The Trump effect is even clearer on the economy. Despite predictions of doom, the stock market has prospered since Trump entered office. The boom seems not to be correlated with any real change in fundamentals, such that the Federal Reserve expressed concern in Federal Open Market Committee minutes released Wednesday. Consumer confidence is also at its highest point since 2000. Hiring is up, too.

Why? The economy was already on a positive trajectory under President Obama, but that doesn’t explain the Trump stock boom. Nor has the new president done anything major to affect the economy. He has promised serious reductions in regulations, a large stimulus in the form of infrastructure spending, and tax reform, but none of these have happened yet. The stock market, though, seems to be pricing in the effects of some of those promises being fulfilled, despite skepticism among political observers that he can actually pull any of this, much less all of it, off. And the president keeps claiming credit for improvement—whether that’s job numbers that follow Obama-era trends, or corporate expansions that predate his election.

The economy is an interesting case where Trump may benefit from deep polarization. Democrats and other anti-Trump voters came into his administration with a more positive view of the economy, and developments since then—from employment stats to the stock market—continue to validate that. Trump voters, however, were much bleaker coming in, but turned more optimistic with their candidate in the Oval Office. As a result, Americans on average are feeling much better about their economic prospects—and may be investing in hiring, or opening their wallets at the store, in response. That may stimulate demand, leading to further gains.

Trump’s ability to bend reality to his will, at least in the short term, also manifests itself in the media sphere. For days, the White House has tried to shift the press narrative away from his aides’ alleged collusion with Russia, a matter actually under FBI investigation, to whether Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice acted improperly in seeking names of Trump team members intelligence reports. Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s heckling didn’t do much to get reporters to cover it. But on Wednesday, when Trump called New York Times reporters into the Oval Office for an interview focused on infrastructure, he complained about the paper’s lack of attention to the story—and, when questioned, affirmed that he thought Rice had committed a crime. The paper ran a suitably measured headline—“Trump, Citing No Evidence, Suggests Susan Rice Committed Crime”—but Trump had succeeded getting the nation’s leading paper to assign new prominence to the Rice story.

A central element of each of these examples is that Trump can act alone. They don’t require him to convince any recalcitrant congressmen, spend any money, or implement any complicated overhauls. All he has to do is open his mouth or log onto Twitter. This makes for an agile, flexible strategy, but it also has the limitation that it cannot directly change underlying realities. He can only seek to improve confidence, and then hope that stimulates economic spending, or deters illegal immigration, or furthers whatever other goal.