Presidential reputations rise or fall with gross domestic product. The state of the economy can determine if presidents are re-elected, and it shapes historical memory of their success or failure.
In the news media, we often use the handover of power as the time for assessing the economic record of the departing president. (I’ve done it myself recently.) Some economists have predicted that the Trump administration could create the next recession or financial crisis. And scholars have studied the relative economic conditions generated by Republicans and Democrats for predictive meaning (Democrats have done better since World War II, they found).
But the reality is that presidents have far less control over the economy than you might imagine. Presidential economic records are highly dependent on the luck of where the nation is in the economic cycle. And the White House has no control over the demographic and technological forces that influence the economy
The lines and phrases in the excerpt that suggest that redemption and danation are predestined and cannot be changed by human choice The reward of sin is death: that's hard.
