For the Record

In his most recent column at The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Jason Riley notes the "complicated relationship" the Democrats and, I might add, Republican "Never Trumpers" have with the former president.

They want us to remember, Riley says, the nonstop chaos of his administration, his Twitter rants, how he debased the presidency on Jan. 6 and won’t stop lying about the 2020 election results.

But, Riley adds, the Democrats and their Trump hating fellow travelers want us to forget Mr. Trump's successes:

The reality is that when Mr. Trump wasn’t embarrassing himself, he was advancing a more or less traditional Republican agenda of lower taxes and lighter regulations. The upshot was an acceleration in economic activity, higher labor-force participation rates and narrowing racial inequality.

Here are some of the facts Riley cites:

“During Trump’s first three years in office, median household incomes grew, inequality diminished, and the poverty rate among Black people fell below 20% for the first time in post-World War II records,” the Journal reported in October 2020. “The unemployment rate among Black people went under 6% for the first time in records going back to 1972.”

Minorities weren’t the only beneficiaries of this boomlet.

Between 2017 and 2019, wages for the bottom 10% of earners grew at more than double the rate they did during President Obama’s second term.

This record is all the more impressive because it defied expectations. The growth of gross domestic product during Mr. Obama’s final year in office was only about half of what it had been a year earlier, which prompted no shortage of doom-and-gloom economic forecasts for the Trump presidency.

Nevertheless, in 2017, 2018 and 2019, the unemployment rate came in below what the Federal Reserve had predicted, while GDP was higher than anticipated.

Democrats are loath to give Mr. Trump’s tax and regulatory agenda any credit for these outcomes, but the economy performed in the main just as administration officials and supply-side economic modeling predicted.

Lower corporate tax rates were intended to reverse the downward trend in business investment, and following their implementation major companies announced wage hikes, bonuses and 401(k) match increases.

In the two-year period after the 2017 tax reform passed, household incomes rose by more than they had in the previous eight years combined.

Much of the media is obsessed with January 6th, but rarely is the history Riley recounts mentioned. They also seem to think that that the "Inflation Reduction" act that the Democrats are poised to pass is some sort of great success story for the Biden administration, but Riley has a different view:

Democrats, via the Inflation Reduction Act unveiled last week, want to raise the taxes that Mr. Trump cut. No matter what it’s called, the legislation is another tax and spending bonanza that will do little if anything to reduce inflation. But passage could discourage the kind of business investment we saw before Covid.

And because corporate levies are borne mainly by employees, higher taxes on businesses can also lead to lower wages and less hiring.

Why are the Biden people so single-mindedly determined to undo everything Donald Trump did? Do they think that because Trump is "evil" everything he did must also be evil and must therefore be undone, no matter how beneficial it was for the country?

The White House seems to be under the impression that Mr. Trump got the boot in 2020 because of his stewardship of the economy and that voters want his economic policies reversed. But the economy is one area where Mr. Trump consistently polled strongest, and he was elected in 2016 in large part because of the sluggish growth under Mr. Obama.

As Mr. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden rode shotgun through the slowest economic recovery since World War II—a recovery that finally kicked into gear after tax reforms opposed by most Democrats in Congress took effect.

This "reasoning" has, however, put the Democrats in a perilous position for this November:

Democrats are in a bind. With inflation at a 40-year high, violent crime rates spiraling upward, and a border situation that even has Democratic mayors of sanctuary cities complaining about too many illegal immigrants, the midterm elections could be significantly worse than they typically are for the party that controls the White House.

Riley concludes with this:

Whether the issue is crime, immigration or the economy, Democrats are putting progressivism ahead of pragmatism and believe that the defeat of Mr. Trump in 2020 gives them license to do so. But Mr. Trump lost his bid for a second term because the country grew tired of his behavior, which shouldn’t be confused with his economic and political agenda.

It might take a midterm shellacking for the left to finally figure out why Joe Biden was elected.

It might be mentioned in closing that one of the reasons for the chaos in the Trump administration mentioned at the outset of this post is that he was constantly subjected to congressional harassment for alleged crimes that he never committed. The Democrats fomented chaos and then criticized the White House for the chaos.

In any case, the country would be in much better shape today if Mr. Biden had continued the bulk of Trump's policies even as Trump himself no longer resides in the White House.