Originally Posted by
GothamCity
The stock market will always trend upwards barring some massive collapse of the entire global economy. There, of course, will be depressions and recessions throughout, but the overall trend is always upwards. It's rather difficult for a President to have dramatic impact on the economy. Barring some massive new sweeping regulation, tax cut, or a stimulus package, the economy tends to keep on churning.
We're 30 months into to Trump's presidency. Since he took office, the DOW has gone up 37.6%
(Under other presidents at 30 months, ranked top to bottom)*
Roosevelt: 138.1%
Eisenhower: 60.8%
Obama: 51.8%
Clinton: 42.2%
Ford: 40.6%**
Trump: 37.6%
Bush 1: 29.1%
Reagan: 26.6%
Johnson: 17.8%
Truman: 9.9%
Kennedy: 7.3%
Nixon: -9.3%
Carter: -11.3%
Bush 2: -15.2%
Based on the DOW under all presidents since the Great Depression, we can see that Trump is currently 6/14. We're not dealing with massive drains on our economy for wars like we saw under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Ford had massive spending cuts on the Vietnam war within the first year of his presidency, and we can see it reflected as men returned home and started to contribute to our economy. Eisenhower begun to escalate at the tail end of his presidency, and we see quite a dip in response which carries into Kennedy's short time in office. Carter inherited a bad recession and Bush 2 did everything in his power to combat what he saw as terror in the middle east, which caused a lot of economic damage (coupled with the dot com bubble). Reagan and Bush 1 did all right, but trickle down does not really stimulate much growth, so they had okay numbers. Trump, so far, is mainly riding off of the policies enacted under the Obama administration, barring the one large tax cut which has notably slowed the growth of the stock market. Right up until he did that, he was basically matching pace with how Obama was doing. Since then he's lagged quite a bit behind.
I think if Trump reverses his tax cut and basically reverts to Obama-era economic policy, things will be fine. While Obama was no economic genius, in the course of his eight years, the DOW and economy grew tremendously. The stock market only did better under two other presidents since the Great Depression - Clinton and Roosevelt. Unfortunately it is unlikely their policies would be overly effective in the modern era. We've seen Trump's attempt at policy making only slow growth.
* Most economists like to look at a larger picture than 30 months, so this kind of evaluation will be more useful at the end of Trump's presidency, as some of the people beneath him did much better towards the end of their terms, and some above him tanked downwards
** Ford was only in office 29 months, but his 29th month outperformed Trumps by 6.7%, so I placed him above