Trump's "economic miracle" wasn't miraculous

Donald Trump frequently claimed during his presidency that he was presiding over an "economic miracle." More recently he has claimed repeatedly that his was the best economy in U.S. history. That's patently absurd.

Average annual GDP growth for Trump's first three years was 2.49 percent. I exclude the disastrous 2020 because of the enormous pandemic-caused decline that year.

For purposes of comparison, Obama's final three years saw average annual GDP growth of 2.22 percent—a little lower than Trump's, but the difference is negligible.

Obama's first year, 2009, saw a huge decline thanks to the ongoing financial crisis he inherited from Bush. Excluding that year, as I did Trump's 2020, the average for Obama's presidency was 2.15 percent. But the dig-out from the financial crisis—the worst downturn since the Great Depression—essentially occupied Obama's entire presidency. Recovery from financial crises is slow in the best of cases. The slow recovery was exacerbated by years of misguided fiscal austerity imposed by the Republican-controlled Congress. Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz had predicted the return to economic normalcy would take about a decade, and that proved to be fairly prescient.

To calculate the Trump and Obama GDP values I simply summed each year's rate and divided by the number of years. Investopedia apparently uses a different methodology. It has Trump and Obama tied at 2.3 percent over their presidencies.

Presidencies with the highest GDP growth rates include JFK and LBJ at 5.2 percent each, Clinton at 4 percent, and Reagan at 3.6 percent. Clinton had seven years over 3 percent, and four years over 4 percent. Trump never even hit 3 percent. Even Jimmy Carter beat Trump by half a point, with 2.8 percent average GDP growth over his presidency.

By comparison to those strong economies, Trump's GDP growth rate was middling at best. It was in most respects just an unremarkable continuation of Obama's economy. Not a miracle. Not even close to the best ever. And by other metrics, such as monthly jobs created, Trump substantially under-performed Obama and was blown away by Biden. Biden's job creation has been off-the-charts incredible, with about 16 million jobs created in his first (and only) term. No other president in U.S. history has come close to that.