The Trouble With Trump-O-Nomics, Part 1

As we have previously documented, Donald Trump inherited an economy that was tepidly coasting forward on the momentum of the post-crisis cyclical recovery, but he then hammered it into a violent tailspin during his last year in office.

And, yes, the economy-killing Lockdowns and Covid quarantine hysteria were ultimately the Donald’s doing: Coach Trump sent the Fauci Lockdown play out to the field on March 16, 2020 and stuck with his badly errant pandemic call and its principal author for the next 10 months despite the carnage that ensued.

The net result, as we have also seen, is that the US economy grew at just 1.52% per annum during the Donald’s 48 months in the Oval Office, representing just half the 3.04% average growth rate under the previous 11 presidents between 1954 and 2016 and the very worst growth score posted among all of them. And it wasn’t just economic growth which scored at the bottom of the presidential league tables—Trump’s jobs, productivity, savings and investment rates all ended up at or close to the bottom for all presidents since Truman, as well.

So the question recurs: How in the world do the MAGA fans keep insisting that the Trump economy was a time of plentiful economic milk and honey?

As the man said, the transformation of the worst economic record in 66 years into a triumph of policy does require some ‘splainin’. In that regard, economic ignorance and partisan willfulness probably go a long way toward the answer, but there are also some specific factors that shed light on the question as well. These include—

• The GOP’s catechismic assumption that the economy was good just because Trump cut taxes;

• The failure to acknowledge that policy actions have a considerable lag and that much of what presidents implement during their time in the Oval Office shows up on the doorstep of their successor;

• The (deserved) partisan loathing of Joe Biden enables the Trump tenure to be cast in a favorable light retrospectively. Or at least relative to the stagflationary blow-off now underway, much of which Sleepy Joe inherited from Trump, his predecessors and most especially the Fed.

Stated differently, the record during Trump’s tenure was punk and it’s legacy during the subsequent years was worse, as we amplify further below. So the only thing that gives it a glow in hindsight is Joe Biden bashing. But that’s partisan hectoring, not analysis.