Opinion | Why Americans Are Feeling Better About the Economy – The New York Times

In 2022, Republicans seemed to have an easy path to regaining the White House, no actual policy proposals required. All they had to do was contrast Donald Trump’s economic record — which they portrayed as stellar — with the lousy economy under President Biden.

That rosy view of the Trump economy involved a lot of selective forgetting — more about that in a minute. But the Biden economy was indeed troubled for much of 2022, with the highest inflation in 40 years. Jobs were plentiful, with unemployment near a 50-year low, but many economists were predicting an imminent recession.

Since then, however, two terrible things have happened — terrible, that is, from the point of view of Republican partisans. First, the economy has healed: Inflation has plunged without any major rise in unemployment. Second, Americans finally seem to be noticing the good news.

Before I get to that, however, let’s talk for a second about Biden’s predecessor. How can people claim that Trump presided over a great economy when he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he arrived?

The answer, mainly, is that Trumpists want us to give him a mulligan for 2020, when the economy was devastated by Covid-19. Strangely, though, they don’t want to give Biden a similar mulligan for 2021-22, when lingering disruptions from the pandemic played a large role in inflation. (Those disruptions finally eased in 2023, leading to last year’s “immaculate disinflation.”)

Yet Trumpists don’t want to forget 2020 entirely. They still talk about how gasoline cost less than $2 a gallon, which was true for only two months in 2020 — months when the unemployment rate was over 13 percent. Funny how that works.