Criteria for a successful Trump administration

Great Debates
1

I take it as given that there is no shortage of anti-Trump and pro-Trump threads (and anti-Trump statements in pro-Trump threads and vice-versa), but I’m hoping to bypass the feelgood scorn and feelgood praise and boil down to plain and hopefully undisputed numbers.

For those among us, myself included, who have said they’d be wiling to give Trump a chance to prove himself, this is a challenge to put goalposts on that, to see how serious the offers are and if they are fairly given with the implied promise that if he meets these goals, we will (perhaps grudgingly) call his administration a success. Similarly, for Trump supporters who (not unjustly) say we opponents should give him a chance, I invite them to also put down goalposts with the implied promise that if he fails to meet these goals, they will (perhaps grudgingly) call his administration a failure.

I suggest that anyone who feels inclined to invoke Trump tweets, or jokes about Trump, or remarks that Republicans will never do anything positive or that Trump opponents are “butthurt” and will never give him a fair chance… pretty-please, with sugar on top, go the fuck somewhere else. I hope this thread to be about hard numbers and reasoned arguments about which numbers are more important.

That said, and in an effort to avoid accusations of cherry-picking, I’m not going to blindly google for a “list of key economic indicators”, using that exact phrase. The first hit I get is here and I will attempt to summarize. Naturally, I invite discussion that some indicators in this list should be dropped and others added.

Leading Indicators (i.e. ones with some value in forecasting the state of the economy)

  1. Stock Market
  2. Manufacturing Activity
  3. Inventory Levels
  4. Retail Sales
  5. Building Permits
  6. Housing Market
  7. Level of New Business Startups

Lagging Indicators (i.e. indicators of past performance, useful for tracking trends)
8. Changers in GDP
9. Income and Wages
10. Unemployment Rate
11. Consumer Price Index (Inflation)
12. Currency Strength
13. Interest Rates
14. Corporate Profits
15. Trade Balance
16. Value of Commodity Substitutes to U.S. Dollar (i.e. gold, silver etc. prices)
There are other potential indicators we might use to judge Trump’s administration against others, i.e. number of U.S. combat deaths, number of terrorist attacks against, U.S. holdings and allies, number of illegal immigrants in the U.S., number of Americans with health insurance as long as there is a definite number involved, or a per-capita number as indicated.

I’m going to start looking at the 16 indicators above and try to determine for each:

  1. Where the numbers currently are and what direction they have been trending
  2. What would be “good” levels for these over the next four years, indicating Trump success.
  3. What would be “bad” levels, indicating Trump failure.

As an example, the first one on the list (“Stock Market”) is probably pretty easy. If the DJIA (currently flirting with 20,000) reaches 30,000 or higher by January 2021, I will credit Trump with a win for that indicator. If it falls to 10,000 or lower before January 2021, I will call that a Trump loss. If anyone want to suggest other values (or other indices) for other reasons, feel free to share.

I’d like to keep this discussion relatively civil and relatively numbers-based but after this initial post, it’s up to the respondents, if any. Thank you.

2

It seems like the majority of your criteria boil down to “Will Trump be good for corporations?” which might be an overly simple definition of success. For instance, by those measures, I could be the greatest president of all times by outlawing unions, the EPA, OSHA, etc…

I would also add non economic factors as well.

[ul]Percentage of population living in poverty conditions.[/ul]
[ul]Average life expectancy.[/ul]
[ul]American/Foreign deaths due to war.[/ul]
[ul]Ranking of U.S. education system.[/ul]

And of course, some non-objective measures like

[ul]Quality of supreme court nominees.[/ul]
[ul]Quality/quantity of research being done.[/ul]

3

I’d say these criteria are better than the economic criteria since they are both things under control of the executive to the extent they are under anyone’s control and also things made prominent by his campaign.

I think DJIA going up or down by 50% doesn’t necessarily mean that the President had anything to do with it (although I’d use the S+P myself.) I sometimes do bring up the market with people who claim that the economy did bad under Obama, not as a way to say that Obama did actually implement great policy, but as a counterargument to the claim that he implemented bad economic policy.

4

The President doesnt have much to do with the top portion of your list. He cant make people get higher education nor job training. He cant stop unhealthy life choices. He has very little control over foreign deaths due to war and cant stop an attack that might cause American deaths. Education is a state issue…

The quality of Supreme Court nominees will come down to our individual ideologies…some will find Sotomayer brilliant while others will have thought Scalia brilliant. And the President doesnt directly control research in the USA.

For some liberals (just as for some conservatived in 2009) nothing Trump could due will make him a success. But its in all our interests that he suprise us and be a good President.

5

Not quite fair. The same could be said for many metrics politicians claim credit for when things go well (and handwave away when they go poorly). Such as many of the economic metrics you listed.

He definitely has some control over policy decisions which may influence education (esp at higher levels) and job training.

HRC (as SOS) was definitely credited with American deaths in Benghazi by a big chunk of vocal people. Are you suggesting POTUS Trump should not be held responsible for Americans killed by attacks? As a candidate, he promised to make people safer.

6

Bernie Sander’s campaign was largely about making it easier for people to go to college. The stop smoking campaigns were run out of the Surgeon General’s office and saying that the President doesn’t have an impact on number of foreign deaths due to war is bizarre [See Iraq: 2003-20??]. At this very moment, Trump is impacting research by promising to “reign in pharmaceutical companies”. No company will invest in research if the government won’t let them reap a profit. Finally, the DoEducation has a huge impact on schools.

As the father of young children, I would be ecstatic to stand here eight years hence and admit that I was worried about nothing, that my kids will inherit a safer, stronger America but these are the things I will be basing that assessment off of.

7

Number of campaign promises kept, regardless if they are considered good or bad.

8

I would certainly consider it a success if Trump has the U.S. military kill fewer people in the Middle East. In the Obama Administration, drone strikes alone killed at least 2,436 and probably many more. Throw in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya…, the war by proxy in Yemen, and so forth, and it adds up to quite a lot of deaths. (Though probably still far fewer than in Dubya’s administration.) So if President Trump can end at least some of those wars and bring the total number of people killed down, that would be cool.

Plus, if Trump kills fewer Muslims than Obama did, that would be quite embarrassing for certain parties who have been screeching about hateful and violent Trump is towards Muslims.

9

By what criteria is Obama’s presidency judged? I would suggest using those criteria. If you don’t have a baseline to compare against, then the measurement is meaningless. That is, if we create some massive list that has never in the past been used to measure the success of a president, how will we know whether Trump was a success or failure vs our list was unrealistic or too simplistic?

I’d say put a few economic indicators in there like unemployment rate and wage increase (from start to end of term), GDP growth. Put some softer measures in there like job approval rating. I like the idea of counting number of deaths due to war and “overseas adventures”, but do we have those numbers for Obama? Percent below the poverty line should be in there.

10
  1. Not let Russia annex neighboring countries.
  2. Not gut the EPA beyond recognition
  3. Come up with, and implement, a workable “alternative” for the ACA
  4. Have Mexico pay for any wall he decides we need.
  5. Appoint rational people to the Supreme Court (even if they’re not the ones I would have picked)
  6. No major ethics scandal.
  7. Learns to speak in something resembling complete sentences with a discernible point.
11

Whether or not he gets re-elected.

12

From Trump’s point-of-view, this has to be the main criteria.

Mussolini, or at least his party, was re-elected. I don’t believe Trump is a fascist, but, just sayin’.

Juan Perón, who maybe was more like Trump, also was re-elected.

13

Well, the intent was that they’d be measurable indicators of success, hopefully reasonably objective. For example, how do you benchmark the “quality of supreme court nominees”?

Your suggestions for these:

… seem viable for benchmarking. I can see the value of allowing some to be situational, in the sense that if the U.S. was hit by another 9/11-type attack, a military response (and subsequent casualties) would be expected of any president and not necessarily a reflection on Trump. Of course, it may turn out there’s no way to use casualties as a benchmark without adding so many qualifiers that its usefulness is questionable.

14

Sure - whatever statistical measure we might use to evaluate Trump, collect similar data for Obama and (for completeness) Bush43 and Clinton. It might be unfair to reach back as far as Bush41 and Reagan, given how much of the economy was geared toward Cold War strategy in their days.

15

I don’t see job growth on the OP’s list; this is distinct from the unemployment rate. Example here:

(I think population growth means ya gotta subtract ~ 90,000 from that number if you want net new jobs.)

16

I was gonna say, base it on his approval ratings. If he does well in the court of public opinion, then (although it’s circular logic) that defines a “successful” administration.

17

I’ll be happy to do that. :smiley:

18

Shit. I’ll consider it a success if he manages to not start a nuclear war in the next 4 years. Anything else is just icing.

19

DJIA is not a good measure of the market as a whole. It’s used mostly for historical reasons. S&P500 is a much better one.

And I would say that your bounds are too big and uneven. A win should be anything approximating the long-term trend line, and a loss anything significantly below.

Trump said we’d see 4-5% growth in the economy (well above recent historical trends). If the stock market flatlines for 4 years, that’s a loss. If it drops by 50%, that’s a fucking catastrophe. If it goes up by about what it has in the past, that seems like a win to me. I mean, maybe his economic policies aren’t gangbusters, but at least they didn’t fuck things up too badly.

20

Trump has said he’ll encourage coal mining and he’s known to vehemently oppose wind turbines (don’t know about solar panels). Never mind climate change or Paris agreement. Still I think the trend away from coal and toward renewable energy and efficiency is unstoppable and will accelerate with or without Trump support.

So perhaps not exactly indicators of a “successful” Trump administration but these are indicators I’ll follow.

  • Total installed wind capacity in GW, wind generation over a year or 12mo in TWh, % of total electricity generation in the USA (Wiki)

  • Total estimated solar capacity in GW, estimated solar generation over a year or 12mo in TWh, % of total electricity generation (Wiki)

  • Coal production (Wiki)

  • % of electricity generation from coal (Wiki)

  • USA carbon emission form energy production in total, per-GDP and per-capita (EIA)