2019 financial slowdown in the interest of delivering a huge election-year economic boom in 2020.

President Trump's opponents are still failing to understand "Art of the Deal" tactics and how he is applying "Deliver the Goods" as a key political strategy.  As Trump argues:

You can't con people, at least not for long.  You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole.  But if you don't deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.

The first CNN/Pivit poll in July 2015 analyzing the probability of first-time candidate Donald Trump winning the 2016 Republican presidential nomination was 1%, and about zero percent that he could win the presidency against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Despite low odds and Clinton's commanding $1.8-billion campaign war chest to Trump's $300 million in mostly personal funds, Trump won a 304-to-227 Electoral College majority in 2016.  Key to Trump's victory was attracting $5 billion of free media and 80 percent of campaign cash on social media to trumpet a populist revolt against American job-killing open-border immigration and globalist free trade policies.

Trump began his presidency with an 11-percent lower presidential approval disadvantage compared to Barack Obama, at 56 percent to 67 percent.  But by the day of both presidents' second State of the Union address, Trump held a 2-point presidential approval advantage to President Obama, at 48 percent to 46 percent. 

The morning before President Trump's State of the Union address on February 5, Dallas Federal Reserve Bank president Robert Kaplan formally acknowledged the success of Trump's "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017," created a surge in business fixed investment and sizable fiscal stimulus that drove "strong consumer spending" in 2018.

Kaplan credited tax cut–driven business fixed investment momentum for December's U.S. unemployment rate down to 3.9% and the U-6 unemployment rate for chronically underemployed at 7.6 percent — a better level than at any time in the prior economic expansion that topped out in 2006.  Kaplan called a combination of 3% economic growth and core inflation of only 2% as "noteworthy" but warned of wage inflation risk due to the labor market being "extremely tight by historical standards."  But many U.S. economists are leery of Trump's unwillingness to quickly settle the China Trade War, suffering the longest government shutdown on record, the Federal Reserve raising interest rates by 1.75%, single-family housing starts trending down, slowing corporate profit growth, and European Central Bank downgrading growth projections as strong indicators that an economic slowdown may arrive by the second half of 2019.

The Nation magazine spoke for most progressives in June when it argued that the "End Game" for Trump's "imperial presidential" strategy of using tweets, denunciations, and insults to start trade wars and restrict immigration might be a "vicious cycle of aggressive responses" from countries that may cause another Great Depression.

President Trump sought to "Deliver the Goods" in his second State of the Union by proclaiming that his tax, trade, and immigration policies generated 5.3 million new jobs, 157 million Americans working, fastest rising wages in decades, lowest unemployment rate in over half a century, and 5 million Americans lifted off food stamps.

The president must be ecstatic at the free media generated by the 25 progressives running for the Democrat presidential nomination who immediately embraced on TV, radio, and social media their party's response that Trump's tax, trade, and immigration policies have "crushed" the hopes of American families.

Having defined the key 2020 issues at least a year before campaigning gets serious, President Trump can afford to play hardball and even risk an economic slowdown in his battles to deliver voters historic trade and immigration victories.