Last week, President Donald Trump, in the midst of a Twitter meltdown that was grandiloquent even by his standards—50 tweets in 24 hours—made the case that the news media was missing the biggest story of his presidency. Not “collusion,” not obstruction, not his ceaseless tweeting or his seemingly improvised approach to both domestic and foreign policy, but the economy. “In the ‘old days’ if you were President and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism,” Trump tweeted. “Remember, ‘It’s the economy stupid.’ Today I have, as President, perhaps the greatest economy in history...and to the Mainstream Media, it means NOTHING. But it will!”

This is, as Bill Clinton will readily testify, revisionist history. But it’s an argument that Trump has been making for the majority of his presidency: Don’t focus on the opinion polls, which reveal him to be a historically and consistently unpopular president. Instead, focus on GDP growth and the stock market, which for Trump have come to encompass an alternative approval poll.



“The economy really is the strong point for Donald Trump,” said former Representative Jason Chaffetz. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, the Utah Republican echoed Trump, telling Chris Wallace, “You can do the tweets and all this other noise that are out there, but when people feel good at home, they’re going to stick with the person who has the White House.”



This has been conventional wisdom for decades; the president’s tweet is roughly quoting Clinton campaign guru James Carville, after all. But the narrative might not be as sound as Trump and his surrogates think it is. A Washington Post-ABC poll released on Monday found that “60 percent of all voters say the country’s economic system mainly benefits those in power,” including “8 in 10 Democrats and more than 6 in 10 independents” and “nearly a third of Republicans.” This is good news for Democratic presidential candidates—if, that is, they’re prepared to craft a populist economic message.



Trump should recognize that he’s more vulnerable on the economy than the big-picture economic data suggests. In 2016, after all, the economy was pretty good—which, many argued at the time, benefited the incumbent party, the Democrats. Hillary Clinton based her campaign on continuing the economic recovery that had begun under President Obama. But Trump (and, for that matter, Bernie Sanders) made a different argument, that the recovery was only benefiting a small percentage of people, while millions were falling further behind. That latter take resonated.

