Exactly. The problem with Trump isn't the economy, at least not yet, and probably never--it's the fascism. Certainly the economy could help discredit him if it goes bad, but if you can't figure out another viable approach to opposing him, you need to think harder or get someone else to help.
I'll add that I think a lot of Trump's policies are bad for the economy, but in ways that matter a lot in aggregate over time but aren't necessarily salient to voters.
Seriously, I agree with you the economy is good and it will take a while for it to become less good. But the economy was good in 2004 and voters thought it was bad. Why is it different now?
My default is just something like "we don't have a good understanding of how inflation lags get processed into economic sentiment."
People were mostly mad about prices being high, and didn't seem to care that the prices have not increased much *recently*.
Yes. the long term damage, while pretty clearly going to happen, isn't going to be visible or salient to even most involved voters, nor is the magnitude obviously predictable. The way you know it's bad is the historical record of such things across time and space, not observation.
I'm genuinely confused that liberals find it incomprehensible that voters might care about inflation *over the course of a President's term* instead of just the last year
It's not like voters are all *that* hard to model. Sure it might not be true that Biden was to blame for the inflation during his term. That's not really relevant to whether voters blamed him for it - they did.