Donald Trump has a plan for a winning economic message in 2018: take credit for the economy he inherited from President Barack Obama, and which he routinely dumped on during his presidential campaign.
“The Stock Market is setting record after record and unemployment is at a 17 year low. So many things accomplished by the Trump Administration, perhaps more than any other President in first year. Sadly, will never be reported correctly by the Fake News Media!,” Trump tweeted two days before Christmas, citing a trend in employment gains that began in 2009 when joblessness peaked at 10 percent.
The trend has been remarkably consistent for the past eight years. And just one year ago, Trump called the jobless rate “totally fiction.” In February 2016 he suggested the real unemployment rate was as high as 42 percent.
Sure, Trump has managed to excite some businesses by giving them tax cuts and free rein to hurt workers, consumers, and the environment.
But hard economic data on growth, job creation and wages look very similar to the last several years under Obama. The pace of job growth actually slowed slightly to 174,000 per month in 2017 through November, compared with 187,000 per month in Obama’s final year.
Even Trump’s stock market performance is similar to or trails Obama’s. In the first 11 months of Obama’s presidency, the Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 37 percent. It rose 18 percent under Trump. The Dow rose 30 percent in Obama’s first 11 months to Trump’s 24 percent.
Credit to Politico’s Ben White and Nancy Cook for reporting the “hard economic data” there, and given that Trump is clearly going to make the economy central to his message—and his lies—in 2018, we had all better prepare to do the same, from social media to the dinner table. Donald Trump has not changed the economic trends one bit. This is the Obama economy (for good or ill) until the trajectory shifts (for good or ill).