Donald Trump is not a shoo-in for 2020

In the distant, half-forgotten yesteryear of January 2019, Donald Trump was bound to lose the next election. There was no money forthcoming for his wall against Mexico. There was, come to think of it, no federal government at all, bar the workers who toiled without pay during a shutdown of his own choosing. He had lost a defence secretary and a chief of staff within weeks of each other. Pressed to name Washington’s most commanding septuagenarian, most would have cited speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.

Even at the time, the Trump slump struck some of us as rather routine for midterm. Once he had presidential rivals to define himself against, ones with names and faces, not just the “generic Democrat” of polling fame, his genius for invective was always going to tell. It has. The reluctance of special counsel Robert Mueller to indict him was another boost. The economy’s impertinent refusal to slow down as much as some had forecast also helped. Mr Trump is now stronger than at any point in his presidency.

There is a faint line, however, between correction and overcorrection. As Washington depopulates for the summer, that line is being crossed. There is exuberance on the right, the beginnings of despondency on the left and, among foreign observers in business and diplomacy, a sighing resignation to a second term of president Trump.

Some of this is “recency bias”: he is on a roll of little victories. Some of it is post-2016 trauma: having failed to see that result coming, no one wants to be caught out again. Either way, it is hopelessly premature.

After the longest economic expansion in US history, Mr Trump remains unpopular. It does not follow that a recession in 2020 would finish him off. If the relationship between economics and politics were as clockwork as that, the incumbent Democrats would not have lost amid a boom in 2016. All the same, a president supervising 4 per cent unemployment should expect to go into an election year with a cushion of goodwill. Instead, according to Fivethirtyeight, Jimmy Carter is the only postwar president with a worse net approval rating at this stage. Mr Trump either trails or barely leads the main Democratic candidates in head-to-head polls. He has no buffer against adverse events.