As ive repeated said, The Current Administration, is riding the waves created by the prior administration, as history always shows, no matter what the talking heads spew.

The economy is just one of several areas where Trump repeatedly claims credit for conditions or policies implemented under his predecessors. He has bragged about reductions in air and water pollution that were the result of presidents going back decades. He has claimed credit for a reduction in lung cancer deaths based on a decades-long study that ended the year he took office. Perhaps most famously, he has repeatedly ― and falsely ― boasted about passing the “VA Choice Act,” which allows veterans to get medical care at private facilities if wait times are too long at Veteran Affairs clinics, even though it was signed into law by Obama.

But the economy is the one issue that could determine whether Trump succeeds or fails in his attempt to win a second term ― and his boasts about it are consistently misleading and, at times, simply false.

Trump repeatedly brags that unemployment among African Americans is at historic lows. While that was correct in August and September, the unemployment figure has risen since then, according to federal statistics. More broadly, the trend lines for both African Americans and Latinos show a steady decrease from the end of the 2008-09 recession, through the Obama presidency and to the present day, with no significant change in the slope of those graphs when Trump took office in January 2017.

“He’s largely riding trends he inherited,” said Jared Bernstein, once the chief economist to former Vice President Joe Biden.