Trump didn't create a booming economy. He inherited one from Barack Obama
Donald Trump knows that no one ever went broke underestimating the attention span of the American public. That’s why, almost immediately upon attaining the Oval Office, his revisionist history went into overdrive. He declared he’d inherited an economic disaster from President Barack Obama. Then, just eighteen months later, he was claiming he’d “accomplished an economic turnaround of historic proportions.” Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump continued to regularly tweet that he’d cleaned up President Obama’s economic “mess.” As with just about all of Trump’s pronouncements, these were lies. But Trump and his advisers clearly believe that If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it. So even as the Dow Jones average approached its all-time high in 2024 under President Joe Biden, Trump continued to claim credit, asserting that—three years after he’d left office—this was still the “Trump” stock market. As he runs for election again, both Trump and his surrogates now routinely parrot the claim that he created the “greatest economy in history.” But the hard data belie Trump’s claims. The reality is that Obama inherited from George W. Bush an economic collapse that rivaled the Great Depression, and then proceeded (with the help of Congress and the Federal Reserve) to rectify it, setting the U.S. economy on a continuous, steady upward trajectory that Trump’s administration simply maintained—for a time. And while Trump can’t really be blamed for the global economic shutdown that occurred in 2020 as a result of the pandemic, he doesn’t deserve any special credit for simply taking up what his predecessor left for him. Although it may be difficult for Americans to recall, at the time Obama was elected, unemployment stood at a staggering 10%. At the time he left office that figure was 4.7%. That, among many other reasons, was why Obama would have undoubtedly defeated Trump in 2016, had the U.S. Constitution allowed him the opportunity for a third term in office. At the time of Trump’s election, as described by Ben White, writing for Politico, the U.S. under Obama was experiencing a robust economy, “with the lowest jobless rate in nearly a decade, record home and stock prices and a healthy growth rate.” Nor did Trump perform any economic miracle once he became president. Even allowing for the massive reduction in unemployment that the country experienced as it climbed out of Bush’s crisis, jobless numbers during Obama’s second term continued to drop by 3.3%, a rate nearly triple what America experienced under the first three years of Trump’s single term (unemployment dropped just 1.2% during those years). Meanwhile, the country’s GDP growth during the last four years under Obama was 2.4%. In Trump’s tenure (pre-pandemic) that figure was 2.5%. As former White House communications director Jen Psaki explained in 2018, “A buffoon could have kept the recovery going.” And in fact, Trump managed to do just that. As Politifact laconically put it in February 2020, as the country teetered on the precipice of what turned out to be the worst public health crisis in a century, “The performance under Trump has generally continued the pace of improvements that began during the final few years of Obama’s presidency.” No more, no less. Trump is currently running TV ads in swing states claiming “we had more in our pockets when Trump was president.” And for Americans on the lower end of the economic ladder, stubborn inflation and corporate price-gouging absolutely continue to eat into their paychecks. Inflation is caused by a number of factors, many of them still redolent in a global economy continuing to reorient itself from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and the supply and labor disruptions it wreaked on every nation on this planet. Meanwhile those in the U.S. with 401ks and other retirement vehicles are generally experiencing substantial gains because of the resurgent stock market. But Trump’s claim is clearly intended to suggest that Americans were generally wealthier during his administration. Obviously, thanks to the pandemic, that was not the case for most Americans during his final year in office. During the COVID-19 crisis the financial situation of millions of Americans was preserved mainly due to stimulus checks enabled primarily by Democratic-sponsored Senate legislation, an effort that was continued by Biden. But even for Trump’s first three (pandemic-free) years, the economic gains experienced by Americans were the product of an economic recovery well underway during Obama’s tenure. That is not to say some people did not become obscenely wealthy during Trump’s term in office. In fact, a few billionaires definitely did. As explained by Ben Steverman, writing for Bloomberg News, the .000006% cohort of the U.S. population who qualify as billionaires had “increased their combined wealth by a staggering $1 trillion” after Trump’s four years in office. That was almost
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Donald Trump knows that no one ever went broke underestimating the attention span of the American public. That’s why, almost immediately upon attaining the Oval Office, his revisionist history went into overdrive. He declared he’d inherited an economic disaster from President Barack Obama. Then, just eighteen months later, he was claiming he’d “accomplished an economic turnaround of historic proportions.” Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump continued to regularly tweet that he’d cleaned up President Obama’s economic “mess.”
As with just about all of Trump’s pronouncements, these were lies. But Trump and his advisers clearly believe that If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it. So even as the Dow Jones average approached its all-time high in 2024 under President Joe Biden, Trump continued to claim credit, asserting that—three years after he’d left office—this was still the “Trump” stock market. As he runs for election again, both Trump and his surrogates now routinely parrot the claim that he created the “greatest economy in history.”
But the hard data belie Trump’s claims. The reality is that Obama inherited from George W. Bush an economic collapse that rivaled the Great Depression, and then proceeded (with the help of Congress and the Federal Reserve) to rectify it, setting the U.S. economy on a continuous, steady upward trajectory that Trump’s administration simply maintained—for a time. And while Trump can’t really be blamed for the global economic shutdown that occurred in 2020 as a result of the pandemic, he doesn’t deserve any special credit for simply taking up what his predecessor left for him.
Although it may be difficult for Americans to recall, at the time Obama was elected, unemployment stood at a staggering 10%. At the time he left office that figure was 4.7%. That, among many other reasons, was why Obama would have undoubtedly defeated Trump in 2016, had the U.S. Constitution allowed him the opportunity for a third term in office. At the time of Trump’s election, as described by Ben White, writing for Politico, the U.S. under Obama was experiencing a robust economy, “with the lowest jobless rate in nearly a decade, record home and stock prices and a healthy growth rate.”
Nor did Trump perform any economic miracle once he became president. Even allowing for the massive reduction in unemployment that the country experienced as it climbed out of Bush’s crisis, jobless numbers during Obama’s second term continued to drop by 3.3%, a rate nearly triple what America experienced under the first three years of Trump’s single term (unemployment dropped just 1.2% during those years). Meanwhile, the country’s GDP growth during the last four years under Obama was 2.4%. In Trump’s tenure (pre-pandemic) that figure was 2.5%.
As former White House communications director Jen Psaki explained in 2018, “A buffoon could have kept the recovery going.” And in fact, Trump managed to do just that. As Politifact laconically put it in February 2020, as the country teetered on the precipice of what turned out to be the worst public health crisis in a century, “The performance under Trump has generally continued the pace of improvements that began during the final few years of Obama’s presidency.” No more, no less.
Trump is currently running TV ads in swing states claiming “we had more in our pockets when Trump was president.” And for Americans on the lower end of the economic ladder, stubborn inflation and corporate price-gouging absolutely continue to eat into their paychecks. Inflation is caused by a number of factors, many of them still redolent in a global economy continuing to reorient itself from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and the supply and labor disruptions it wreaked on every nation on this planet. Meanwhile those in the U.S. with 401ks and other retirement vehicles are generally experiencing substantial gains because of the resurgent stock market.
But Trump’s claim is clearly intended to suggest that Americans were generally wealthier during his administration. Obviously, thanks to the pandemic, that was not the case for most Americans during his final year in office. During the COVID-19 crisis the financial situation of millions of Americans was preserved mainly due to stimulus checks enabled primarily by Democratic-sponsored Senate legislation, an effort that was continued by Biden. But even for Trump’s first three (pandemic-free) years, the economic gains experienced by Americans were the product of an economic recovery well underway during Obama’s tenure.
That is not to say some people did not become obscenely wealthy during Trump’s term in office. In fact, a few billionaires definitely did. As explained by Ben Steverman, writing for Bloomberg News, the .000006% cohort of the U.S. population who qualify as billionaires had “increased their combined wealth by a staggering $1 trillion” after Trump’s four years in office. That was almost entirely due to Republicans’ mass tax giveaway to the wealthy in 2017, which Trump eagerly signed into law. Those tax cuts were designed to solely benefit the country’s wealthiest Americans, the corporate CEOs and otherwise uber-wealthy individuals who bankroll Republican political campaigns, which is why the Republicans barely mentioned them going into 2018 elections.
But those tax cuts did not translate for ordinary Americans. And while in 2018 they provided a temporary boost to the stock market (akin to a “sugar high” as many termed it), within two years the economy had reverted to the same “trends that predated implementation of the tax cuts and were inherited from the Obama administration.” Meanwhile, contrary to Republicans’ claims that these cuts would “pay for themselves,” they are currently on track to explode the country’s national debt by another $2 trillion.
Those massive tax cuts—and their consequences for the country’s future—are the most significant difference between Trump’s 2016-2019, pre-pandemic economy and the economy that President Obama cultivated during his eight years in office. And while Americans may understandably have trouble remembering just how strong the Obama economy was at the time he departed, what they might want to consider instead are the implications should Trump be allowed another opportunity to cut the taxes for the nation’s wealthiest. Those are the same taxes that allow Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to remain solvent, and pay directly for innumerable government services and benefits most Americans take for granted.
As economists are fond of pointing out, the performance of the economy is mostly a consequence of events that presidents cannot control. Thus, most presidents tend to operate as stewards, carefully managing all the various unexpected crises and the domestic and global repercussions that befall their terms in office, with a view toward maintaining the nation’s economic growth. Obama governed in this manner, as has Biden, and both have the numbers to show for it. Trump, however, has shown no such forbearance, either in his appalling response to the COVID-19 pandemic or in his pet policies before that catastrophe occurred. His specific economic plans should he be elected again have been characterized as potentially disastrous.
Americans’ memories may be short, but there is one basic fact they ought to keep in mind. This country has sustained two successive economic calamities during this century, in 2008 and 2020, both occurring under Republican administrations. In both circumstances, it was the Democrat—Obama in 2009 and Biden in 2021—who succeeded in pulling the economy and this nation out of a very deep, dark hole left to them by their Republican predecessor. So Americans ought to ask themselves, which party has proved itself competent at managing the economy, and which has not?
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