“JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!” That was what Donald Trump tweeted a month ago, when the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy had created three hundred and four thousand jobs in January. So what did the @RealDonaldTrump account have to say on Friday morning, when the Labor Department reported a gain of just twenty thousand jobs in February—about a hundred and fifty thousand fewer than economists had been expecting? “Women’s unemployment rate is down to 3.6% - was 7.9% in January, 2011. Things are looking good!”

Kudos to the White House staffer who dug through the Bureau of Labor Statistics archives and found these figures for Trump to ballyhoo on International Women’s Day. As usual, however, his tweet was misleading. It failed to mention that, in January, 2017, when Barack Obama left office, the adult female unemployment rate had already fallen to 4.4 per cent, and that the gap between 7.9 per cent and 4.4 per cent is a lot bigger than the gap between 4.4 per cent and 3.6 per cent. Throughout the labor market, Trump inherited positive trends that have largely stayed in place during his first two years in office.

The big question that Friday’s employment report raised is whether these positive trends may be coming to an end. The sensible answer is that one month of data doesn’t provide a sufficient basis on which to reach a conclusion, and the actual estimate of twenty thousand new jobs should be treated with skepticism. At the same time, however, there is good reason to believe that we have already seen the best days of the Trump economy. Even if this payrolls figure was an outlier on the downside, it may turn out to be a harbinger of things to come. And that can’t be good news for the President’s reëlection prospects.

In explaining why the actual number was so low, economists at Goldman Sachs argued that the unusual weather—a warmer than usual January, followed by a harsh February—likely reduced growth by a hundred thousand jobs, which is obviously a big impact. Another possibility is that there was a statistical error. The folks at the Labor Department don’t have time to contact every employer in the country, so in coming up with payrolls figures they rely on a sample survey, which has a substantial margin of error attached to it: plus or minus about ninety thousand. A second survey that the government carries out—of households rather than employers—indicated solid job growth last month.

Rather than obsessing over the details of a single report, it is worth recalling how we got here. At the start of last year, a substantial stimulus package went into effect as a result of the Republican tax bill and a bipartisan spending agreement. It wasn’t labelled as a stimulus, but that is what it was, and the economy responded almost immediately. In the second and third quarters of 2018, the gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 3.8 per cent, close to double the average rate of growth that we’ve seen over the past decade. Employment and wage growth picked up, as well.

Between April and December, the monthly rise in payrolls averaged more than two hundred and twenty thousand a month. In the same period, the annual rate of growth in average hourly earnings rose from 2.6 per cent to 3.2 per cent, comfortably above the rate of inflation. Trump had plenty to chirp about. If he were a cannier politician, he would have tried to turn the midterm elections into a referendum on the economy rather than on himself and his controversial immigration policies. That didn’t happen, of course. He and the Republicans got walloped, despite a strong economy.

Going into the election year of 2020, the likelihood is that Trump will be saddled with an economic environment that is a good deal weaker. For one thing, the boost from the tax and spending stimulus will gradually run down over the next year or so. Also, lower growth in Europe and other parts of the world will adversely affect exports of American goods and services. (The impact is already visible, and helps to explain the sharp rise in the U.S. trade deficit that the Commerce Department reported earlier this week.) In theory, the Federal Reserve could counteract these developments by introducing a new monetary stimulus. However, with wage inflation rising, the Fed seems unlikely to act unless things get really bad.

Particularly in manufacturing, the economic slowdown has already begun, and the new jobs report confirms this. Last month, the entire manufacturing sector added just four thousand jobs, compared to an average of twenty-two thousand during the previous twelve months. These days, of course, the services sector is a lot bigger than the manufacturing sector. But, as the Goldman Sachs analysis pointed out, there are signs of a slowdown in job growth there, too. And, in another ominous sign, the average number of hours that Americans are working fell back a bit last month.

None of this means that a recession—i.e., negative G.D.P. growth—is in the cards anytime soon. But it appears that the U.S. economy is already slowing down pretty sharply. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s “GDPnow” forecast for G.D.P. growth in the January-to-March quarter is just 0.5 per cent. Most economists expect growth to rebound during the rest of the year, but only modestly. The Conference Board, for example, is predicting that the rate of G.D.P. growth in the second half of the year will be 2.2 per cent. And some economists expect even lower growth next year. How would Trump explain such an outcome after boasting that “we have the greatest economy that we’ve ever had”?

It’s pretty unusual for a first-term President to engineer an economic boom for the year of a midterm election rather than the year of his own reëlection campaign. According to the theory of the “political business cycle,” which the Yale economist Bill Nordhaus put forward in the nineteen-seventies, Presidents and other politicians like to get the bad economic news out of the way early in their terms, so that they can create more benign conditions as election day approaches. Trump seems to be doing the opposite. One wonders if he is aware of this.