Donald Trump’s 2024 kickoff speech came as a surprise to no one: The former president has effectively been running a national campaign all year, and last night’s announcement simply made official what we already knew. Similarly, the fact that the Republican lied throughout his remarks was similarly predictable.
A variety of worthwhile fact-check reports were published overnight, and they’re well worth your time to fully appreciate the avalanche of dishonesty Trump dumped on his audience. But a New York Times report highlighted a claim of particular interest.
Trump falsely claimed, as he has previously done almost 300 times, to have passed the “largest tax cut and reform in the history of our country by far” despite the 2017 tax cut ranking below several others. He also boasted once more to having presided over the “greatest economy.” Annual average growth, even before the coronavirus pandemic decimated the economy, was lower under Trump than under recent former Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.
Abandoning all subtlety, the Republican at one point declared that he and his team “built the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
Before we get into why this is so bonkers, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the significance of the lie. For Trump and many of his allies, this is the linchpin to the Republican’s success: Many voters, they believe, might be bothered by Trump’s corruption, bigotry, ignorance, incompetence, mismanagement, abuses, affection for dictators, divisiveness and overt rejection of democracy, but there’s a significant chunk of the electorate that will prioritize their wallets above all other considerations.
And for those voters, a president who’s responsible for creating “the greatest economy in the history of the world” looks pretty good, no matter the costs to the country or our system of government.
It’s why we’ve heard so many GOP officials, many of whom really ought to know better, echo Trump’s lie. Sen. Chuck Grassley, for example, last year credited Trump with creating the best economy “in 50 years.” Around the same time, Sen. John Barrasso said the former president’s policies “brought us the best economy in my lifetime.” Sen. Pat Toomey added that he saw “the strongest economy” of his lifetime during Trump’s tenure. The GOP senator concluded, “That’s just an indisputable fact.”
Except, it’s not a fact at all.
Even if we exclude the pandemic-related recession in Trump’s final year in the White House, the Republican’s economic record is underwhelming. Job growth in his first three years in office actually slowed when compared with job growth from Barack Obama’s final three years in office. Economic growth during the Trump era — again, before the Covid crisis — wasn’t bad, but it failed to reach 3% GDP growth, it fell short of the kind of growth we saw under other modern presidents, and it didn’t come close to the growth the Republican promised to deliver during his 2016 campaign. The point is not that the economy was awful during Trump’s first three years. Rather, by every relevant metric — job growth, economic growth, wages, manufacturing, et al. — the economy was mediocre by contemporary standards. To believe that the former president was responsible for “the greatest economy in the history of the world” is to believe a ridiculous and demonstrable lie.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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