It’s going to be decision time.

President-elect Donald Trump had barely declared victory in the early-morning hours of Nov. 9, 2016, when liberals started predicting doom for the economy.

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman was one of the first, and worst, with his now-notorious essay in The Times projecting “global recession, with no end in sight.”

Now, after an astonishingly productive two-and-a-half years in office, President Trump is turning the tables by predicting an economic disaster if he doesn’t win re-election. And he’s got a little more evidence than his liberal critics ever will.

In a Twitter post on Saturday, Trump warned of what could happen to the humming American economy if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020.

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“The Trump Economy is setting records, and has a long way up to go….” Trump wrote. “However, if anyone but me takes over in 2020 (I know the competition very well), there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before! KEEP AMERICA GREAT.”

The Trump Economy is setting records, and has a long way up to go….However, if anyone but me takes over in 2020 (I know the competition very well), there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before! KEEP AMERICA GREAT — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2019

Even allowing for Trumpian hyperbole, that’s a warning that should resonate.

Do you think a Democrat win in 2020 would kill the economy? Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use You're logged in to Facebook. Click here to log out. 97% (993 Votes) 3% (29 Votes)

It’s been disgracefully downplayed by the mainstream media, but the economy under Trump has been roaring. As MarketWatch noted in 2017, a year into Trump’s presidency, the stock market had risen by 26 percent.

Despite the turmoil of the times – Trump’s trade-war brinkmanship, the “Russia collusion” hoax, the relentless ankle-biting of the bitter Democrat opposition and its dishonest water carriers in the mainstream media — that first-year performance has been maintained.

As Business Insider noted in early June, the S&P 500 is up 28 percent since Trump’s election and 24 percent since his inauguration.

Unemployment has dropped sharply and remains at the lowest levels of his presidency – something that black and Hispanic voters should be noticing and keeping in mind come 2020.

Trump’s opponents in the media know it – and it shows in the coverage.

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Trump is scheduled to officially launch his 2020 re-election campaign with an announcement in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday. (Supporters were already getting in line on Monday, according to WKMG.)

On Monday, The Hill published a look at his chances that included these paragraphs about the economy:

“Trump’s hopes are also buoyed by a strong economy — a factor that almost all political observers, on both sides of the partisan divide, consider his strongest card.

“The national unemployment rate was 3.6 percent — the lowest of Trump’s presidency — in both April and May. That’s a decline from 4.7 percent when he took office in January 2017.

During the Great Recession, the unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in October 2009.

“The stock market has also risen sharply during Trump’s presidency, though he has recently complained that it would have soared even higher were it not for the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates.”

All great news, right?

If a Democrat were in a position to boast about record-setting unemployment and a booming stock market, Americans would be subject to the kind of personality cult the mainstream media tried to inflict on the country for the eight disastrous years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

But how did The Hill headline its Trump piece?

“The Memo: Trump begins uphill slog to 2020.”

Seriously.

Well, here’s a memo:

Jimmy Carter faced an uphill slog for re-election, because the economy was in the toilet for most of his presidential term (and he was a lousy president).

George H.W. Bush faced an uphill slog because of a recession – and a billionaire named Ross Perot who gave the country a three-way election in 1992, and Bill and Hillary Clinton for the next quarter-century and counting.

So, spare us the polling data in June 2019 for an election that’s being held more than a year later. (A lot of Americans are old enough to remember when polls showed George H.W. Bush couldn’t be beat. Some of them might even work for The Hill.)

The stock market, job creation and the economy have all turned around during the Trump White House because they were freed from the shackles of Democrat regulation.

Trump’s upset victory in 2016 also meant the end of the Obama administration’s efforts to command the economy by determining which favored businesses would survive through government intercession (“green” rent-seekers such as the almost-forgotten Solyndra, for instance, or politically connected, heavily unionized GM) and which businesses would die (anything connected to coal, for example.)

For anyone not invested — philosophically and financially — in the idea of an ever-bigger government taking over an ever-growing part of Americans’ lives, it was a dismal period.

No one in the clown-car field of Democratic candidates has said or done anything to make the business world think his or her administration would be any less destructive than Obama’s.

If Trump doesn’t win re-election — if, in the early hours of Nov. 4, 2020, God forbid, a President-elect Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or anyone else is making a victory speech — conservatives might have to put aside their congenital, American optimism for a while.

As Krugman wrote so wrongly in 2016, we really could be looking at a “global recession” then, “with no end in sight.”

That’s the decision every American voter will have to make in 2020. And if it looks like an easy one, it is.

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