As the curtain rapidly draws to a close on Donald Trump’s colorful presidency, conspiracy theories about systemic electoral fraud notwithstanding, he leaves behind a decidedly controversial record and a correspondingly mixed legacy. There is no question that the president has done some positive things during his time in office, and there is likewise no question that he has at times pursued misguided policies. While I do not intend to dissect Trump’s entire record in this article, I would like to address some common misconceptions relating to a particular policy arena with respect to which he generally earns high marks from both the pundits and the public – that of the economy.

For all of the criticism President Trump has received relating to his stances on such issues as immigration, trade, foreign policy, judicial nominations and healthcare, few have questioned his efficacy when it comes to stimulating the American economy. In fact, the economy was the one policy area in which Trump – a president who has been disliked by Americans to an historic degree – consistently garnered high marks in the polls throughout his presidency. This popular perspective has persisted even throughout the pandemic, with exit polling in the 2020 race showing Trump performing far better on the economy than on any other issue. Perhaps no one has done more to perpetuate this narrative than Trump himself, who has repeatedly bloviated that he has presided over the greatest economy in American history (a statement which is meaningless to the extent that it is true, since nearly every president in history has presided over a greater economy, as measured by GDP, than any president before him).

To be fair to the president, it is indisputable that his deregulation effort and corporate tax cuts contributed somewhat to the economic growth witnessed throughout most of his tenure. Furthermore, the record government spending during Trump’s tenure certainly helped the economy grow by infusing trillions of government dollars into private industry. These policies, along with the upward march of the stock market over the last four years, have fed into the idea that the presidency of Donald Trump – a former businessman – was unusually good for the American economy.

There are, however, several issues with this viewpoint. For one thing, the stock market is but one portion, albeit a highly visible portion, of the economy. The market was undoubtedly boosted by the 2017 tax reform bill which Trump signed into law, as well as deregulation and other administration initiatives. However, these gains mainly trickled to the top of the economic food chain; middle-class Americans did not benefit nearly as much as their wealthier counterparts. Indeed, under President Trump the wealth gap between poor and rich Americans reached an all-time high. This is not in itself evidence that President Trump’s economic policies primarily abetted the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, but that is in fact the case – as we will proceed to demonstrate.

More to the point, we must analyze just how well the economy actually did under Trump. The stock market performed fairly well from 2017 to present, but not exceptionally well. (For example, Presidents Clinton and Obama both presided over vastly superior equity performance.) In any event, as we have mentioned, the stock market is just one of many important economic indicators.

A broader-based and more representative measure of a nation’s overall economic success may be found in its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the growth rate thereof. GDP growth measures a country’s annual increase in the total value of goods and services generated in such country. For instance, if a country collectively sold goods and services worth $100 billion in one year and $105 billion the next year, its GDP growth rate in the second year was 5%. If its GDP subsequently grows to $108 billion in Year 3, then its GDP growth rate has slowed to a little less than 3%.

The US has historically generated consistent GDP growth, although the rates of growth have varied. There was a time when GDP growth regularly exceeded 6% a year, but that has not been the case for about 50 years. The US economy commonly grew at over 4% per annum as recently as the 1990s, but 2-3% annual growth has been the norm since the turn of the century. Under the leadership of Donald Trump, our economy has continued this lackluster streak – growing by 2.2% in 2017, 2.9% in 2018, and 2.3% in 2019. Not exactly inspirational stuff.

Now obviously it is very difficult, if not impossible, for a $20 trillion economy such as ours to sustain a mid-single digit growth rate as it did in its younger, more agile years. Nobody expected Donald Trump to take annual GDP growth to 4%, and no one can fault him for failing to do so. Perhaps the American economy is simply destined to experience subpar growth indefinitely. The fact remains, however, that for all of Donald Trump’s tax cuts and deficit spending, he got the economy moving no faster than his predecessors. Despite all of his bluster about creating the greatest economy ever, growth has in fact remained stagnant. Despite all of his posturing about beating other players on the international stage, we are still losing economic ground to emerging states like China and India.

It’s really worse than that, though – an awful lot worse. Not only did Donald Trump fail to meaningfully stimulate the American economy, but he also created an economic mess in the process of attempting to do so. As a result of Donald Trump’s fiscal failures, generations of Americans will be forced to grapple with a set of economic dangers that loom menacingly over our nation’s future and threaten to condemn its economy to even weaker growth for decades to come.

How do I figure? Well, while Trump’s tax cuts and profligate spending on the taxpayer dime failed to achieve their desired effects, they did come at a heavy cost. Trump’s economic legacy is historic in at least one sense, in that he presided over the largest average budget deficit of any president in history, even when adjusted for inflation. In other words, President Trump’s government borrowed more money per year than any administration in history. And lest you counter that Trump was victimized by Covid-19 and was otherwise fiscally responsible, it must be noted that he ran a trillion-dollar annual deficit in 2019, before the pandemic reached American shores – surpassed in scope only by deficits during the Great Recession, when tax revenues plummeted and government spending spiked. If we compare apples to apples – the Obama administration’s largest deficit during the Great Recession to the Trump administration’s deficit during the Coronavirus pandemic, the numbers are not even close – Trump’s 2020 deficit of close to $4 trillion nearly triples Obama’s 2009 deficit. Consequently, Trump has minted ~$7 trillion in new federal debt during his four-year tenure – and leaves the country poised to generate massive deficits for the duration of the foreseeable future.

It is important to emphasize that none of this occurred by accident – the deficit did not blow up in a vacuum. Trump’s policies directly fueled the increase in government debt and deficits. By cutting tax rates (40% for corporations and 10-20% for you and me) without commensurate cuts in spending, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) spinelessly exacerbated our debt problem under the guise of fiscal conservatism. I’m all for tax cuts, but all that Republicans accomplished by cutting taxes without cutting spending was a cowardly shift of even more of the nation’s tax and credit burdens to future generations – as though our grandchildren didn’t already have enough debt to reckon with, coupled with the specter of organically weaker economic growth over the long run.

Trump didn’t stop there, however. To make matters worse, in 2018 he struck a deal with Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders to eliminate the budget caps put into place in 2013, which had helped keep the deficit relatively low from 2013-2017. Trump’s deal facilitated an immediate $320 billion in new government spending, but it also had much farther-reaching implications than that – it effectively killed the budget caps forever, enabling further years of fiscal recklessness in Washington. Apostatic as it may sound to Trump’s conservative Kool-Aid drinkers, Obama exhibited significantly more fiscal responsibility than his Oval Office successor. Trump is leaving behind a budget far more difficult to balance than the one he inherited – and that is not the fault of Covid.

Many political observers – myself included – noted as early as 2018 that Trump was setting America up for historic deficits at the first sign of recession, at which times the gap between government spending and revenue tends to spike. Such observers were proven correct when the pandemic struck and the deficit kicked itself into overdrive. To be clear, Trump is responsible neither for the pandemic nor for its related economic fallout. However, he contributed more than his fair share to the debt crisis America finds itself in today, and he leaves future administrations with no obvious way out of the fiscal hole he helped dig.

Adding insult to injury, most of the Trump administration’s deficit spending has benefited not the middle class, but corporations and the wealthy investors who own the bulk of their shares. I have addressed this topic at length in a previous article written earlier this year, so I won’t make too fine a point of it here. Suffice it to say, however, that the trillions of deficit dollars spent by the federal government this year – not including unrelated money printed by the Fed and handed out to corporations willy-nilly – could have afforded tens of thousands of dollars to every American household. Instead, the average American received a $1,200 check while corporate investors got bailed out on their investments gone sour.

This corporate favoritism has been especially conspicuous during 2020, but the pandemic is far from the first time it has reared its ugly head. Donald Trump increased spending to military contractors and other government vendors while seeking to slash safety-net programs like SNAP and HUD. As alluded to above, his tax bill disproportionately benefited corporations as opposed to individual taxpayers – and, per usual, it was upper-middle-class wage earners who benefited the least. Racking up government debt to shovel corporate welfare to big business has been a hallmark of the Trump administration’s fiscal policy since long before Coronavirus entered the American lexicon.

One counterpoint to this pessimistic view of Trump’s record is the job growth achieved prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. The US economy added jobs consistently throughout the first three years of Trump’s presidency, and unemployment reached a 50-year low. Certainly this is one aspect of the economy that did well under Trump, at least until the pandemic and state-mandated lockdowns wreaked havoc upon the employment picture. It is indeed very likely that Trump’s corporate tax cuts and Wall Street handouts helped drive full employment. Unfortunately for Trump’s efforts to claim outsized credit for this accomplishment, however, the economy was already on a record-long job growth streak prior to Trump’s inauguration. Under the Obama administration, the US job market underwent 76 consecutive months of sequential growth leading up to President Trump’s inauguration – during which time the unemployment rate was cut in half from levels near 10%. Trump simply oversaw the continuation of this streak, as the unemployment rate slipped from 4.7% in January 2017 to 3.5% in February 2020. Trump deserves credit for not mucking up market-driven job growth, but it’s not exactly a phenomenon he can claim much credit for. The Coronavirus-driven unemployment spike, while not Trump’s fault, does starkly illustrate the temporary nature of the economic gains for which Trump permanently sacrificed so much of America’s future.

I do not mean to imply that Donald Trump invented budgetary irresponsibility; he has merely followed a storied tradition of myopic fiscal policies advanced by US leaders over the past few decades. However, he has been uniquely bad even when graded on this curve – and it is therefore ironic that his economic record is supposed to be the one unquestionably positive aspect of his short-lived reign of terror. Rather than celebrating Donald Trump’s economic legacy, future generations will presumably despise his administration for prioritizing short-term growth over long-term stability – and largely failing even at that.

Donald Trump’s supporters are still hoping for some perverse sort of Chanukah miracle (or nightmare) whereby his single term might last for eight years, but their fantasies will not materialize – as even they are beginning to see. That being the case, it is past time to collectively take off our MAGA-hat-colored glasses and dispense with the rosy myths about Donald Trump’s economic mirage.