To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump say it, he is inheriting a country ravaged by a desolate hell of crisis, crime, chaos, and economic hardship. “Our country is a disaster and a laughing stock all over the world!” he declared on social media last week.
But by many traditional indicators, the America Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath of office for a second time in two weeks from Monday will be the most newly elected America since George W. Bush. It’s actually in better shape than what the president was bequeathed. Appointed in 2001.
For the first time since the transition to power 24 years ago, no U.S. military will be fighting overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in recent days shows that murders have fallen sharply, the number of illegal immigrants at the southern border is even lower than when Trump left office, and a turbulent stock market has seen its best two years in a quarter century. It shows that you have finished.
Jobs are up, wages are rising, and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Trump’s presidency. The unemployment rate is as low as it was just before the coronavirus pandemic and near record highs. Domestic energy production is increasing like never before.
Manufacturing has the most jobs under any president since Mr. Bush. The number of drug overdose deaths has fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of Biden’s presidency, is closer to normal, although prices are still higher than they were four years ago.
“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is better than ever,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world because it is the only significant economy that is growing faster after the pandemic than before.”
These positive trends may not be enough to sway voters toward Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s election, and the numbers align with how ordinary Americans appear to feel about the state of the country. This reflected the large gap between them. And the United States clearly faces some major challenges that Trump will face if he returns to power.
The terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people in the early hours of New Year’s Day by an American man who claimed to have joined ISIS is a reminder that the Islamic State group that Trump boasts he defeated during his last term remains. It became a thing. It is both a threat and an inspiration to radicalized loners. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are difficult challenges even when U.S. forces are not participating in the fighting.
Thanks in part to Trump and Biden’s coronavirus relief spending, the national debt has ballooned significantly and now accounts for a larger share of the economy than in any previous generation, excluding the period of the pandemic itself. Families continue to struggle with living expenses such as housing, medical care and college tuition. Although gas prices are down from their peak, they are still about 70 cents a gallon higher than they were when Biden took office.
Moreover, Americans have remained politically, ideologically, economically, racially, and culturally divided for many years. While the country may be economically and otherwise healthy, various scholars, studies, and other indicators show that America is struggling to unite around a common view of national identity at home and abroad. It suggests that you are having a hard time.
In fact, many Americans don’t feel the situation in their own lives, don’t trust the statistics, or buy into the dystopian view promoted and expanded upon by Trump, so the country’s is not as successful as the data suggest. Through a fragmented, self-selecting news media and online ecosphere.
A Gallup poll last month found that only 19% of Americans were satisfied with the direction of the country. A separate Gallup poll conducted in September found that 52 percent of Americans say they and their families are worse off than they were four years ago, compared to 1984, 1992, and 2004. , which was higher than the percentage who felt that way in 2012 and the 2020 presidential election year.
Of course, it was in Mr. Trump’s political interest to foster and appeal to such sentiments during last year’s campaign. He was not the first challenger to emphasize the negative in an effort to defeat a sitting president.
When Dwight D. Eisenhower first ran for office in 1952, he despised the current state of the country, infuriating President Harry S. Truman, and when he ran for office in 1960, John F. Kennedy did the same. I decided to do this. There was no “missile gap” with the Soviet Union, but after the victory, in contrast to Eisenhower’s view of its security record, he declared that the United States was in a “moment of greatest danger.”
“It’s a common contrast,” said historian Michael Beschloss, who has written nine books on the American presidency. “Candidates running against a sitting president or a sitting government make it sound like it’s much worse than it really is.”
Still, few people are as radically negative or as resistant to fact-checking as Mr. Trump. He falsely suggested that immigration, crime and inflation were out of control, blamed the New Orleans attack on lax border policies, even though the attacker was a Texas-born American, and went on to say: As recently as Friday, he called the country “a complete mess!”
Still, Trump is returning to the White House with an enviable caliber that any other president would have aspired to on his first day in office. President Ronald Reagan inherited double-digit inflation and an unemployment rate twice that of today. President Barack Obama inherited two foreign wars and an epic financial crisis. Biden inherited a devastating pandemic and resulting economic turmoil.
“He’s on the mend,” said William J. Antholis, director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which studies presidential transitions.
Mr. Antholis compared the situation to the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, who inherited a growing economy and a new post-Cold War order. The country had already begun to recover from the recession during the 1992 election, but many voters still weren’t feeling it and punished President George H.W. Bush.
“Economic fundamentals improved right before the election and continued to move in the right direction after Clinton took office,” Antholis said.
As with the first Mr. Bush team, the disconnect between macro trends and individual perceptions prevented them from convincing voters in last year’s election that the country was doing better than generally thought. This has been stressful for Biden and Harris. . Ignoring statistics and boasting about the success of “Bidenomics” did not resonate with voters who did not share the same view.
“Of course, not everyone is enjoying the economic boom, as many low- and middle-income households are experiencing financial hardship and the nation’s fiscal challenges are increasing,” Zandi said. “But when you look at the economy as a whole, it’s unlikely to do better than it does now with President Trump in office.”
White House press secretary Andrew Bates said the latest reports show Biden’s policies are working, and Republicans have no intention of repealing them after taking control of the president and the House and Senate. He argued that it shouldn’t be asked for.
“President Biden inherited an economy hit by a free fall and a surge in violent crime, the best-performing economy on earth, the lowest violent crime rate in more than 50 years, and the lowest border crossing in more than four years. “I am proud to hand over the passage to my successor,” Bates said.
Trump’s press secretary, Caroline Leavitt, responded, citing the election: “The American people overwhelmingly rebuked the Biden-Harris administration’s abysmal record on Election Day. Communities were left uninspected by the millions who walked across Biden’s open border. Overcrowded with immigrants, real wages, and a decline in trust in law enforcement that cannot even release accurate crime data.”
Trump does not need to share a positive view of the situation for him to benefit from it. When he takes office on January 20th, barring unforeseen circumstances, he will be forced to take immediate action, such as the one Mr. Obama experienced when he needed to bring the economy back from the brink of the Great Depression. We will not face any serious crisis.
In return, Mr. Trump would be given more latitude to pursue his preferred policies, such as mass deportations of illegal immigrants and tariffs on foreign imports. And if past is prologue, he may eventually begin to praise economic conditions and claim policy successes.
Even before he took office, he was already taking credit for the recent rise in stock prices. He has demonstrated skills at self-promotion that Biden lacked, and was able to convince many Americans that the economy was even better during his first term than it actually was.
At the same time, unemployment, crime, border crossing, and even inflation are already so low that it may be difficult for Mr. Trump to significantly improve them. Trump seemed to indirectly acknowledge this in a post-election interview with Time magazine, noting that he may not be able to fulfill his campaign promise to lower food prices. “It’s difficult to bring down a situation once it’s gone up,” he says. “You know, that’s very difficult.”
On the contrary, Mr. Trump faces the risk of the economy moving in the opposite direction. Some experts have warned that tariff-driven trade wars with major economic partners could reignite inflation, for example.
N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University and chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under the second Bush administration, said that when Mr. Bush took office in 2001, the economy was already in a relative position. Even his former boss recalled facing significant challenges as the company was heading into a recession. A gradual recession after the collapse of the dot-com boom.
“There are no similar storm clouds on the horizon right now,” Mankiw said. “That’s certainly fortunate for Mr. Trump. On the other hand, every president has to deal with unexpected shocks to the economy. It remains to be seen what shocks President Trump will have to deal with. No.”
