Inheriting a Mess

Trump just said: "I inherited a mess. At home and abroad. A mess.... no matter where you look, a disaster... we'll take care of it. I just wanted to let you know- a mess."

• And at home, we were facing a financial crisis that just about every credible economist said had the potential to plunge us into another great depression, an economic crisis that was producing stagnant wages, falling incomes, and a shaken middle class, and a deficit crisis that was saddling our children with a mountain of debt. That's what we inherited when we came in. -- Barack Obama, September 29, 2010.
• "We inherited a recession. The first three quarters of my Presidency were negative growth. That means it's a recession." -- George W. Bush, August 24, 2002
• "Now they want to hold us accountable for all the messes that we inherited from them. At least we can hold them accountable for the decisions they've taken in the last 21 months." -- Bill Clinton, November 7, 1994
• "Who can remember any other time in this country when we faced double-digit inflation, a trillion-dollar debt, 21 1/2-percent interest rates, and the highest peacetime tax burden in our history, all at the same time? Yet, that's exactly the situation that we inherited 20 months ago." -- Ronald Reagan, October 6, 1982
• "I said 2 years ago that we would remove fraud, waste, and corruption from the Government, and we are doing it-not overnight; it took a long time to create the mess that we inherited and we can't eliminate it in 1 year." -- Jimmy Carter, September 27, 1978
• "Why have they [prices] gone up? Very simply: because the previous administration, over a period of years, had spent far more than the tax system would produce with full employment. And when you do that, when you have runaway spending in Washington, you have runaway prices at home. And I say, let's get the big spenders out of Washington and get the savers into Washington." -- Richard Nixon, October 19, 1970 
• The times demand that all of us solve problems which at times appear to some of us to be unsolvable, problems that we inherited, problems that are thrust upon us by years of injustice and years of neglect. -- Lyndon Johnson, June 10, 1968