It doesn’t seem all that long ago the media and liberal academia were predicting economic meltdown in the aftermath of Trump’s election. Liberal “economist” Paul Krugman, for example, famously predicted after Trump’s election, “So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.”
Well, the left has been repeatedly proven wrong about Trump and the economy, and once again, it’s pure joy to point out how wrong they were.
With the latest unemployment statistics in, we can see that Trump has presided over the lowest average unemployment rate of any president (at the same point in their presidency) in recorded history. Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner notes, “Since February 2017, Trump’s first full month in office, the monthly unemployment rate has averaged 3.9%. No prior president has averaged less than 4% over the first 35 months of his presidency. The closest was Dwight Eisenhower, when the rate averaged 4.3% between February 1953 and December 1955.”
Modern unemployment statistics began in 1948, so the analysis only includes presidents back to Dwight Eisenhower. This analysis, according to Klein, illustrates “the unprecedented nature of this consistently low level of unemployment,” but notes that “this statistic isn’t predictive of the election outcome.”
The economy is only one of many factors that voters use to evaluate incumbent presidents. Also, voters tend to weigh the trend of the economy, which is not reflected in the average. For instance, George H.W. Bush averaged lower unemployment during the first 35 months of his presidency than his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. But the Reagan economy started weak, then expanded rapidly in the run-up to his reelection, whereas Bush inherited an economy in decent shape and was voted out of office when it had declined.
But Trump’s case is unique because he took over a recovering economy with unemployment already at 4.6%, and the rate continued to go down and stay low. So now he starts off his potential reelection year with a record of consistently low unemployment that’s currently holding steady at 3.5%.
Who’s the president with the highest average unemployment rate for his first 35 months? Barack Obama with 9.3 percent.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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