It is telling to me that Trump defenders always talk about the circumstances during the time Trump was president instead of talking about anything Trump actually did.
I'll admit it. Trump was a fairly weak President. He tried to build a wall and got like a quarter of it done at the most. He put a dent in the number of successful illegal crossings at the border, but he didn't deport those already here in anywhere remotely close to sufficient numbers. And of course, he joined his recent predecessors in overseeing a huge spike in the national debt.
Nonetheless, he was a Republican president who made the executive branch's policies lean right instead of left. And he made judicial appointments of judges who leaned right instead of left. And until Covid, which was outside of everyone's control and caught the whole Western world unprepared, he maintained stability in our economy and foreign policy at a time when foreign policy challenges were becoming more difficult.
This was, basically, the job he was hired to do, and he did it. Putin didn't do diddly-squat when Trump was in office. Neither did China, Iran, etc.
Setting aside that the job numbers are factually better under Biden,
If you discount Covid, no they are not. Unemployment is 3.9, which is higher than under Trump's 3.5 in February 2020, and it probably would've been lower than 3.5 come Jan. 2021 if not for Covid. Were Trump's economy to take a downturn in the absence of Covid or anything similar then sure, you'd have a point to stand on. But that's not the case.
As for Biden, it's not just a matter of time; like I told IWRA, Biden actually did achieve 3.4 at the beginning of last year...and then it started going up again. By the time he leaves office unemployment could plausibly stand where it did when Trump took office 7+ years ago. A figure Trump himself would've hit had his term stretched on another 9 months, simply Biden simply inherited his recovery.
this bragging about Trump’s job numbers is just taking credit for things he had nothing to do with
I mean, Biden supporters routinely brag about his numbers. Why can't we do the same?
Also, that's not true. Perhaps Trump inherited a good economy from Obama and simply didn't screw it up. But he also oversaw the fastest economic recovery in US history.
What were the Covid lockdowns? You had like tens of millions of American worker from various industries just sitting home not working, for months at a time. That should've absolutely cratered the economy. Indeed, unemployment was a whopping 14.8 percent in April 2020. By the time he left office 9 months later, it was 6.4 percent.
I can't stress this enough. The worst unemployment got during the Great Recession was 10.0 percent, and it took Obama until April 2014 to get it at or below 6.4. Five years and three months, or sixty-three months total. Were he a one-term president he would've left unemployment 0.2 points higher than he found it. Lucky for him he got two terms.
Compared to 9 months for Trump. Trump did, or at least oversaw, what Obama's most famous for, in 1/7th of the time. Starting from a rock bottom point that was 48% deeper.
