When President Donald Trump took office, we asked columnists of Bloomberg Opinion to use data to judge his progress as president. Some are widely backed as important indicators. Others are meant to highlight an important issue facing his administration and the nation. Two years later, we are taking a look at the original metrics and adding a couple more that seem worth tracking going forward.
Clinton
Bush
Obama
Trump
Percentage of respondents who approve of the president’s job performance
75%
25
1993
2001
2009
2017
By JONATHAN BERNSTEIN
For a president’s electoral health, nothing beats plain old approval ratings. Gallup, FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics, and HuffPollster each collect all the polls out there and compile simple or more complex averages of the surveys; FiveThirtyEight has a useful comparison to all polling-era presidents, from Harry Truman through Trump, so it’s easy to see where Trump ranks historically through the same number of days of his presidency.
Trump’s first year was a public opinion disaster — he was almost always the lowest-ranked president. His second year was better. He rallied into the low 40s for most of the year, sometimes even moving up a bit higher as we reached a point in their presidencies where one of Trump’s predecessors had slumped.
However, the shutdown and other bad news ends Trump’s second year back at or below 40 percent. And his disapproval rating, which has been the worst of any president all along except for a single day, has moved back over 55 percent.
Dow Jones Industrial Average
First term percentage change
30000
100%
0
–40
Year 1
2
3
4
By CASS R. SUNSTEIN
A simple measure of presidential performance takes account of just two variables: approval rating and the Dow. The argument for APDOW, as we might call it, is that public opinion matters, because it captures the wisdom of crowds, and that the performance of the stock market matters, because it provides one measure of how the economy is doing.
In terms of public opinion, 2018 was a bad year for Trump — not worse than 2017, but not better. His average approval rating has been around 41 percent, which is far lower than that of Barack Obama and George W. Bush (and also Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson).
In terms of the Dow, 2018 was also pretty awful, with a 5.6 percent decline — the worst since 2008.
Trump doesn’t deserve all of the blame for his APDOW score, but it’s bad: a D+ for public approval, and a C- for the Dow.
Deficit or surplus as a percentage of GDP
First term percentage-point change
4%
pct.
pts.
–10
–8
By MATTHEW A. WINKLER
Trump has the dubious distinction of being the first leader among the Group of Seven (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, U.K., U.S.) to see the deficit widen on his watch as a percentage of gross domestic product during a synchronized global expansion. It ballooned from 2.2 percent in February 2016 to 4.3 percent in November 2018, the most precipitous deterioration since 2008 when the financial crisis triggered the worst recession since the Great Depression. This measure, which tracks the relationship of deficits and growth, had improved more under Obama than any president since 1980, and only Clinton saw perennial deficits transformed into annual surpluses. Under Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts — the biggest rewrite of the Internal Revenue Service code in 30 years by the Republican Congress — the trend is reversing amid lower-than-forecast tax receipts, less-than-anticipated wage gains, a declining birth rate and an aging workforce. During the past year, when gross domestic product growth accelerated and unemployment reached an 18-year low — an achievement unmatched in the slower-growing G7 — federal revenues from corporate, payroll and personal income taxes fell by 2.7 percent, or $83 billion, from 2017. The last time U.S. growth approached 3 percent, in 2015, tax revenues increased 7 percent. If growth falters, as many economists predict, Trump will be the first president to preside over perennial deficits exceeding $1 trillion.
Number of federal regulatory restrictions
10%
1.2M
By VIRGINIA POSTREL
As a candidate, Trump promised to lighten the regulatory burden and, as president, he seems to be delivering.
The most meaningful measures of changing regulatory burdens come from the QuantGov project, which tracks words like “shall” and “must” that create legal obligations in government manuals. In Trump’s first year, the data showed a significant slowdown in the growth of federal rules, which grew by only 0.6 percent, compared to 1.6 percent in 2016.
Last year, the number of restrictions actually fell for the first time since 1996, dropping by about 1 percent. That’s only the fourth time since 1970 that the number of regulations has declined.
Rather than a true drop, however, last year actually represented a flat year for regulatory growth. That’s because a big chunk of the decrease came from simple housekeeping. The Dodd-Frank financial regulation act passed in 2011 made the Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision obsolete, transferring its regulatory roles elsewhere. In October, the Treasury took its now-superseded rules off the books.
“There have occasionally been single years of no growth or even negative growth, but I can’t think of any time that’s happened two years in a row,” said Patrick McLaughlin, director of policy analytics for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the project’s creator.
January through October
Net imports and exports for goods and services
$0B
$350M
–800
–250
By RAMESH PONNURU
Trump and some of his top advisers believe that naive free-trade policies have led to high trade deficits that have cost Americans money and manufacturing jobs. In 2018, this theory was put to the test.
The administration imposed trade restrictions. As its policies started to be implemented, two things happened: Manufacturing employment rose, and so did the trade deficit (especially the trade deficit in goods). The administration is, naturally, crowing about the first trend.
But the second trend should lead it to question its theory. If trade restrictions don’t lead to lower trade deficits, isn’t the administration’s case for imposing them much weaker? And if rising trade deficits are compatible with rising manufacturing employment, should we care so much about those deficits?
Even if the trade deficit in itself doesn’t deserve as much attention as it gets, I’ll be looking at it over 2019, because it does matter how Trump reacts to it.
Overseas profits repatriated by U.S. companies
$300B
600%
–100
1999
By LEONID BERSHIDSKY
Trump vowed to get U.S. multinational corporations to bring back their foreign cash piles. That was one of the goals of his tax reform package.
But, as is his wont, Trump wildly exaggerated the amount of cash the reform would bring back by allowing companies to pay a one-time, 15.5 percent tax on profits they’d hoarded overseas. “We expect to have in excess of $4 trillion brought back very shortly,” he said in August.
There was never so much to start with. The overseas cash pile of U.S. public corporations was estimated at $1.4 trillion at the end of 2017. Even adding in non-cash assets purchased with the overseas profits, $2.5 trillion would have been a more plausible number.
Even less money than that has come back — a total of $557.1 billion in the first three quarters of 2018.
Data for the fourth quarter aren’t available yet, but the negative trend shows that companies are gradually running out of cash they’d like to repatriate. Their foreign subsidiaries need cash, too — and certain jurisdictions and schemes still offer companies better terms than Trump’s tax reform. Besides, companies have been having trouble getting refunds from the government on repatriation taxes they’ve overpaid.
Still, the return of more than half a trillion dollars to the U.S. economy is no small achievement.
Number of manufacturing workers
18M
workers
5%
10
–20
By JUSTIN FOX
There were 12.8 million people (seasonally adjusted) working in manufacturing in the U.S. in December, up 473,000 from when Trump was inaugurated. Since March 2010, when manufacturing employment hit its lowest level since 1941, the sector has added almost 1.4 million jobs — the biggest manufacturing job gain since the late 1970s. All this should be understood in the context of 6 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010, and an economy in which manufacturing now accounts for just 8.5 percent of jobs, down from 30 percent in the 1950s. But all in all, it’s pretty great, and the manufacturing job gains have accelerated since Trump took office. If you’re judging his presidency by this metric, it is so far a clear success.
Combined civilian labor force in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin
21M
18
By CONOR SEN
Trump promised an economic turnaround in the four Rust Belt states that flipped red in 2016 — Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It hasn’t materialized. The unemployment rate in all four states was already low; it has since fallen somewhat, just as it has for the country as a whole. Yet there are still no signs of a pickup in the labor force, with the combined labor force in all four states only up slightly over the past two years.
Michigan
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Wisconsin
5.2M
6.00
6.6
3.2
4.6
5.4
5.8
2.6
Yr 1
1
While we don’t have the data at the state level, for the country as a whole whatever pickup in labor force growth we’ve seen seems more concentrated with women than men.
The cyclical improvement in the labor market that began under Obama have continued in the first two years of the Trump administration, and that’s welcome news. But Trump supporters had hoped for more than a continuation of the Obama recovery. It’s still hard to find evidence of that in the data.
Real median household income
$62,500
a year
6%
50,000
–5
By NOAH SMITH
Official numbers aren’t out for 2018 yet, but the Census Bureau’s surveys show that real median household income increased by about 1.8 percent from 2016 to 2017. That’s not nothing, but it’s not particularly rapid, especially given the robust overall expansion of the economy in that year, and the fact that income only recently caught up to the level that prevailed before the Great Recession. Private surveys, meanwhile, show continued small increases in the first half of 2018. So it appears that while Trump’s presidency has continued to benefit from the economic expansion that began under his predecessor, the benefits to average American households have been modest. And since this data became available, Trump has ramped up his trade wars and forced a lengthy government shutdown — delaying paychecks — while the corporate bond market has begun to look shaky. So even those modest gains may now be in danger.
October to August
Number of apprehensions at the border
2M
30%
–60
Border apprehensions rose a bit in 2018, but they’re still below their levels of 2016, and far below the numbers that prevailed in the early 2000s. There are two things that determine border apprehensions—how many people attempt to cross the border illegally, and how hard the Border Patrol tries to catch them. Given Trump’s hard line on immigration, it seems likely that enforcement has gotten more stringent during his administration. That implies that the decrease in border apprehensions signals an even larger collapse in the number of people actually trying to enter the country. Despite Trump’s dire warnings, the era of mass illegal immigration across the southern border appears to be over.
2016
2018
= One child killed in Syria
By ELI LAKE
Last year 1,437 children were killed in Syria’s civil war, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. That number is a moral stain and a tragedy. At the same time, it represents a kind of morbid progress. It is significantly less than the 2,109 children who were killed in 2017 and the 2,372 killed in 2016. One of the main reasons for the decrease is that Russia, Iran and Syria’s army consolidated their gains in 2018 — for all intents and purposes, winning the war. With Islamic State nearly defeated, there is less fighting, and therefore less killing of children. Now, especially since the U.S. has announced plans to withdraw its troops, the survivors of the war will have to make their peace with the dictator responsible for starting it.
Probability Trump will leave office before the end of his first term
60%
chance
Aug. 2017
2019
By FRANCIS WILKINSON
How close are British gamblers to Robert Mueller III? Even before Trump took the oath of office, Ladbrokes, the British oddsmaker, began offering odds that Trump would resign or be impeached before his first term is up. Odds were remarkably consistent, and highly pessimistic, over his first year — at roughly even. As the indictments and guilty pleas have piled up, and as even Trump fixer Michael Cohen has turned cooperating witness, Ladbrokes has concluded that Trump’s odds have improved. The odds of his leaving office “via impeachment or resignation” before his first term ends are now 2-1, or 33 percent.
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