Is It Trump's Economy or Not?

A year ago, President Donald Trump proclaimed that he was presiding over an “economic turnaround of historic proportions.” That was always an exaggeration, but Friday’s new gross domestic product numbers from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (which include revisions going back to 2014) seem to indicate that the mid-2018 boomlet that had the president so excited has faded. Growth rates have returned to their post-Great-Recession norm of a bit over 2%.

I use trailing-four-quarters GDP growth because it’s less noisy than the estimates of quarterly growth at annual rates published by the BEA (which put second quarter 2019 growth at 2.1%). Real GDP growth over the four quarters ending in June was 2.3%, which happens to be exactly what the annualized rate of GDP growth has been since the economy started expanding again in late 2009.