Donald Trump is good at certain things. (Please take a deep breath and don’t throw your mouse or laptop at the wall.) I have not come to praise Mr. Lost The Popular Vote By 2.9 Million. But the truth is the truth—even if the truth is something Trump wouldn’t recognize if it landed right on the dyed bird’s nest that covers his dome. In any case, we must acknowledge that the man has demonstrated the ability to shape the media narrative for his own nefarious purposes.
For example, when the term “fake news” first gained widespread usage during the 2016 campaign, it most often referred to anti-Hillary, pro-Trump stories planted by non-journalists on social media. Trump, however, has over the past year co-opted the term successfully enough so that, for many, it now primarily refers to mainstream journalists’ supposed anti-Trump bias. Similarly, he has sought to control the narrative about the strong performance of the American economy, and last week’s passage of the rich man’s tax cut is going to be a crucial pivot point in that narrative. The mainstream media and the American people simply cannot allow him to control it the way he has controlled the narrative on fake news.
Throughout his time in the White House, Trump has been obsessed with denigrating the accomplishments of Barack Obama (Think: “Obamacare is imploding”—it isn’t, but who knows what will happen next year as a result of Trump’s repeal of the individual mandate and other steps taken to sabotage the health care law).
Washington Post fact-checker Nicole Lewis offered a detailed comparison of the economy under Trump thus far and Obama. There’s far too much detail to go into here, but here are some highlights. First, the stock market growth in Trump’s first 10 months doesn’t look nearly as impressive when you learn that it is no better than the market’s performance in peer countries like the UK, Germany, and Japan. This isn’t a Trump bull market, it’s a global one. By comparison, under Obama the U.S. stock market, as measured by the S&P 500, not only tripled over eight years, it significantly outperformed the markets in those same peer countries.
Job growth under Trump lags behind job growth under Obama (in a comparable time period, i.e., February through November) in each of the previous four years, and five out of the last seven years of the Obama presidency. And while we’re on the topic of media narrative, Trump now touts the big drop of about one-half of 1 percent in the unemployment rate since he took office, but while Obama was president he denigratedthe unemployment rate as “nonsense.” That’s not surprising given that it fell almost five points during the final five years of the Obama presidency.
Overall, the economy under Trump thus far looks no better by most measures than the economy in the last years under Obama. Furthermore, whereas Trump inherited the strong Obama economy, Obama inherited the Great Recession from George W. Bush—the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. That crash followed years of Republican control of Congress and a round of tax cuts whose benefits flowed mostly to the wealthy (sound familiar?). Until the passage of the Trump tax scheme, there were no significant changes to the economic policies put in place during the Obama presidency—policies that brought our economy out of the Great Recession and which have given us the longest lasting period of job growth in our history.
Trump’s comments above about his tax scheme and “rocket fuel” make clear that he will go even further than he has so far in claiming credit for anything good happening in the economy. He and his right-wing minions have in fact begun doing so. Here’s a headline from the Conservative Review: “The Trump tax cuts are ALREADY raising wages” (all-caps makes it much more convincing, doesn’t it?). Don’t buy it. As Conor Sen at Bloomberg explained, the rich man’s tax cut is merely the “excuse to raise wages. The tight labor market is the real reason.” And of course the tight labor market reflects years of a strong economy bequeathed to us by none other than President Barack Obama. Don’t let Donald Trump steal the credit.
More: Obama Policies Fueled Our Economic Boom. Don’t Let Trump And His Rich Man’s Tax Cut Steal The Credit
Trump continues riding President Obama's coattails and trying to steal his thunder. President Obama gave us a stable and sustainable economy; whereas, Trump is trying to give us a rocket ship economy that may propel us into another Great Depression. The current economy does not need deregulation and tax cuts for stimulation.
