MICHAEL BARONE: Either Trump is delivering on his economic promises, or he’s very lucky.

Is President Trump fulfilling candidate Trump’s promises?

You can make a case that he is, based on some surprising and widely unexpected economic developments. Vice President Mike Pence, writing in the Des Moines Register, put it succinctly: “The evidence is clear: America is back.” He adds, “It’s not an accident.”

Pence and other Trump enthusiasts can point to increasing macroeconomic growth. GDP growth ran at a hot annualized 4.1 percent in the second quarter, and for the year it’s up more than 3 percent. Unemployment was down to 3.9 percent in July. The S&P 500 stock index is up 6 percent during the Trump presidency while the rest of the world’s stock markets are down 6 percent. These are numbers any recent administration would boast about.

More notable are positive trends among subgroups who weren’t doing so well before Trump took office. Obama administration chief economic adviser Jason Furman, writing at Vox.com, notes that in the past three years “recent wage growth … at the lower end of the wage scale has been stronger” than among those higher paid. Similarly, Bloomberg columnist and portfolio manager Conor Sen makes the point that job growth has been greatest among “goods-producing workers and the least-educated workers.”

Both Furman and Sen contrast current trends with those in the 1998-2001 period of torrid economic growth, when income gains were concentrated at the top of the economic spectrum and employment gains were concentrated in office jobs and “meds and eds” — the government-financed or heavily regulated healthcare and education sectors.

So maybe growing income inequality isn’t inevitable after all. And maybe the economic prospects of groups clustered at the low end of the economic scale are not as dire as has long been assumed.

Go figure.