"This Economy Is Too Good For Donald Trump"

The following is part of a post by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman:

Donald Trump says that the U.S. economy is a disaster. And why not? I mean, just look at the facts. Here’s the unemployment rate:

And here’s the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation:

Wait, you say: That doesn’t look like a disaster. Unemployment and inflation are both low. Indeed, by any normal standard we are very close to a Goldilocks economy, in which everything is more or less just right.

But Trump wants a disaster. He needs a disaster. He’s likely to declare formally that the economy is a disaster, never mind the facts.

The title of this post is a triple entrendre. When I say that the economy is too good for Trump, I’m talking in part about justice: Having spent the past four years trashing President Biden’s economic policies, it seems unfair that he’s inheriting an economy in such good shape.

But I’m also talking about the fact that Trump wants to implement extreme policies and needs to claim that the economy is terrible to justify his actions.

Finally, presidents are often judged not by the state of the economy on their watch, but on whether things got better or worse — unemployment and inflation were much higher when Ronald Reagan declared “morning in America” than they were in November 2024. And because Trump will be starting from Goldilocks, things would be much more likely to get worse than better even if Trump didn’t have terrible policy ideas.

About those bad ideas: If Trump were to ask me what to do about the economy (hahaha), I would say: do as little as possible.

Oh, make a few gestures; stick a new name on largely unchanged policies, the way you did with NAFTA; lie about your predecessor’s economic record; but don’t fix what isn’t broken.