To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” he declared on social media last week.
But by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.
For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.
Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the Covid-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been.
The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.
“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than prepandemic.”
I’m not blaming Baker specifically, but the media in general mocked and derided Joe Biden and others in the White House for pointing all this out over the past couple of years. Biden was old, he was wearing shoes with rubber tread, Harris had a cackle, voters have vibes. But rarely did we ever see a straightforward recitation of the fact by the media that looked like that.
I don’t know if it would have made a difference. I do wonder if the Democrats had said “fuck the vibes, we’re going to relentlessly parrot the truth over and over again” if it might have helped people see the reality. Instead we had endless hand wringing about how we need to be empathetic to people’s perceived needs because they have feelings and it’s wrong to deny them even if they’re not true. Well, that really worked out, didn’t it?
The propaganda machine of the right wing in America has been well-honed for 30 years now and it’s almost impermeable. But I don’t know that Democrats couldn’t penetrate it with simple, repetition of the truth over and over again. Yes, you and I would probably rebel. It gets boring. But the only way to break through the cacophony is by relentlessly pushing the same message.
If we’ve learned anything from Donald Trump it’s that.