Trump's task is to convince voters that the bad numbers that so define America today - COVID deaths, lost jobs, and protests - are Joe Biden's fault and not Trump's.
Let's start with facts. This table shows the number of deaths from protests and from pandemics, and the number of jobs created or lost in the economy inherited or passed on.
The 1 death during the protests at Ferguson was Michael Brown's, the young man whose death triggered the protests. If more teenage white supremacists with AK-47s show up at protests, the death toll from these 2020 protests could continue to rise, making the contrast even more stark.
And of course 1,000 Americans are still dying of COVID every day. A safe prediction is that between 200,000 to 300,000 Americans will have died from COVID by election day.
The job market each president inherited is an interesting metric. There were ways to calculate this that made the difference even more dramatic but I chose a simple measure: how many jobs were created in the twelve months before Obama or Trump took office?
The economy Obama and Biden inherited was in free fall. They were sworn in on 20 January 2009 and in that month the economy destroyed 784,000 jobs. Trump inherited an economy in the midst of the longest run of uninterrupted job creation in history. In the month that Trump was sworn in - January 2017 - the economy created 969,000 (yep, nearly a million) more jobs than the month in which Obama was sworn in. How much is a million? In a great decade the American economy creates about two million jobs per year. The two presidents inherited vastly different economies. So are the economies each passed on. (Or in Trump's case, will pass on.)
In the twelve months before Obama and Biden took office, the economy lost 4.3 million jobs. They handed off an economy to Trump and Pence that had created 2.5 million jobs in the previous year. Obama and Biden inherited a train wreck and passed along an economy that was on track for the longest uninterrupted streak of job creation on record.
What has Trump done with this inheritance? In the last 12 months the American economy has destroyed 11.3 million jobs. The economy Obama and Biden inherited - one that had destroyed 4.3 million jobs in the previous year - was the worst in a lifetime. The one Trump is about to pass on is more than twice as bad.
(It is worth noting that the man's main measure of productivity has gone up, though. Trump is tweeeting 6X as often as he did in his first six months in office - 33 times a day - so you can't really say that he's done nothing.)
The numbers under Trump are awful. Americans are traumatized by his leadership and incredibly dissatisfied with the way things are going. Trump is going to tell his loyal followers what he tells them about all facts: these are fake. He's going to tell the swing voters, these numbers are Biden's fault.
The number of people who believe him is the most important number of all: that will determine in which direction these numbers go during the next four years.
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