So I’m curious to see what he does with this news, and what it portends for the near future:

The U.S. economy grew 2.2 percent in the final quarter of last year, the Commerce Department said Thursday, less than the 2.6 percent the government initially estimated and another sign of a slowdown. President Trump, however, has focused on how fast the economy grew in 2018, which was widely expected to be a strong year after the GOP tax cuts and infusion of more government spending. Trump contends the economy is taking off, while most economists say growth peaked last year. Trump has been touting 3.1 percent economic growth in 2018. But officially, the Commerce Department said Thursday, the economy grew 2.9 percent last year.

Gross domestic product growth of 2.2 percent is not bad, though not nearly as fantastic as the administration would like us to believe it is and will continue to be. And, of course, there are other measures of economic health, most particularly unemployment, that are doing extremely well.

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But if there's a problem for the president, it's that he isn't really capable of adjusting what he tells Americans about the economy, since he really has only two modes when speaking about any issue. If it's something he can blame on others, then it's disastrous, catastrophic, a living nightmare — which is how he described the economy when he ran for president, at a time when it was in pretty much the same shape it is now. If it's something he's responsible for, then it's incredible, amazing, unequaled in all of human history.

Seriously: Try to picture Trump in 2020 saying, as many incumbents do, “We’ve made a lot of progress but we have more work to do, and here’s where I want to go next.” He just doesn’t have it in him. He’s going to say it’s phenomenal, no matter what the truth is.

That’s because he has used a particular brand of dishonest salesmanship his entire life, and he simply brought it to the presidency. Let me refer you to a story in The Post on Thursday by David Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell about how Trump spent years inflating his net worth to fool lenders and potential business partners into giving him money, using financial statements that were full of lies:

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For instance, Trump’s financial statement for 2011 said he had 55 home lots to sell at his golf course in Southern California. Those lots would sell for $3 million or more, the statement said. But Trump had only 31 lots zoned and ready for sale at the course, according to city records. He claimed credit for 24 lots — and at least $72 million in future revenue — he didn’t have. He also claimed his Virginia vineyard had 2,000 acres, when it really has about 1,200. He said Trump Tower has 68 stories. It has 58.

One of the foundations on which Trump’s business was built is that once you’ve bilked one sucker for all he’s worth, there’s always another one to find. He could refuse to pay vendors who had provided him goods and services, because there would always be more small businesses out there to cheat, with owners who weren’t aware of how he did business.

He could declare multiple bankruptcies, and find other banks to lend him money (though in the end, only Deutsche Bank continued to do so, for somewhat mysterious reasons). He could steal people’s life savings with cons like Trump University, but they were little people, and there were plenty more where they came from.

But politics is different, because you have to go back to the same people again and again. If you have a disastrous negotiation with Congress on one issue, you have to negotiate again with the same people on the next issue, and they may not be too eager to trust you. And when you run for reelection, you have to go back to the voters, who are aware of what you told them last time.

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That’s not to say that most of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 aren’t happy with what he has done in office; they are. And most of them will vote for him again, even if the economy slows down between now and the end of next year, as most analysts seem to think it will. But not all of them will, and he could get some real skepticism at the margins when he tells them that despite what they see in their own lives and communities, they’re actually enjoying limitless prosperity.

That’s not to mention the ongoing investigations that could produce criminal liability from Trump’s particular brand of financial exaggeration. If he lied to obtain bank loans — as Michael Cohen testified to Congress, saying that he had documents to verify the claim — that would be a crime. The Post’s Jacqueline Alemany also reports that Cohen told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that Trump filed a false insurance claim for damage to a fresco on the ceiling of Melania’s bathroom (which just goes to show that no grift is too small for Trump). Alemany also reminds us that in 2005 Trump committed what looks a lot like insurance fraud, taking a $17 million payment for hurricane “damage” to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, that no one can seem to remember.