To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it, he is about to take over a crisis-torn nation, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our country is a disaster, and a laughing stock all over the world!” He announced on social media last week.
But by many conventional measures, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he is sworn in for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than the one inherited by any newly elected president since George W. Bush. He took office in 2001.
For the first time since that shift 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war abroad on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days suggests that homicides have dropped significantly, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Trump left office, and buoyant stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter. century.
Jobs are up, wages are rising, and the economy is growing as quickly as it was during Mr. Trump's presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic and is near its historic best levels. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been.
The manufacturing sector has more jobs than any president since Bush. Deaths from drug overdoses decreased for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices are still higher than they were four years ago.
“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is as good as ever,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. “The US economy is the envy of the rest of the world, because it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly after the pandemic than before the pandemic.”
These positive trends were not enough to push disaffected voters behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election, reflecting a large gap between what the statistics say and what ordinary Americans feel about the state of the country. It is clear that the United States faces some major challenges that will face Mr. Trump when he regains power.
The terrorist attack by an American man who said he had joined ISIS that killed 14 people in New Orleans early on New Year's Day was a reminder that ISIS, which Mr. Trump likes to boast had defeated during his previous term, He's still a threat. A threat and inspiration for extremist lone wolves. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza pose enormous challenges even without the participation of American forces in the fighting there.
Thanks in part to both Trump and Biden's coronavirus relief spending, the national debt has ballooned so much that it now represents a larger share of the economy than it has in generations, unlike during the pandemic itself. Families are still stressed by the costs of living, including housing, health care, and university fees. Although the cost of gasoline is down from its peak, it is still about 70 cents per gallon higher than it was when Biden took office.
Moreover, Americans remain as divided as they have been for many years – politically, ideologically, economically, racially, and culturally. Despite the country's health economically and otherwise, a variety of researchers, surveys and other indicators suggest that America is struggling to unite behind a shared vision of its national identity, both at home and abroad.
In fact, many Americans don't see the country doing as well as the data suggest, either because they don't see it in their own lives, or they don't trust the statistics, or they accept and amplify the dystopian view that Mr. Trump is promoting. Through fragmented choose-your-own news media and the online environmental sphere.
Only 19 percent of Americans were satisfied with the direction the country is heading in a Gallup poll conducted last month. In another Gallup poll conducted in September, 52% of Americans said they and their families were worse off than they were four years ago, a higher percentage than they felt that way in the presidential election years of 1984, 1992, 2004, or 2012. , or 2020.
It was, of course, in Mr. Trump's political interest to encourage and appeal to this sentiment during last year's campaign. He was not the first contender to emphasize the negativity of defeating an incumbent.
Dwight D. underestimated. Eisenhower's condition for the country when he first ran in 1952, angering President Harry S. Truman, only for John F. Kennedy to do the same to him when he ran in 1960. The “missile gap” with the Soviet Union did not exist, and then after winning he declared that America was in an “hour of maximum danger,” in contrast to Eisenhower’s view of his security record.
“That's the contradiction you often find,” said Michael Beschloss, a historian who has written nine books on the American presidency. “Candidates running against incumbent presidents or incumbent governments make it look much worse than it is.”
However, few of them were as extreme in their negative descriptions as Trump, or resistant to fact-checking. He has falsely suggested that immigration, crime and inflation are out of control, attributed the New Orleans incident to lax border policies, even though the attacker was an American born in Texas, and recently described the country as “total chaos.”
Still, Mr. Trump returns to the White House carrying an enviable hand, one that other presidents would have loved very much on their inauguration day. President Ronald Reagan inherited 10% inflation and an unemployment rate twice what it is today. President Barack Obama inherited two foreign wars and an epic financial crisis. Mr. Biden inherited a devastating pandemic and the resulting economic turmoil.
William J. said: Antholis, director of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, who has studied presidential transitions, said of Trump: “He is on the verge of getting better.”
Mr. Antholis compared the situation to the arrival of President Bill Clinton in 1993, when he assumed leadership of a growing economy and a new post-Cold War order. While the country had already begun to recover from the recession during the 1992 election, many voters had not yet felt it, so they punished President George H.W.
“The fundamentals of the economy turned around right before the election, and they continued to move in the right direction when Clinton took office,” Antholis recalls.
As happened to Mr. Bush's first team, the disconnect between macro trends and individual perceptions has proven extremely frustrating for Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, who failed to convince voters during last year's election that the country was doing better than usually thought. . Exaggerating statistics and boasting about the success of the “pedium economy” did not resonate with voters who did not view the matter in the same way.
“Of course, not everyone is enjoying good economic times, as many lower-middle-income families are experiencing financial problems, and the country is facing increasing financial challenges,” Mr. Zandi said. “But if we look at the entire economy, it has rarely done better than it is now with President Trump in office.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said the latest reports showed Mr. Biden's policies were working, and said Republicans should not seek to repeal them once they control the presidency and both chambers of Congress.
“Having inherited an economy in free fall and rising violent crime, President Biden is proud to hand to his successor the best-performing economy on Earth, the lowest violent crime rates in more than 50 years, and the lowest border crossings in more than four years,” Mr. Bates said.
Carolyn Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, responded by citing the election: “Americans delivered an overwhelming rebuke on Election Day of the Biden-Harris administration’s poor record: communities overrun by millions of unvetted migrants who walked across Biden’s open borders, down real wages, and declining trust in law enforcement agencies.” Increasingly politicized and unable to even publish accurate data on crime.
Mr. Trump does not have to share a positive view of the situation to benefit from it. When he takes office on January 20, barring the unexpected, he will not face the kind of major immediate crises that force action, which Obama faced, for example, when he needed to rescue the economy from the brink of depression. Great again.
Instead, Trump will have more freedom to pursue preferred policies such as mass deportation of illegal immigrants or imposing tariffs on foreign imported goods. If past is prologue, he may eventually begin to glorify the state of the economy to claim the successes of his policies.
He has already been credited with recent increases in stock prices even before he took office. He demonstrated a self-promotion skill that had eluded Biden, enabling him to convince many Americans that the economy during his first term was better than it actually was.
At the same time, with unemployment, crime, border crossings and even inflation already significantly low, it may be difficult for Trump to improve them significantly. Mr. Trump seemed to indirectly acknowledge this when he suggested in a post-election interview with Time magazine that he might not be able to fulfill his campaign pledge to lower grocery prices. “It's hard to bring things down once they're up,” he said. “You know, it's very difficult.”
On the contrary, Mr. Trump faces the risk of the economy moving in the other direction. Some specialists have warned that a tariff-based trade war with major economic partners could, for example, reignite inflation.
Gregory Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard University and chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers under Mr. Bush II, recalls that even his former boss faced major challenges when he took office in 2001 as the economy was already heading into relative decline. Mild recession after the collapse of the dot-com boom.
“There are no similar storm clouds on the horizon at this time,” Mankiw said. “This is certainly fortunate for Mr. Trump. On the other hand, all presidents have to deal with unexpected shocks to the economy. “We don’t know yet what kind of shocks President Trump will have to deal with.”
