Trump has made a lot of claims at Davos — especially about the US economy. Here's the truth behind the bluster

One paradox is that manufacturing is the area where you can see Trump’s impact most clearly — and it’s negative

For a president who says daily that the US economy is roaring, Donald Trump’s spending a lot of his time in Davos pointing fingers at everybody else.

In a speech Tuesday and a CNBC interview Wednesday morning, the president argued that the economy is the best ever, and that the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes last year cost the Dow Jones Industrial Average between 5,000 and 10,000 points. He said 2%-plus growth in gross domestic product would be 4% had the central bank not raised interest rates, before cutting them again in 2019. He also blamed the weather, General Motors’ strike, and Boeing’s safety problems with the 737 Max.

“The American consumer has never been so rich,’’ Trump told CNBC’s Joe Kernen, in an interview where Kernen sold Trump’s impact on the U.S. economy harder than the president did. “[Growth] will be higher than 2%. A lot of people are thrilled with that. I’m not, We had a lot happen.”

So, do we have triumph or disaster here?

In fact, for a president who wants to stake his re-election effort on the economy, Trump’s numbers are average — in key ways, practically identical to what happened during Barack Obama’s second term. To the extent Trump makes a difference, he’s been a modest negative.

As a Brit who had a way with words put it, Trump’s economy is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Let’s zoom in first on the “signifying nothing” part. It’s stunning how closely the key stats of Trump’s first three years, just completed this week, resemble the growth path he inherited.

Job growth under Trump has averaged 191,000 new positions per month. Under Obama, that was 217,000 a month in the second term.

Under Trump, GDP growth has averaged about 2.5% a year (fourth-quarter 2019 GDP hasn’t been announced yet), with its best year being 2.9% in 2018. Under Obama, growth averaged 2.2% a year in the second term, with its best year being 2.9% in 2014. A modest fourth quarter and early-2020 slowdown, which most forecasters expect, would make these numbers match almost perfectly.

“The Trump economy is seeing a boom that has never been seen before — by three-year olds,’’ Pantheon Macroeconomics chief economist Ian Shepherdson said.

Under Trump, the Standard & Poor’s 500 has risen 53%, including dividends, or 15.4% a year. Under Obama, it was 74% in his second term, for 14.9% yearly. (Stocks more than tripled the market’s low in March 2009, six weeks into his first term, by the time Obama left, or 18%-plus with dividends).

Now let’s talk about the tale told with lots of sound and fury.

This would be Trump’s argument that he alone has revived manufacturing. But manufacturing job growth is running negative in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan — those states which handed Trump his 2016 electoral college victory. The same applies to his argument that he has reversed the so-called war on coal, building jobs and consumer spending through deregulation.

Trump told CNBC the economy has added 700,000 manufacturing jobs in his term. Actually, it’s 469,000, of which only 5,000 have arrived since July. For Obama’s second term, the number was 372,000, with a 14,000-job dip in the last year of his presidency, when China’s economy wobbled.

The paradox is that manufacturing is the area where you can see Trump’s impact most clearly -- and it’s negative.

According to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Trump’s trade policies helped take 6% off the S&P 500 in the first 11 months of 2018, a year that produced the only annual decline in US stocks since 2008. Surveys of manufacturing purchasing managers show slumping demand into late 2019, which purchasing managers blamed on trade tensions.

Through all this, the trade deficit Trump vowed to shrink has widened. With the president telling CNBC his next trade fight will be with Europe, prospects for manufacturers’ peace of mind aren’t great.

The greatest argument for Trump’s irrelevance has been his other prized cause — the energy industry, especially coal.

Energy has been the focus of Trump’s putatively job-creating deregulation policy, including the cancellation of Obama’s plan to prod utilities to phase out coal to fight climate change. The New York Times in December counted at least 44 Trump administration rules designed to lighten the load on producers of coal, oil and natural gas.

The result? Coal use for power dropped 23% in 2019 alone, according to the US Department of Energy, as wind became the cheapest major electricity source thanks to improving technology. Energy was the worst-performing sector in the S&P 500 in 2019.

So when Trump says — as he has — that “the coal industry is back,” his words are as empty as his suit. Prices — specifically, cheap wind power — matter much more.

This brings us to the fact that the economy is still Trump’s number one argument for re-election. The unemployment rate is at a historically low 3.5% — even if he did inherit a 4.7% rate that was dropping faster than it is now, that’s a talking point. Polls show a majority of Americans approve of his economic stewardship, even as they disapprove of him in general.

But Americans are smart enough to sort out coincidence from causation. The numbers above are no more than the lived experience of Americans who understand the Trump economy is the one he inherited -- warts and all.

Only voters, then, can decide whether all the other sound and fury Trump generates is reason enough to send the idiot home to Florida.