Rating the Trump Economy Pre-Covid-19? Just Average
A look at the past 12 administrations put the current president in the middle of the pack.
Struck by some bad luck.
Photographer: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg
If voters opt in November to toss Donald Trump out of the White House, as polls seem to indicate they will, he will probably leave office with the worst economic growth record of any president since Herbert Hoover.
That is, if real gross domestic product grows at a spectacular 18% annual pace in the current quarter, 6.5% in the fourth quarter and 5% in the first quarter of next year — the median forecast from the economists tracked by Bloomberg — annualized growth from Trump’s first quarter in office to his last will be 0.6%. If the economy does far better than that, and real GDP in the first quarter of 2021 rebounds to the level of the fourth quarter of 2019, annualized growth would be 1.7%, just barely edging out George W. Bush’s time in office (1.73% to 1.72%) for second-worst since Hoover.