The middling Trump economy, in 9 charts
The Trump economy is neither soaring nor crashing. Here's how it compares with Biden, Obama, and other prior presidents.
President Trump touts a new golden age in the US economy, while most Americans shake their heads at the excessive hyperbole. While Trump brags, his ratings on the economy have crashed, from a net approval of +12 when he took office to -20 now, according to YouGov.
Yet the economy isn’t in a recession. It’s just muddling along. The Pinpoint Press tracks the Trump economy in six key categories, using data provided by Moody’s Analytics, and compares its performance with that of prior presidents going back to Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. We use data for the same point in each presidency, for apples-to-apples comparisons. So when Trump or his critics say he’s doing better or worse than Joe Biden or Barack Obama or any other president of the last 50 years, we can present the facts.
For simplicity, the following charts compare Trump’s second term with the six prior presidential terms of the 21st century. Graphics guru David Foster hosts an interactive graphic with data on all 13 presidents here.
Overall, Trump ranks 5th out of the last 7 presidents. That’s based on changes in employment, manufacturing employment, inflation, incomes, stock-market performance and GDP from the point each president took office through March of their second year in office.
Obama’s first term earns the top rank mainly because he took office in January 2009, when the Great Recession was at its nadir. The recession ended a few months after Obama took office, and a slow but long recovery began. So the numbers were depressed when Obama took office, and mostly went up from there. You could argue that Obama’s top rank is a quirk of timing, but all presidents are captive to circumstances they can’t entirely control, whether lucky or unlucky.
The next six charts show how Trump compares with the six prior presidents on each of our metrics. On overall job growth, Trump ranks 5th out of 7. Job growth has slowed sharply since Trump took office.
Trump promised a blue-collar revival, but the economy has actually lost manufacturing jobs since Trump took office. The number of manufacturing jobs has been declining since the 1980s, and manufacturing employment has declined under most presidents. There was a gain in blue-collar jobs under Biden, largely because of the end of the Covid pandemic and massive amounts of fiscal and monetary stimulus.
Trump ranks 5th out of 7 on inflation, which is a particular irritant for many Americans because Trump vowed to get the high inflation of the Biden presidency under control. Since higher inflation is worse and lower inflation is better, the inflation numbers in the chart below are inverted so that a higher number is better, as in all the other charts. Trump is doing better than Biden on inflation at the same point in each term, but the war he launched against Iran on February 28 has sent oil and gasoline prices sharply higher. More inflation could be coming as producers pass their own higher costs onto consumers.
The stock market has done well under Trump, but it still ranks only 5th out of 7. The stock market generally rises, and the S&P 500 was up under 6 of the last 7 presidents at the 15-month point. Gains were highest during Obama’s first term, again, because the stock market bottomed out shortly after Obama took office, and then went on a tear.
Income growth under Trump is 3rd best out of 7. That’s fine, but many Americans don’t feel like their purchasing power is improving, because inflation bites.
Trump ranks 2nd out of 7 on GDP growth. Only Biden did better. But Trump also presides over a K-shaped economy in which the wealthy are doing great—and keeping the whole economy afloat—while a much larger group is struggling. That’s why Trump’s approval rating on the economy stinks, even though the economy is doing okay.
Here’s a summary of where Trump stands on each of those six metrics.
And for those who want to go deep, here’s how our index ranks each of the last 13 presidential terms:
