It shouldn’t be surprising that the economy isn’t doing any better under Trump, since Trump really hasn’t done anything to make it better. There hasn’t been a dollar of new infrastructure spending, let alone the trillion that Trump’s since-departed ideological consigliere Steve Bannon promised. And despite the administration’s tax cut bravado, it’s looking pretty iffy whether it will get that done either. (That’s because Trump wants, more than anything, to cut corporate taxes, but, due to legislative rules, even a temporary corporate tax cut has to be paid for — and Republicans don't agree on any way to do that.)

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The economy, then, is still just chugging along as it has been for the last six years now. Nothing has changed. Even the relatively weak numbers in August are probably just a blip rather than the beginning of something bad. What those do tell us, though, is that there are still quite a few more people who want to work than you’d think there would be when the unemployment rate is only 4.4 percent. Which is to say that the recovery still has some room to run.

But in any case, it is fitting that Trump has tried to take credit for the same economy he said was a disaster as recently as nine months ago. That’s just him running the government like a business — at least his own. After his casinos went bankrupt in the early 1990s, you see, Trump figured out that it was a lot easier to let other people put his name on things they’d built rather than do so himself. (Well, that and a lot of Wall Street banks wouldn’t lend to him anymore). This is no different. Trump is just putting his name on a recovery that Obama put in place with his stimulus and his Federal Reserve picks.