Then there’s the inconvenient fiction that the president of the United States “runs” a $10 trillion economy. All of the metaphors and verbs used by the press leave you with the impression that the president sits in some giant cockpit, fidgeting with flashing lights and humming doodads as he “drives” the economy. Meanwhile, the White House itself, somehow, “creates” jobs. “The White House created 200,000 jobs in the last quarter…” Is there a Play-Doh job factory next to the White House bowling alley? And — gird your loins! — if the president is “asleep at the switch,” the economy could “derail” and “plunge into a ditch.” Of course, others see the president as some sort of farmer who can “grow the economy,” so long as he “focuses like a laser” on doing just that.
When you think about it, such language betrays an almost medieval understanding of economics. If the king doth prosper, so doth the land. It reminds me of John Boorman’s Excalibur. Once King Arthur is restored by the Grail, so too is all of England. Does any serious person believe that if a president “pays more attention” to the economy, it will necessarily do better than it will if he “ignores” the economy? Well, actually a lot of serious people seriously believe that. … Jimmy Carter was a micro-detail guy, and few people would say he ended the debate on how to manage the economy (let alone the White House tennis-court schedule, another detail he focused like a laser on).
FDR was probably the most famous example of a president keeping his eye on the economy. Over four terms, he didn’t fix it. We had to wait for the “externalities” of the post-World War II era to really get the economy roaring.
Since FDR, every president has leaned, to one extent or another, into the idea that they “run” the economy and “create” jobs—so long as things are going well. And both parties, and much of the media, signal-boost these claims.
At the margins, I think this is defensible for three reasons. First, it’s endemic to politics. Second, it’s endemic to politics because lots of people think it’s to some extent true. Third, economic policy does matter, and because of reasons 1 and 2, it gets personalized around the president (particularly in an era of congressional impotence).
Nobody has internalized this idea more than Trump, who has literally described the economy as a department store that he runs.
Which brings me to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
To the extent that economic policy can be directly credited for the pre-COVID economy in Trump’s first term, they deserve the lion’s share of the credit. Look, I get it, all presidents take credit for the legislation they supported and signed. So if you want to give Trump that conventional form of credit, fine.
But the simple, historical fact is that Trump signed on to legislative packages forged by Ryan and McConnell and relied on basic normie, “establishment,” conservative policies and ideas.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, while also lowering individual rates and moving toward full expensing. This was basically the kind of supply-side, pro-investment tax agenda congressional Republicans and right-of-center think tanks had been pushing long before Trump won. It most immediately drew on Ryan’s 2016 “A Better Way” blueprint.
I should note that Ryan included a Border Adjustment Tax in that plan—taxing imports but exempting exports, to incentivize domestic manufacturing. I didn’t like it, but it was crafted in large part as a more elegant and less harmful way to satisfy Trump’s hunger for his Tariff Everybody! approach. It also failed to make it into the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
I bring that up because it illustrates how little of Trumponomics made it into the major economic policies of the first Trump term. Yes, there were some tariffs (which Biden mostly kept), but their significance, never mind success, is highly debatable. He did renegotiate and rename NAFTA into the USMCA, but those changes were mostly cosmetic. He wanted the headline, not the substance.
The point is, if you want to credit “Washington” for the good economy of the first Trump term, you need to allow for the fact that it wasn’t Trump’s unique genius and economic mastery that were responsible. It was a conventional, mainstream, tax and regulatory agenda favored by the supposedly RINO, cuck, “establishment,” zombie Reaganites. Steve Bannon never got his new New Deal.
Now, the broader story pushed by Trump and his supporters is that Ryan, McConnell, and the other normie Republicans in Congress and the White House worked against Trump and Trumpism, not just on economics, but on everything. They wouldn’t “let Trump be Trump.”
Consider Mike Pence. A stalwart defender of Trump for four years, Pence did his best to be loyal to Trump while also pushing sound policies as best he could behind the scenes. But when he wouldn’t “let Trump be Trump” on January 6, he was denounced as a coward and traitor.
Trump and his inner circle of loyalists were determined not to repeat such mistakes in his second term. J.D. Vance was selected because he assured the Trump boys and Tucker Carlson that he would be no Mike Pence. He’d be a Renfield to Trump’s Dracula. Out went the Trump restrainers, in came the pliant yes men and women, charged with one overriding command, “Let the baby have his bottle”—on tariffs, retribution, NATO, myriad vanity projects such as Trump Accounts, the Trump Card, the Trump Institute of Peace, the Trump Kennedy Center, etc.—and of, of course, “taking the oil” in Venezuela and (if Operation Epic Fury had worked the way he planned) Iran.
I don’t want to rehash my “news”letter from last week, but I’ll say it again: The Iran war isn’t a “betrayal” of “Trumpism.” It’s exactly the kind of thing you get when you organize an administration and GOP congressional majority around the “principle” that you can’t say no to the boss. “In Trump we Trust” is not a policy agenda, it’s a cult of personality.
If the theory is that presidents in general, or Trump in particular, run the economy, then you have to ask why is this economy so inferior to the Trump I economy. Now, I want to be clear: I think Democrats wildly exaggerate how bad the economy is. At least until the Iran war, it was going pretty well. But prices were still too high. Housing remains a real problem. Job growth wasn’t stellar, but unemployment was okay. In Trump’s first year, the economy grew 2.1 percent, down from 2.8 percent in Biden’s last year. Affordability, for all its base-stealing as a slogan, was a legitimate issue.
But the economy wasn’t “roaring like never before.” Few Americans felt like we were in a new “Golden Age.”
As Richard Reinsch explained this week, the Liberation Day agenda—despite all of the TACOing and revisions—has not delivered what Trump said it would, in terms of jobs (we shed 100,000 manufacturing in 2025), revenues (billions not trillions, mostly paid by Americans), or restructuring the economy.
Of course, no one—even his closest admirers—will deny that Trump considers himself a great salesman or that all presidents try to talk up the economy. But you have to accept that all of his talk about how the economy is going unprecedentedly well falls somewhere between obvious lies to wild exaggeration. And when he says affordability is a “hoax” you have to decide whether he understands it’s not and is lying or whether he actually believes it, which means his mastery over the economy isn’t what his superfans claim. Again, if it was, he would have willed into existence the same economy, or a better one, that we had pre-COVID.
And if you still cling to the idea that Washington can deliver that kind of economy simply by pulling the right levers, you have to ask why they did it in Trump’s first term, but not his second. My answer to that, at least in part, is that a lot of smart, patriotic, and unfairly demonized Republicans didn’t let Trump be Trump.
