Donald Trump will once again benefit from inheriting a fairly robust economy. Now the question is what he is going to do with it... and whether Americans will be able to objectively measure his performance.
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Donald Trump claims that he oversaw the greatest economy in US history, which is false to an almost comical degree. To be fair to him, a few metrics in his first years in office were quite good. However, even before the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the economy, his performance was merely average.
Then again, presidents never start at zero. Some of them are aided by an economy on the upswing while others inherit one that is in decline. In both cases, they often get credit (or blame, respectively) that they do not deserve.
Trump and President Joe Biden are excellent examples of this. In 2017, the Republican took over an economy from Barack Obama that was doing pretty well. Four years later, the country was just recovering from the pandemic, which means there was a lot of opportunity for Biden to “bring back jobs,” which really just meant that businesses were reopening.
Conversely, during the first half of his term, the world was gripped by post-pandemic inflation, which resulted in massive price hikes that, ultimately, were probably the main reason why Trump won.
So, what about his second term?
For one, Trump should be measured by his own claims that he would again make the economy the greatest in history.
Sadly, throughout his first term and during this year’s campaign, not enough people looked at facts and instead listened to his boasts. It would be nice if, this time around, voters actually tried to judge his performance based on reality.
However, Trump will also be compared to Joe Biden’s record. And, at least when it comes to jobs, it will be a tall order to match his historic achievements.
On Friday, the Department of Labor announced that the economy created 256,000 jobs in December, Biden’s last full month in office, and that the unemployment rate dipped to 4.1 percent.
Aided by reversing the job losses from the pandemic, the US economy created 16.6 million jobs since he took office, which is the most ever by any administration. In addition, the average unemployment rate throughout Biden’s term stood at just about 4 percent, which is the lowest in decades.
“Although forecasts were projecting it would take years to achieve a full recovery, we have had the strongest growth and employment creation of any advanced country, brought inflation back down, and achieved the soft landing that few thought was possible,” Biden said on Friday.
“This has been a hard-fought recovery, but we’ve made progress for working families, showing what can be accomplished when we build from the middle out and bottom up,” he added.
With inflation now under control, Trump is once again inheriting a solid economy.
Time will tell what he does with it.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
