[facepalm]
Of course Trump is going to brag. Any president would, and Trump has three modes when speaking: insulting, lying and bragging, so however much a normal president would brag when a 4.1% growth number comes out, Trump will take that level of braggadocio to unheard-of new heights.
So, here's how to deal with people who want to give Trump credit. There are two types. First, you've got your Trumpkins. Don't bother talking to them. They can't be reached with reason or facts, so there is no point trying. Then, there are the wannabe balanced-centrist-types who think that they need to give Trump some praise some of the time because if they don't, it means they're just partisan hacks. In principle, some of these people might be reachable with facts. You have several avenues for reaching these people.
First, point out to them that they are inventing a fun, new logical fallacy: pre hoc ergo propter hoc! "Wait," you're thinking. "Didn't that pompous, pedantic professor mean, post, not, pre?" Nope. I mean, yes, I'm pompous and pedantic, but I typed that correctly. Incidentally, if you actually want to convince people, do this without the snark. I suck at that. I'm good at math and logic. You can have the math and the snark, or the logic and the snark, all three consecutively or concurrently, but the snark is compulsory. Extra bonus points for anyone who actually gets that reference.
Anyway, the point is to put a good quarter of GDP growth in historical perspective. Here's GDP growth, going back through 1977, to capture Carter's entire Presidency.
There is absolutely no way to look at this graph, without politics, pick out the last 1.5 years and say, "wow, whoever is President now must be doing an awesome job!" What you notice about those last six quarters is that they are within the broad historical range, not historically large growth, and they follow from a pattern of growth that has been consistent since the "Great Recession" ended formally in 2009. (The technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, indicated by shaded regions in all FRED graphs). Trump campaigned in 2016 on the lie that the country was in shambles, but the economy was doing pretty well in 2016. The economy was growing, and it has just kept growing, within the historical range. To take credit for a pattern that began before he was inaugurated would be to argue, as I posed a moment ago, pre hoc ergo propter hoc. Translated from Latin, "before this, therefore because of this." Does that make any logical sense? No. Is that even possible? No. That's not just a flawed syllogism-- it is an impossibility of causation. Trump can't go back in time and create growth that started in 2009.
Then, we look at the number. 4.1%. Yes, that's bigger than the number has been in the last few quarters. Trump is obsessed with... size, but of course, Obama's... GDP growth was... bigger, in several quarters. There have been a lot of quarters over the period above with higher GDP growth. In fact, look at Jimmy Carter! The exact same quarter in his Presidency-- Q2 1978. 16.4%. Suck on that, Trump! Jimmy Carter beat you by a factor of 4! You lost to Jimmy Carter!
Of course, that's not because Jimmy Carter was secretly an awesome President. The economy just has weird spikes, and things happen. Presidents have very little influence on the economy, except when acting in times of crisis. The point, though, is that a quarter of 4.1% growth shouldn't signal to anyone that Trump is secretly an awesome President.
Not unless they want to heap four times as much praise on Jimmy Carter. No. I'm not going to do that.
So, what has Trump done? Among the people who want to give him credit for the growing economy, you will get two answers: tax cuts, and deregulation. The de-regulation thing needs to get thrown out immediately. This is straight-up bullshit. There is no real evidence that you can get serious macroeconomic growth from the kind of willy-nilly deregulation in which the Trump administration has engaged. Tax cuts are more complicated. Here's what the tax cuts did. They cut corporate taxes, mostly. The result? The stock market is doing great! If you have money in the stock market, a bunch of credit goes to whoever gets credit for the tax cuts.
That's not Donny-boy. He played zero part in the writing of that legislation. They wrote that shit, by hand, on the margins of the page, at the last minute on the Senate floor. If you asked Donny-boy to explain what was in the bill-- the technical details-- do you seriously think he could do it? No. He didn't know anything about the bill, and didn't care. All he cared about was signing a bill that he could call a tax cut, but that would have happened with any Republican president. If Trump had a stroke from eating too many buckets of fried chicken on his gaudy, solid-gold toilet (advised by his quack doctor, of course), the GOP could have Weekend at Donnie's-ed their way to the same outcome. Grover Norquist used to say that all he wanted from a president was enough working digits to sign one of Paul Ryan's budgets, but if Pence were behind Trump's brain-dead body giving it a reach-around, so to speak, to hold that pen, Norquist would have been happy with that too. And the outcome would have been the same. Would it have been simpler, and more constitutionally safe to just have Pence take the oath of office? Sure, but then you wouldn't have gotten those wonderful images, and I'm having fun this morning.
Donald Trump deserves zero credit for the content of the tax bill, and a tax cut would have passed with any Republican president and unified Republican government. However, does that contribute to a slightly higher GDP growth number? Possibly. Econ 101 says it's the wrong thing to do when the economy is growing. You pay down your debt when the economy is growing so that you have more room to run deficits when the next recession hits and you don't run the risk of crowding out future growth with interest rate increases, but it could. Just not that much. After all, 4.1% isn't out of line with recent past growth or historical growth, and businesses aren't doing the investment thing that had been promised.
A while back, I wrote this post, about what presidents can and cannot do to influence the economy. Mostly, presidents matter in times of crisis. Donald Trump came into office with a growing economy, contrary to his constant lying. There hasn't been an external crisis to stop that growth, and he hasn't created enough of one to stop that growth. The former condition can't hold forever. Exogenous shocks occur. As for the latter? I'll get to his trade war tomorrow (probably), but it looks like he is backing away from the ledge, with Europe, at least. A full-blown trade war really could put the kibosh on solid economic growth, and solid economic growth is the only thing keeping is presidency afloat, to the degree that it is.
Most people don't know enough about politics or economics to understand how... economically... impotent Trump is. There isn't much he can do to influence the economy. He could blow it up, though. He might, but he hasn't yet. He was fortunate enough to inherit a growing economy, just as he was fortunate enough to be born a rich, white male in a society that never lets rich, white men fail, no matter how stupid and vile they are. And, most people are so poorly educated that they give credit or blame to the president for the state of the economy.
Funny. You know, the whole point of capitalism rather than communism is that we don't have a centrally-run economy. That way, one jackass doesn't run things into the ground when he becomes Supreme Leader. The flip-side is that no one person gets credit for things running smoothly.
Capitalism just works.
