Bloomberg

For a president’s electoral health, nothing beats plain old approval ratings. Gallup, FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics, and HuffPollster each collect all the polls out there and compile simple or more complex averages of the surveys; FiveThirtyEight has a useful comparison to all polling-era presidents, from Harry Truman through Trump, so it’s easy to see where Trump ranks historically through the same number of days of his presidency.

Trump’s first year was a public opinion disaster — he was almost always the lowest-ranked president. His second year was better. He rallied into the low 40s for most of the year, sometimes even moving up a bit higher as we reached a point in their presidencies where one of Trump’s predecessors had slumped.

However, the shutdown and other bad news ends Trump’s second year back at or below 40 percent. And his disapproval rating, which has been the worst of any president all along except for a single day, has moved back over 55 percent.

A simple measure of presidential performance takes account of just two variables: approval rating and the Dow. The argument for APDOW, as we might call it, is that public opinion matters, because it captures the wisdom of crowds, and that the performance of the stock market matters, because it provides one measure of how the economy is doing.

In terms of public opinion, 2018 was a bad year for Trump — not worse than 2017, but not better. His average approval rating has been around 41 percent, which is far lower than that of Barack Obama and George W. Bush (and also Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson).

In terms of the Dow, 2018 was also pretty awful, with a 5.6 percent decline — the worst since 2008.

Trump doesn’t deserve all of the blame for his APDOW score, but it’s bad: a D+ for public approval, and a C- for the Dow.

Trump has the dubious distinction of being the first leader among the Group of Seven (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, U.K., U.S.) to see the deficit widen on his watch as a percentage of gross domestic product during a synchronized global expansion. It ballooned from 2.2 percent in February 2016 to 4.3 percent in November 2018, the most precipitous deterioration since 2008 when the financial crisis triggered the worst recession since the Great Depression. This measure, which tracks the relationship of deficits and growth, had improved more under Obama than any president since 1980, and only Clinton saw perennial deficits transformed into annual surpluses. Under Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts — the biggest rewrite of the Internal Revenue Service code in 30 years by the Republican Congress — the trend is reversing amid lower-than-forecast tax receipts, less-than-anticipated wage gains, a declining birth rate and an aging workforce. During the past year, when gross domestic product growth accelerated and unemployment reached an 18-year low — an achievement unmatched in the slower-growing G7 — federal revenues from corporate, payroll and personal income taxes fell by 2.7 percent, or $83 billion, from 2017. The last time U.S. growth approached 3 percent, in 2015, tax revenues increased 7 percent. If growth falters, as many economists predict, Trump will be the first president to preside over perennial deficits exceeding $1 trillion.

As a candidate, Trump promised to lighten the regulatory burden and, as president, he seems to be delivering.

The most meaningful measures of changing regulatory burdens come from the QuantGov project, which tracks words like “shall” and “must” that create legal obligations in government manuals. In Trump’s first year, the data showed a significant slowdown in the growth of federal rules, which grew by only 0.6 percent, compared to 1.6 percent in 2016.

Last year, the number of restrictions actually fell for the first time since 1996, dropping by about 1 percent. That’s only the fourth time since 1970 that the number of regulations has declined.

Rather than a true drop, however, last year actually represented a flat year for regulatory growth. That’s because a big chunk of the decrease came from simple housekeeping. The Dodd-Frank financial regulation act passed in 2011 made the Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision obsolete, transferring its regulatory roles elsewhere. In October, the Treasury took its now-superseded rules off the books.

“There have occasionally been single years of no growth or even negative growth, but I can’t think of any time that’s happened two years in a row,” said Patrick McLaughlin, director of policy analytics for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the project’s creator.

Trump and some of his top advisers believe that naive free-trade policies have led to high trade deficits that have cost Americans money and manufacturing jobs. In 2018, this theory was put to the test.

The administration imposed trade restrictions. As its policies started to be implemented, two things happened: Manufacturing employment rose, and so did the trade deficit (especially the trade deficit in goods). The administration is, naturally, crowing about the first trend.

But the second trend should lead it to question its theory. If trade restrictions don’t lead to lower trade deficits, isn’t the administration’s case for imposing them much weaker? And if rising trade deficits are compatible with rising manufacturing employment, should we care so much about those deficits?

Even if the trade deficit in itself doesn’t deserve as much attention as it gets, I’ll be looking at it over 2019, because it does matter how Trump reacts to it.

Trump vowed to get U.S. multinational corporations to bring back their foreign cash piles. That was one of the goals of his tax reform package.

But, as is his wont, Trump wildly exaggerated the amount of cash the reform would bring back by allowing companies to pay a one-time, 15.5 percent tax on profits they’d hoarded overseas. “We expect to have in excess of $4 trillion brought back very shortly,” he said in August.

There was never so much to start with. The overseas cash pile of U.S. public corporations was estimated at $1.4 trillion at the end of 2017. Even adding in non-cash assets purchased with the overseas profits, $2.5 trillion would have been a more plausible number.

Even less money than that has come back — a total of $557.1 billion in the first three quarters of 2018.

Data for the fourth quarter aren’t available yet, but the negative trend shows that companies are gradually running out of cash they’d like to repatriate. Their foreign subsidiaries need cash, too — and certain jurisdictions and schemes still offer companies better terms than Trump’s tax reform. Besides, companies have been having trouble getting refunds from the government on repatriation taxes they’ve overpaid.

Still, the return of more than half a trillion dollars to the U.S. economy is no small achievement.

There were 12.8 million people (seasonally adjusted) working in manufacturing in the U.S. in December, up 473,000 from when Trump was inaugurated. Since March 2010, when manufacturing employment hit its lowest level since 1941, the sector has added almost 1.4 million jobs — the biggest manufacturing job gain since the late 1970s. All this should be understood in the context of 6 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010, and an economy in which manufacturing now accounts for just 8.5 percent of jobs, down from 30 percent in the 1950s. But all in all, it’s pretty great, and the manufacturing job gains have accelerated since Trump took office. If you’re judging his presidency by this metric, it is so far a clear success.

Trump promised an economic turnaround in the four Rust Belt states that flipped red in 2016 — Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It hasn’t materialized. The unemployment rate in all four states was already low; it has since fallen somewhat, just as it has for the country as a whole. Yet there are still no signs of a pickup in the labor force, with the combined labor force in all four states only up slightly over the past two years.

While we don’t have the data at the state level, for the country as a whole whatever pickup in labor force growth we’ve seen seems more concentrated with women than men.

The cyclical improvement in the labor market that began under Obama have continued in the first two years of the Trump administration, and that’s welcome news. But Trump supporters had hoped for more than a continuation of the Obama recovery. It’s still hard to find evidence of that in the data.