Last week’s economic data clearly contradicts Donald Trump’s deluded claim that
“we’re celebrating the most successful first 100 days of any administration in American history.”
In a startling turnaround, Trump’s commerce department said on Wednesday that the US economy shrank in the first quarter of this year.
Naturally, Trump returned to the White House at that time, but as usual, he denied any involvement in the unexpectedly negative economic news. Trump, who has always placed blame on others and refused to stand up to his faults, was quick to attribute the decline to Joe Biden. After accounting for inflation, the country’s gross domestic product fell at an annual rate of 0.3% during the quarter.
Trump mentioned the poor first-quarter report during Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, when cabinet secretaries sounded like North Korean officials obediently praising Kim Jong-un. He added,
“This is Biden, and you can even say the next quarter is sort of Biden.”
Trump continued to try to avoid accountability later that day when he told business CEOs,
“This is Biden’s economy.”
Trump was full of it, according to the New York Times, which is quite cautious. Trump “accused his predecessor of handing him a bad economy, despite data showing that growth was strong when he took office,” according to the Times.
Many experts spoke well of the economy as Biden left office. According to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.” “As the only major economy growing faster after the pandemic than before, the US economy is the envy of the rest of the world.”
Economists generally concur that there was only one major factor responsible for the poor first-quarter GDP result, and it was not Joe Biden. Instead, it was the extreme apprehension and anxiety sparked by the possibility of Trump’s tariffs. US companies hurried to boost their imports because they were eager to stockpile foreign goods before Trump’s wave of tariffs. The GDP formula states that rising imports have a negative impact on economic growth.
In a March speech to a joint session of Congress, Trump said that “we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe.” This is just as irrational as his insistence that Ábrego García’s knuckles say “MS-13.”
No analyst was predicting a recession when Biden left office, which is why the announcement on Wednesday that the economy fell in the first quarter was such a shocking reversal. The country’s GDP expanded at a strong 2.4% percent in the fourth quarter of last year, which was Biden’s final full quarter in office. In fact, the US has seen far faster economic development than Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and other G7 countries since the COVID-19 epidemic ended. The Economist magazine featured headlines claiming that the US economy was “the envy of the world” and that it had “left other rich countries in the dust” a few weeks before to election day.
The unemployment rate was a pitiful 4.0% at the end of Biden’s term. In addition, Biden’s four years in office saw a lower average unemployment rate than any other president since the 1960s. Trump gained a lot of support by criticizing Biden’s high inflation rate, which was a real issue. However, by the time Biden stepped down from office, inflation had dropped to just 2.9%, much below its 2022 top of 9% and almost to the Federal Reserve’s inflation target.
