The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose above 22,000 for the first time on Wednesday. “Donald Trump is loving the stock market these days,” observes the Journal, which adds that Wednesday’s milestone “marks a rise of precisely 20% since Mr. Trump was elected in November. Assuming the blue-chip index closes above 22000, it will have taken just 183 days to do that, the fastest jump of 20% after a new president was elected since George H.W. Bush in 1988, according to WSJ’s Market Data Group.” But how much credit does Mr. Trump deserve?

The investor euphoria after Mr. Trump’s election has bumped up against the reluctance of Republican legislators to enact significant reform. After several GOP senators broke their promises last week to repeal ObamaCare, now the Washington Post says, “The White House’s push to quickly pass a major package of tax cuts through Congress is facing a fall calendar full of legislative land mines, potentially delaying a key part of President Trump’s agenda into at least 2018.”

These days many investors argue whether the rising market is still being driven by optimism about the Trump agenda or simply by rising corporate sales and profits thanks to improving global growth. Monetary policy has also left the financial system awash in cash looking for assets to buy. And then there’s the thesis from Brian Reynolds of Canaccord Genuity that as long as pension funds continue to buy huge volumes of corporate bonds, those corporations will continue to have the cash to buy back their own stock and keep markets grinding higher. He points out that credit investors “bought a record amount of corporate bonds in July.”

Whether the stock market boom is largely driven by one of these factors or some combination, it’s clear that investors continue to be much more optimistic about the United States than most journalists, who write daily on the latest alleged signal from Washington that civilization is heading into an abyss.

Mr. Trump certainly runs a risk in pointing to the markets as an arbiter of his performance. The Journal notes: