“Three more years! Three more years!”
That's what Donald Trump's supporters should be shouting, considering how long they seem to believe he will remain in office. Because when they describe the Trump administration's great economy and other idyllic metrics, they conveniently leave out his fourth and final year, when everything collapsed — and when he made that collapse even worse.
In recent weeks, allies of the former president have inflated his record and diminished that of his successor. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) declared that Joe Biden's presidency represents “the end of the American dream,” while under the “Trump economy,” American jobs went to American workers. Under the Biden economy, American workers will be laid off and replaced with foreign workers.” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) claimed that black and Hispanic Americans “are better off under Trump” because he has “the lowest unemployment rates of any racial group ” have.
The American public, by and large, also has nostalgia for the Trump years, based on polls on memories of the economy under Trump compared to that under Biden.
There are some problems with these characterizations.
Follow this authorCatherine Rampell's opinions
First, some of the superlatives used about Trump's first three years are not entirely accurate. For example, unemployment among Black and Hispanic Americans was undoubtedly low in the pre-COVID Trump years (as Scott recalls), but since Biden took office, unemployment rates for these groups have either matched or exceeded Trump-era numbers.
For example, unemployment among blacks fell below 5 percent last April for the first time in history.
As for the job market as a whole, there are 6 million more jobs today than there were in December 2019. And while many older, U.S.-born Americans have retired – I emphasize, contrary to Vance's claims, that they are retired, not laid off –, the number of prime working age Americans is about the same as the number of U.S.-born Americans who have a job, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Immigrants, in turn, have helped employment grow even faster than expected, rather than displacing Americans' jobs.
The second and bigger problem is that as good as conditions looked at the end of 2019, disaster followed in 2020.
Trump surrogates, and often Trump himself, sometimes ask Americans whether they are better off than they were four years ago. For most people, the answer would be “yes” – if you count correctly. “Four Years Ago” takes us to the first year of the pandemic.
In early 2020, many Americans were stuck at home, lysing their groceries and searching for toilet paper in vain. Unemployment reached its highest level since the Great Depression. Worse, thousands died every day.
Trump wasted the first few precious months of the pandemic. He downplayed the spread of Covid (“It will go away”) and overstated the government’s ability to respond to the crisis. His supposed “expert” advisors enabled him to do this, including by providing pseudoscience to support his predictions. Meanwhile, Trump mused about treating Covid with bleach injections, UV rays and other unproven and dangerous therapies. Some of his followers followed his advice, causing them (and others) great harm.
Trump botched the crisis in other ways. He spoke openly about withholding financial and public health aid from blue state governors who had not sufficiently bowed to him. He tried to intervene in the functioning of the Federal Reserve just as it was stepping in to prevent a financial crisis.
Crucially, he also dismantled much of the legal immigration system. He did this through outright immigration bans; by travel restrictions that made it harder for foreign-born nurses and other health care workers to get here just when they were needed most; and most lastingly, through policies that required immigrants and immigration authorities to cut nearly impenetrable bureaucracy. This created significant backlogs in processing work permits and other required documents, contributing to labor shortages and eventual inflation when the economy later reopened. Of course, Biden was blamed for such consequences.
But it was Biden's shift away from many of the Trump-era immigration policies that has contributed to gigantic job growth and cooling inflation more recently.
The only good thing the Trump administration did during the pandemic was accelerate vaccine development through Operation Warp Speed. Since his supporters rejected Covid-19 vaccinations, Trump has joined the broader anti-vaxxer movement as measles cases rise. That doesn't bode well for what might happen if we suffer another national crisis, whether related to public health or otherwise, if Trump were elected to another term.
Was the coronavirus pandemic itself Trump's fault? Obviously not. Any president can be hit by a bad shock. The real test of leadership, however, is how to deal with this shock. It is telling that neither this former president nor his supporters want to deal with the results.
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