Did Trump handle the economy well (Pre-COVID)?

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Not really, most of the progress of 2017 - 2019 was merely a continuation of the previous trend, despite his tax cuts and the roaring stock markets. Wage growth and job creation over the 2017 to 2019 period looked an awful lot like how it did over 2014 to 2016.

In fact, his trade wars that began to ramp up in late-2018 began to drag on the macroeconomy, and the manufacturing and transportation sectors saw job creation stagnate in 2019 as some industries began laying off workers (and that's after the sectors saw net employment increase by 600k+ over 2017 and 2018). Business investment ticked up at a normal pace in 2017 and 2018 despite the tax law and then fell quite noticeably over the course of 2019. Business PMIs were falling quite sharply in 2019 to levels that were worse than the manufacturing mini-recession of 2015-16 and on par with levels seen in 2009.

Furthermore, the tax cuts combined with increased spending drove up the value of the US Dollar, further worsening our trade deficit as exports fell slightly but imports increase notably.

So by his own fake-populist economic standards, he failed.

There's also the question marks surrounding the high levels of corporate debt that were run up over the decade, along with the weird Fed interventions in the repo markets in late-2019, which may be related to the Trump administration loosening the Volcker Rule, which would make sense if credit markets became less liquid because banks were suddenly free to engage in previously-restricted trading activities and went all-in on this at the same time.

Doesn't necessarily mean that we would have had a recession in 2020 without COVID-19, because consumers were ultimately resilient (but this was accomplished by them taking on more debt, particularly credit cards and auto loans). But the light version of his key economic policies put stress on the real economy and if he really ramped up his trade war even further, it would have started to be an even bigger drag and would have been noticed.

I'd say the economy was "okay" over the 2014 - 2019 period, but what few economic policies the Trump administration enacted via regulatory changes or managed to pass through Congress were ultimately harmful. And ultimately, the fundamental problems and imbalances were not solved, but rather worsened during the 2017 - 2020 period.