Trump's Lucky Break on the Economy

Americans aren't thrilled with President Donald Trump's performance so far, with a new ABC/Washington Post poll putting his approval rating at 36 percent -- the worst on record six months into a presidency -- and a Bloomberg News one putting it at 40 percent.

The one area where the president is making out at least OK, though, is on economic issues. Respondents to the Bloomberg National Poll gave Trump a 47 percent approval rating on "creating jobs" and 46 percent on "the economy."

And why shouldn't they? The U.S. economy isn't exactly setting records, but it is chugging right along, adding jobs and driving down the unemployment rate. This happens to be exactly what the economy was doing for several years before Trump took office, too -- if anything, job creation seems to have downshifted ever so slightly since January. But on the whole, things look better than they have at any time since the onset of the last recession in 2008.1500296726062

Are these good times really Trump's doing? Mostly not, given that he has no significant legislative accomplishments, and economic momentum doesn't seem to have shifted much since he took office. But if one goes on the assumption that poll respondents are simply rating current economic performance (this may be an incorrect assumption, which I'll get to at the end of this column), his comparatively positive approval rankings on the economy make sense. Trump inherited a moderately healthy economy and hasn't screwed it up.