Donald Trump. Photo from whitehouse.gov.

In a statement about Republican Party of Wisconsin site, president Brian Schimming accuse Kamala Harris of “expecting us to ignore what our bank statements and monthly budgets clearly show: that we were better off four years ago under trump card.”

Weekly Covid deaths

This is a version of a question made famous by Ronald Reagan in a debate with the president Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” For many viewers, the answer was No, and Reagan won the election. Since then this question has been popular among Republican politicians.

The problem with Schimming’s statement is that four years ago puts us in October 2020 – and in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the chart below shows, during the week of October 3, 2020, COVID killed 4,240 United States residents. This compares to 679 COVID deaths in the week of October 5, 2024.

The 4,240 deaths from COVID represent something of a trough between two peaks in 2020. In October 2020, COVID deaths were about to take off, reaching a peak of 25,974 deaths on January 9, 2021, near the end of Trump’s term.

The following chart shows the general pattern of these deaths appearing to slow down, only to peak again.

Weekly deaths from COVID

Needless to say, a variety of economic measures reacted to this. For example, the unemployment rate reached 14.8 percent nationally and 14.0 percent in Wisconsin the previous April. By October, rates had fallen to 7.8% and 5.8%.

Although Trump was not responsible for the COVID pandemic, he and the people who worked for him were responsible for organizing an effective response. They fell short in many ways MODES.

The problem started years before the emergence of COVID-19. Experts inside and outside government warned that the question was not if, but when the next disease would strike. Reflecting the realization that an effective nation for biothreats requires inter-agency cooperation between many federal and state agencies, Obama administration built on Bush the administration plans to create a “Manual for Early Response to Emerging High-Consequence Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”

The Trump administration abandoned the playbook and in 2018 abolished the Global Health Security and Biodefense Directorate. So when COVID hit, the government didn’t have a map for who was supposed to do what. However, Trump insisted: “Nobody knew there was going to be a pandemic or an epidemic of this magnitude. No one has seen anything like this before.”

From the beginning, Trump downplayed the danger posed by COVID. Speaking to reporters in February, Trump said, “We’ve got them very much under control in this country… Very interestingly, we haven’t had any deaths.”

Worried about the next election, Trump played down the severity of the virus. Recently, he alleged:

We had the country going, even before the entry of COVID, at a level that no one had ever seen. And even if you go all four years, it was so good that even with that terrible blackout that destroyed the world, I had the greatest four years. The economy was so great. The jobs numbers were the best ever, etc.

The following chart shows job growth by president since then Truman. Job growth under Democratic presidents is shown in blue, under Republicans in red. We split Trump’s results into two: Trump1 shows the results for Trump’s first three years. Trump 2 shows job loss in his final year.

The chart shows moderate job growth in Trump’s first three years, continuing a trend set by the Obama administration. This was more than offset by job losses in 2020, for a net Trump of -1,856,000. Giving up on Trump’s 2020 jobs record leaves a respectable jobs record, surpassing all Republicans other than Reagan and Nixonbut falling below that of most Democratic administrations. This is not “the greatest economy in the history of the world”.

The president’s job growth

In 2021, PolitiFact: decided to investigate Trump’s claim. Her conclusion? “No, Donald Trump did not run the ‘largest economy in the history of the world.’

The strongest evidence in favor of demand, PolitFact concluded, is the unemployment rate. The graph below shows US unemployment since 1948 (in yellow) and Wisconsin unemployment since 1976 (in green). The yellow and green dotted lines show the lowest national and state unemployment rates since 1976. To find an unemployment rate lower than that found in Trump’s first three years, we would have to go back to the 1950s.

Interestingly, Wisconsin’s lowest unemployment rate occurred during the period Biden administration, not Trump’s.

US unemployment rate and Wisconsin

In terms of job growth, we’ve already seen that even excluding 2020, most Democratic presidents have done better than Trump. He also pointed to other factors that suggest Trump’s record has failed:

• GDP growth was only “so-so”.
• The federal deficit has grown under Trump
• Wage increases were modest compared to the 1960s.
• The low interest rates came from the Federal Reserve, a sign that the Fed considered the economy shaky.

Even ignoring the mismanagement of the COVID challenge, Trump’s record on the economy cannot lead to “the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Because of Trump’s intransigence on COVID, unemployment rates in his last year have risen to historic levels.