President Donald Trump gestures towards members on the media on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2019, after returning from United Nations General Assembly. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Donald Trump is already on the verge of a big milestone. In just half the time, Trump is going to close the DOW with the same amount record closes as former President Barack Obama, but will have done so with just one term while Obama reached his number in two terms.

However, Forbes writer Chuck Jones is already trying to get out ahead of this and develop a narrative that plays down Trump’s success by making the excuses for Obama:

Investors will probably be surprised that during Obama’s Presidency the Dow 30 Industrials had more record closes than Trump has had, 118 vs. 117. While it is true that Trump has only been in office for three years vs. Obama’s eight, as you can see in the graph below Obama’s market had to recover from the Great Recession and its impact on stock prices.

Jones makes the argument that while Obama inherited a failing economy, Trump inherited one that was already on the rise for its eighth straight year:

When Trump entered office he benefited from an economy that was in its eighth year of growth, a stock market that had been consolidating for about two years and was close to an all-time high. Making new highs is much easier in this situation vs. the one that greeted Obama when he took office.

In truth, not only did Obama’s economy climb so sluggishly that sloths were getting bored, economists found that the economy actually shrank 2.9 percent in the first quarter of 2014. As the Daily Caller also reported in 2014, Obama set the record for the slowest economic growth post-World War 2:

Over the first five years of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. economy grew more slowly than during any five-year period since just after the end of World War II, averaging less than 1.3 percent per year. If we leave out the sharp recession of 1945-46 following World War II, Obama looks even worse, ranking dead last among all presidents since 1932. No other president since the Great Depression has presided over such a steadily poor rate of economic growth during his first five years in office. This slow growth should not be a surprise in light of the policies this administration has pursued.

After a massive recession like the one we had, the economy has nowhere to go but up. While Obama may have been in office to benefit from that, the fact is that Obama actually hindered its growth. The average amount of growth for the American economy was 3.3 percent, but Obama’s record growth rate was 2.8.

The truth is, Trump has done more to grow the economy than Obama ever could have, and did so in half the time.