Economic performance under each president is a topic of endless partisan wrangling, with cherry-picked metrics, timeframes, and baselines proving one’s preferred administration a triumph and the opposition’s a calamity—all of which requires the further, questionable assumption that the identified effect has presidential policy as its cause. Even by these low standards, interpretation of the Trump administration’s economic record already suffers from a Rashomon-like divergence of self-interested narratives. Democrats argue that the economy’s strength prior to the onset of the COVD-19 pandemic was inherited from President Obama and that trendlines mostly carried forward existing momentum. Republicans credit President Trump for presiding over a nearly unprecedented boom but, depending on their own policy preferences, attribute it to either the conventional “supply-side” agenda of tax cuts and deregulation or else to Trump’s willingness to reject that agenda on issues like trade. As in Rashomon, none of these stories holds water.
The American economy did generate impressive results on some dimensions in 2018–19, far better than what the pre-Trump trajectory would have predicted, but those dimensions do not include the ones that supply-side policies are supposed to influence. Put bluntly: the Trump administration’s tax cuts did not quickly spur investment, dynamism, and growth. As for the agenda most associated with Trump himself—rejecting Republican orthodoxy on issues like free trade and purportedly focusing on concerns of the working class—it went mostly unrealized. Where pursued, the policies were not ones that would generate results in so short a timeframe regardless.
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