WASHINGTON — To hear President-elect Donald Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship.
“Our Country is a disaster, a laughingstock all over the World!” he declared on social media last week. But by many traditional metrics, the America that Trump will inherit from President Joe Biden when he takes the oath for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.
For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no U.S. troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.
1. US poised to see dramatic drop in homicides for 3rd straight year – Good Morning America
2. Statistics on unauthorized US immigration and US border crossings by year | USAFacts
3. Trump vs. Biden: How the Dow’s Performance Compares
Is the US economy better now than under Trump?
Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Trump’s presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the COVID-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been. The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Bush.
Opioid deaths now lowest in 3 years, but still worse than pre-pandemic – CBS News
Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.
“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post pandemic than pre pandemic.”
Those positive trends were not enough to swing a sour electorate behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election, reflecting a substantial gap between what statistics say and what ordinary Americans appear to feel about the state of the country. And the United States clearly faces some major challenges that will confront Trump as he retakes power.
The terrorist attack that killed 14 people in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day, carried out by an American man who said he had joined the Islamic State extremist group, served as a reminder that the group — which Trump likes to boast he defeated during his previous term — remains a threat and an inspiration to radicalized lone wolves.
US Mass Shootings, 1982–2024: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation – Mother Jones
Updated Detailed Information on Mass Public Shootings from 1998 to 2024
How Many Mass Shootings Happened Under Trump?
The wars in Ukraine and in the Gaza Strip are daunting challenges even without U.S. troops engaged in combat there.
Thanks in part to COVID relief spending by both Trump and Biden, the national debt has ballooned so much that it now represents a larger share of the economy than it has in generations, other than during the pandemic itself.
However in Trump’s first three years in office the Federal Govt spent $3.1 trillion and during the pandemic year of 2020 the Democrats balloon the deficit by $5 trillion through wasteful pork barrel spending. When Trump left office the federal debt was at 27 trillion dollars today’s Debt under Biden its at 36.3 trillion U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time
On Biden’s first day in office, he signed off on energy through fossil fuel. Thereby, Families remain pressed by the cost of living, including housing, health care and college tuition. The cost of gasoline, while down from its peak, is still about 70 cents per gallon higher than when Biden took office. This Administration can lie all they want inflation went up 25% under Joseph “Robinhood” Biden.
Joe Biden Is Descended From Robin Hood?
Current US Inflation Rates: 2000-2024
According to 4 sources
The year 2024 has seen a significant increase in store closures across the United States, with over 7,300 stores shutting their doors, according to CoreSite Research. This marks a 57% rise from the previous year and the highest annual number since the pandemic’s peak in 2020.
Yes, 2024 was a tough year for many retailers. According to Coresight Research, over 7300 store closures in 2024, marking a 57% increase compared to 2023. This spike in closures was the highest since the pandemic in 20202.
Some of the most affected retailers included Family Dollar, Walgreens, CVS, Party City, and Big Lots. Even larger retailers like Macy’s and LL Flooring had to shut down multiple locations.
The rise of e-commerce, inflation, and changing consumer habits were major factors contributing to these closures. It’s definitely a challenging time for brick-and-mortar stores. Is there a specific store or aspect of this trend you’re particularly interested in?
Moreover, Americans remain as divided as they have been in many years — politically, ideologically, economically, racially and culturally. As healthy as the country may be economically and otherwise, a variety of scholars, surveys and other indicators suggest the U.S. is struggling to come together behind a common view of its national identity, either at home or abroad.
Indeed, many Americans do not perceive the country to be doing as well as the data suggests, either because they do not see it in their own lives, they do not trust the statistics or they accept the dystopian view promoted by Trump and amplified by a fragmented, choose-your-own-news media and online ecosphere.
Only 19% of Americans were satisfied with the direction of the country in Gallup polling last month. In another Gallup survey in September, 52% of Americans said they and their own family were worse off than four years ago, a higher proportion than felt that way in the presidential election years of 1984, 1992, 2004, 2012 or 2020.
It was in Trump’s political interest, of course, to encourage that sentiment and appeal to it during last year’s campaign. He was hardly the first challenger to emphasize the negative to defeat an incumbent president.
Dwight Eisenhower disparaged the state of the country when he first ran in 1952, much to the irritation of President Harry S. Truman, only to have John F. Kennedy do the same to him when running in 1960. Kennedy hammered away at a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that did not exist, then after winning declared that the U.S. was in “its hour of maximum danger,” in contrast to Eisenhower’s view of his security record.
“This is a contrast you often find,” said Michael Beschloss, a historian who has written nine books on the American presidency. “Candidates who are running against incumbent presidents or sitting governments make it sound much worse than it is.”
Still, few have been as extreme in their negative descriptions as Trump, or as resistant to fact-checking. He has suggested falsely that immigration, crime and inflation are out of control, attributed the New Orleans incident to lax border policies even though the attacker was an American born in Texas and as recently as Friday called the country “a total mess!”
Yet Trump is moving back into the White House with an enviable hand to play, one that other presidents would have dearly loved on their opening day. President Ronald Reagan inherited double-digit inflation and an unemployment rate twice as high as today. President Barack Obama inherited two foreign wars and an epic financial crisis. Biden inherited a devastating pandemic and the resulting economic turmoil.
“He’s stepping into an improving situation,” William J. Antholis, director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which has studied presidential transitions, said of Trump.
Antholis compared the situation to President Bill Clinton’s arrival in 1993, when he took over a growing economy and a new post-Cold War order. While the country had already begun recovering from recession during the 1992 election, many voters did not yet feel it and punished President George H.W. Bush.
“The fundamentals of the economy had turned just before the election, and kept moving in the right direction when Clinton took over,” Antholis recalled.
Much as it did for the first Bush’s team, the disconnect between macro trends and individual perceptions proved enormously frustrating to Biden and Harris, who failed to persuade voters during last year’s election that the country was doing better than commonly believed. Rattling off statistics and boasting about the success of “Bidenomics” did not resonate with voters who did not see it the same way.
- Honduras threatens to expel the U.S. military as Latin America gears up for Trump deportations
- Trump’s sentencing is set for Jan. 10. Here’s what could happen next
“Of course, not everyone is enjoying good economic times, as many low-middle income households are struggling financially, and the nation has mounting fiscal challenges,” Zandi said. “But taking the economy in its totality, it rarely performs better than it is now as President Trump takes office.”
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said the latest reports demonstrated that Biden’s policies are working and argued that Republicans should not seek to repeal them once they take control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.
“After inheriting an economy in free-fall and skyrocketing violent crime, President Biden is proud to hand his successor the best-performing economy on Earth, the lowest violent crime rates in over 50 years, and the lowest border crossings in over four years,” Bates said.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, responded by citing the election: “Americans delivered an overwhelming Election Day rebuke of the Biden-Harris administration’s abysmal track record: communities being overrun with millions of unvetted migrants who walked over Biden’s open border, lower real wages, and declining trust in increasingly politicized law enforcement agencies that are unable to even publish accurate crime data.”
Trump does not have to share a positive view of the situation to benefit from it. When he takes office on Jan. 20, absent the unexpected, he will not face the sort of major immediate action-forcing crisis that, say, Obama did in needing to rescue the economy from the brink of another Great Depression.
Trump instead will have more latitude to pursue favored policies such as mass deportation of immigrants living in the country illegally or tariffs on foreign imported goods. And if past is prologue, he may eventually begin extolling the state of the economy to claim successes for his policies.
He has already taken credit for recent increases in stock prices even before assuming office. He has a demonstrated skill for self-promotion that eluded Biden, enabling him to persuade many Americans that the economy during his first term was even better than it actually was.
At the same time, with unemployment, crime, border crossings and even inflation already pretty low, it may be difficult for Trump to improve on them significantly. Trump obliquely seemed to acknowledge as much when he noted in a post-election interview with Time magazine that he may not be able to live up to his campaign pledge to lower grocery prices. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he said. “You know, it’s very hard.”
On the contrary, Trump faces the risk that the economy goes in the other direction. Some specialists have warned that a tariff-driven trade war with major economic partners could, for instance, reignite inflation.
N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University and chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under the second Bush, recalled that even his former boss faced significant challenges when he took office in 2001 as the economy was already heading into a relatively mild recession following the bust of the dot-com boom.
“There are no similar storm clouds on the horizon right now,” Mankiw said. “That is certainly lucky for Mr. Trump. On the other hand, all presidents must deal with unexpected shocks to the economy. We just don’t know yet what kind of shocks President Trump will have to handle.”
This story was originally published at nytimes.com. Read it here.
The Seattle Times does not append comment threads to stories from wire services such as the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post or Bloomberg News. Rather, we focus on discussions related to local stories by our own staff. You can read more about our community policies here.