Trump sees the US as a ‘disaster.’ The numbers tell a different story.

WASHINGTON — To hear President-elect Donald Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” he declared on social media last week.

But by many traditional metrics, the America that Trump will inherit from President Joe 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 U.S. 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 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 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 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 postpandemic than prepandemic.”

Those positive trends were not enough to swing a sour electorate behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election, reflecting a substantial gap between what statistics say and what ordinary Americans appear to feel about the state of the country. And the United States clearly faces some major challenges that will confront Trump as he retakes power.

Yet Trump is moving back into the White House with an enviable hand to play, one that other presidents would have dearly loved on their opening day. President Ronald Reagan inherited double-digit inflation and an unemployment rate twice as high as today. President Barack Obama inherited two foreign wars and an epic financial crisis. Biden inherited a devastating pandemic and the resulting economic turmoil.

“He’s stepping into an improving situation,” William J. Antholis, director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which has studied presidential transitions, said of Trump.

Antholis compared the situation to President Bill Clinton’s arrival in 1993, when he took over a growing economy and a new post-Cold War order. While the country had already begun recovering from recession during the 1992 election, many voters did not yet feel it and punished President George H.W. Bush.

“The fundamentals of the economy had turned just before the election, and kept moving in the right direction when Clinton took over,” Antholis recalled.

Much as it did for the first Bush’s team, the disconnect between macro trends and individual perceptions proved enormously frustrating to Biden and Harris, who failed to persuade voters during last year’s election that the country was doing better than commonly believed. Rattling off statistics and boasting about the success of “Bidenomics” did not resonate with voters who did not see it the same way.

“Of course, not everyone is enjoying good economic times, as many low-middle income households are struggling financially, and the nation has mounting fiscal challenges,” Zandi said. “But taking the economy in its totality, it rarely performs better than it is now as President Trump takes office.”

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said the latest reports demonstrated that Biden’s policies are working and argued that Republicans should not seek to repeal them once they take control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

“After inheriting an economy in free-fall and skyrocketing violent crime, President Biden is proud to hand his successor the best-performing economy on Earth, the lowest violent crime rates in over 50 years, and the lowest border crossings in over four years,” Bates said.

Trump does not have to share a positive view of the situation to benefit from it. When he takes office on Jan. 20, absent the unexpected, he will not face the sort of major immediate action-forcing crisis that, say, Obama did in needing to rescue the economy from the brink of another Great Depression.

Trump instead will have more latitude to pursue favored policies such as mass deportation of immigrants living in the country illegally or tariffs on foreign imported goods. And if past is prologue, he may eventually begin extolling the state of the economy to claim successes for his policies.

He has already taken credit for recent increases in stock prices even before assuming office. He has a demonstrated skill for self-promotion that eluded Biden, enabling him to persuade many Americans that the economy during his first term was even better than it actually was.

At the same time, with unemployment, crime, border crossings and even inflation already pretty low, it may be difficult for Trump to improve on them significantly.

On the contrary, Trump faces the risk that the economy goes in the other direction. Some specialists have warned that a tariff-driven trade war with major economic partners could, for instance, reignite inflation.

N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University and chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under the second Bush, recalled that even his former boss faced significant challenges when he took office in 2001 as the economy was already heading into a relatively mild recession following the bust of the dot-com boom.

“There are no similar storm clouds on the horizon right now,” Mankiw said. “That is certainly lucky for Mr. Trump. On the other hand, all presidents must deal with unexpected shocks to the economy. We just don’t know yet what kind of shocks President Trump will have to handle.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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