"I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country. And now we have almost no inflation," lied Donald Trump in an NBC New interview on February 4.
Inflation hit 9.1 percent in the summer of 2022 as a consequence of Covid-era supply chain disruptions, but that was not nearly the "worst inflation in the history of our country" and Trump wasn't in office to bring it down. By January of 2025, when Trump was sworn in, inflation had fallen all the way to 3 percent. That was the inflation Trump "inherited." A year later inflation is 2.4 percent, all thanks to the Federal Reserve, at which Trump has continually sniped and griped for its inflation fighting efforts.
Not only did Trump not inherit high inflation, but he also didn't do anything to bring down the modestly elevated inflation he did inherit. Trump, however, is always eager to take credit for the accomplishments of others.
Like with this disparagement of Joe Biden at a rally on Thursday, in which he said Biden "was sleeping while you were trying to get a job. You weren’t working, and now we have the most people working in history."
Now, huh? I wonder why there are so many people working right now. Maybe it's because Biden created an astonishing 15.4 million jobs during his four years as president. It's an all time record; no other president has come anywhere close to that many jobs created in a single term. So what Trump actually did inherit, thanks to Biden, is a country with lots of people working.
What, you might wonder, was Trump's contribution to our "now [having] the most people working in history"? This: Trump added a paltry 359,000 jobs total in his first full 12 months in office, for a dismal average of just 30,000 per month. The "sleeping" Joe Biden averaged 321,000 per month over a full four years. Now that's impressive. (You can get authoritative job creation numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
Trump would like you to think he heroically brought down inflation when he actually had nothing to do with it. There wasn't much remaining by the time he arrived on the scene. And he certainly didn't bring down prices, as he promised he would. (Prices and inflation aren't the same thing.) He'd like you to think the country's record number of people working is his doing too, but his actual performance has been underwhelming, and that's being charitable. He actually had the gall to slander Biden, who really did create unprecedented numbers of jobs. Truly, Trump is a leech and a parasite, always trying glorify himself by taking credit for the accomplishments of others. It's a defining story of his life.
And he thinks you're stupid. He thinks you will swallow whatever he's peddling. I do have to admit, the abject stupidity of his supporters, or at least their stupendous ignorance, is one of the only explanations I can come up with for how Trump gets away with continually spewing outrageous lies, and creating an alternative reality, where he's always the star, that bears no resemblance to the actual one. Such flagrant lying by a president is as unimaginably noxious as it is unprecedented.
I will leave you with the graph below showing total nonfarm employment. It comes from the St. Louis Fed, the Federal Reserve branch responsible for the Fed's economic data. I added my own annotations marking the intervals that Trump has held office. As you can see, in his first term employment continued up at about the same rate as the long term trend Trump had inherited from Obama. So in this and several other respects, Trump can take credit for not screwing up Obama's economy. Which is hardly the economic "miracle" Trump claimed he accomplished. The recovery after the Great Recession of 2008--a catastrophe Obama really did inherit--was one of the longest economic expansions in U.S. history. Trump got in at the end, and promptly took credit for all of it. That's our Donald. Then Covid hit in the final year of his first term, and jobs were decimated. Counting the Covid bloodletting, Trump actually lost millions of jobs over his first term. But fair persons that we are, we won't blame him for those. Suffice to say that Obama created tens of thousands more jobs per month over his final three years as Trump did in his first three.
Now, over a year into his second term, we can see Trump's recent contribution to the employment picture: that pathetic little flat squiggle at the right edge of the graph. That's his contribution to our "now [having] the most people working in history" for which he wants to take credit.
He really is a piece of work, isn't he?
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