From what I've seen republicans tend to ride the coattails of the person before them and *lay claim to what their predecessor accomplished. I don't know enough about that time period to say if that was the case then but it seems likely.
George HW Bush was the last one to leave office while the economy was doing well. It was going fine at the end of George W Bush's first term, then the 2007 housing crash brought it down. Trump's first term ended with the covid lockdowns severely harming the state of things. So... 3 Republican presidencies ago, but that's a lot of years.
Clinton left a booming economy and projections to reduce, if not eliminate, the national debt in 10 years. Then came another Bush. Bush left a shitty economy for Obama, through bullshit tax breaks for the rich during a time of bullshit military spending among other dumb actions. Obama fixed things. trump inherited a booming economy from Obama, and slowly (maybe quickly) ruined it through gross incompetence. Biden inherited a shit economy and inflation from that moron, trump. After dealing with fallout from stupid trump policies (that's being generous), Biden managed to turn things around and the economy was once again doing pretty good. Now that dipshit trump will give his idiot voters and the rest of us another shitty economy that the next Dem will have to try to fix. The wheels on the bus go round and round.
Inflation was on the rise before Trump left office. It continued under Biden for the first two years of his term, but he managed to get key legislation passed in that span of time that has measurably reduced inflation. It's still not back down to what it was pre-pandemic, but we are leading almost every other western democracy in that metric. It really is incredible that people are giving Biden shit for the economy when he is actively fixing the problem, and it shows that the Democrats have a tremendous failure in their ability to do effective messaging.
If it doesn't feel like inflation has been improved under Biden, that's because the price you pay at the gas pump or the grocery store has more to do with what they chose to set their prices at than what the current rate of inflation is. The "vibe economy" is real, but they aren't casting the blame for it at the right people. For once, government did it's job. Who knows if the current trend will continue under Trump, but given that he set off the massive inflationary spending spree by injecting a ton of cash into a booming economy with stimulus checks, I imagine he's not going to care much about the fundamentals of a healthy economy and will instead do whatever makes his donors happy.
Consumers don’t relate low inflation to bad inflation but as you can see the fed wasn’t able to hit its target all of 2020. That’s a really bad sign by itself, the US is very lucky that it never got a true recession/depression.