This week, much of the story that the White House likes to tell about its economic record fell apart.

It’s not just that growth appears to have slowed, though it has. On Friday, the Commerce Department reported that the country’s gross domestic product expanded at a middling 2.1 percent annual rate during the the second quarter, down from 3.1 percent over the first three months of 2019. This was only a preliminary estimate, a guesstimate really; the government will gather more data and revise that number in the coming months. But it was clearly worrisome to Donald Trump, who tried in vain to put a glass-half-full spin on the news while also placing blame for any weakness on his nemeses at the Federal Reserve.

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