Assuming that Trump doesn’t blunder us into a global thermonuclear war and get us all killed, I do wonder what future historians will make of the Trump Administration. One phenomenon that they are likely to note is that Trump’s presidency would have been more successful if he’d done absolutely nothing.

When Trump took office in January 2025, the U.S. economy was the envy of the world, according to The Economist. Inflation was coming down, More than 2 million jobs had been added in 2024 (2.2 million jobs, an average of 186,000 per month, down from 2023’s average of 251,000), which was not spectacular but certainly respectable. Compared to most other nations still struggling to recover from the Covid restrictions, the U.S. was doing great. What can stop the American economy now? The Economist asked.

Well, it turned out to be Donald J. Trump. Inflation has gone up, not down. U.S. job growth has slowed significantly. 2025 was the weakest year for job growth since 2020, adding only about 584,000 new jobs.  February 2026 saw an unexpected loss of 92,000 jobs, driven by declines in manufacturing, construction, and healthcare, with the unemployment rate rising to 4.4% (it was 4% in January 2025). Much of this economic weakening comes directly from Trump’s stupid tariffs and the way he gets off on playing tariff god and changing them frequently, making it impossible for businesses to plan for future business.

Now he’s discovered that having a military is fun!  So he gets us involved in a war in Iran, and today headlines are screaming that oil prices are soaring. Way to go. Even a reasonably bright high school student could have seen that coming.

If he’d just coasted on the economy Joe Biden had set up for him — as he coasted on Barack Obama’s economy in his first term — he would have looked good. His dimwit followers would have given him all the credit for continued economic stability and growth. Now, who knows? The nation will almost certainly be much poorer once he’s done with it.

His poll numbers are bad, but not nearly as bad as they should be if we assume most U.S. adults are bright enough to be able to eat with a fork and tie their own shoes. Michael Tomasky writes that the myth of Trump’s competence doesn’t seem to die.

We’ve seen numerous examples in these last 13 months of Trump’s mendacity and malevolence. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans will never see him that way. There are those who adore him unconditionally, but beyond these dead-enders, there are others who know he’s not a good person but aren’t all that bothered by it.

That’s hard for millions of us to accept. But I hope to God that these people are finally starting to move themselves toward the conclusion that, even if they aren’t that troubled by the mendacity and malevolence, the man is just wildly incompetent. A mountain range of mythmaking has gone into creating the Trump persona over the years; by him, by a pliant business press in his real estate days, and, since he entered politics, by a right-wing media that would make the old Soviet press agencies blush and a party of cowardly sycophants, most of whom know very well that he shouldn’t be in charge of a high-volume McDonald’s, let alone the executive branch of the federal government, but would rather let the country collapse than say so.

I remember a conversation I had with a Biden White House official in the spring of 2024, when Joe Biden was still running. I was asking about Trump’s weaknesses, and this official said something to me that may stand as the single most depressing couple of sentences I’ve ever had directed at me in 30-plus years of covering politics. We’re not going to dislodge people’s belief that he’s a great businessman, this official said; forget it. It’s hardwired in there, and undoing it, for a significant percentage of the people, just isn’t going to happen.

Remember how we were yelling at the media about “sanewashing” all through 2024? Remember all the times news stories didn’t bother trying to explain to people that Trump clearly doesn’t know how tariffs work?  I sincerely hope a lot of news people are rethinking how they cover politics.

Trump’s actual record as a businessman is a rolling disaster. This was reported in a lot of print media, but people getting their news from television would never have heard the truth about how badly and how frequently Trump failed at business. Before he began hosting The Apprentice in 2004, he was in so much debt it’s not entirely clear what was keeping him afloat. There are rumors he was getting lifelines from the Russian mob, who used him for money laundering purposes. The Apprentice put him back on his feet and sold him to the American public as some kind of business genius, which he never was. I bet most Americans still don’t realize how badly they were bamboozled.

Can anyone think of anything Trump has done these past 15 months that actually made life in the United States better? Nothing is coming to my mind. Everything he does just makes everything worse, from destroying the East Wing and screwing with the Kennedy Center to stripping millions of American of their health care and food benefits to starting a stupid war. If he is so worried about the midterms he should have tried to be a better POTUS. But he doesn’t know how. If he’d just done nothing but show up in his office in a suit and take part in an occasional medals ceremony or ribbon cutting he’d be in better shape politically than he is now. And so would the nation.