Donald Trump's Inheritance

The Pottery Barn Rule kicks in today.

Photo by Cesar Done on Unsplash

As of noon today, Donald J. Trump will be the president of the United States again. He currently exercises near-total control over the Republican Party, which now commands majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Supreme Court of the United States is dominated by a 6-3 Republican majority that has proven quite willing to bestow Trump near-total immunity over his actions as president. Silicon Valley is falling all over itself to appease Trump, as are other multinational corporations eager to stay on the right side of Trump to avoid government persecution. The purging of the federal bureaucracy has preceded Trump’s inauguration and will continue over the next few months. As for the opposition party, Democrats are dispirited, disorganized, and — dare I say it — in disarray right now. When Ezra Klein writes that, “Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory,” he’s not wrong.

In other words, as of noon on January 20th Donald Trump faces very few constraints preventing him from fulfilling his campaign promises and make America great again…. again. That presumably means a country that is materially and socially superior than it is right now.

So let’s lay down a marker today. Trump has pledged to make the country better off. In other words, he has promised to improve upon the status quo. Which is what, exactly? Because as the New York Times’ Peter Baker noted earlier this month, the United States is currently occupying a pretty great status quo:

By many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.

For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.

Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the Covid-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been.

The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.

“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than prepandemic.”

It’s not just Peter Baker making this argument. According to the latest New York Times/Ipsos poll, 82% of Americans are currently satisfied with the way things are going in their lives today. That’s pretty high! But it jibes with how most analysts are viewing the overall economy. Late last month MSNBC’s Steve Benen noted the wide array of outlets that reached the same conclusion:

The top economist at Goldman Sachs concluded in her latest analysis that the United Sates economy “grew much faster than expected” in 2024. The report came on the heels of Commerce Department data that showed the economy growing at an annualized rate of 3.1% over the summer, exceeding expectations, and up slightly from the 3% growth in the spring….

There’s been no shortage of headlines in recent weeks and months about the strength of the domestic economy. A recent Wall Street Journal analysis described the state of the U.S. economy as “remarkable,” which coincided with a Bloomberg analysis that said, “The nation is experiencing a dream combination of strong growth and low inflation.”

There was more where that came from. A couple of months ago, the New York Times reported that the U.S. job market “is as healthy as it has ever been” — as in, in the history of the United States — and described recent economic growth as “robust.” A few days later, The Washington Post’s Heather Long explained in a column, “We are living through one of the best economic years of many people’s lifetimes.” The same day, Politico described the status quo as “a dream economy.”

The Economist, a leading British publication, also recently described the U.S. economy as “the envy of the world,” adding that the American economy “has left other rich countries in the dust.”

Is the economy perfect? Hardly! Inflation remains slightly higher than the Fed would like. Housing prices remain high; combined with high interest rates, buying a house seems out of reach for too many. After a decade of massive tax cuts, emergency spending, and Biden-era industrial policy, the federal budget deficit and national debt are larger than anyone would like. Some folks are super-obsessed about the stubbornly high trade deficit with China.

Still, even conservative firebrands like Christopher Rufo are acknowledging the strength of the U.S. economy right now. Furthermore, it’s not a bubble that is about to pop. As I noted back in November, this is not empty economic growth: “It does not matter which metric one looks at — economic output, productivity growth, employment, the stock market — the United States outclasses the rest of the world.” The New York Times’ Joseph Talon Smith noted earlier this month, “Predictions of a downturn, once omnipresent, were mostly absent from the year-ahead forecasts that major financial firms typically send around to clients over the holidays.”

So it’s now up to Donald Trump to make sure that the misery index, already at at near-historic lows, does not pop up above seven percent again.

Not everything in politics is material, of course — what about other indicators?