When Donald Trump delivered his prime-time address this week, the very first words out of the president’s mouth were, “Good evening, America. Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess.”
Soon after, the Republican went on to declare, “One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail. Totally fail. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
A day earlier, in an economic speech delivered in Pennsylvania, his vice president pushed a similar line. “I don’t want you to think for one second that because Joe Biden gave us the worst economy in the world that we forget it,” JD Vance said. “No, we know. We know exactly what we’re left with.”
Evidently, they don’t know exactly what they were left with.
The basic elements of this are familiar. Trump and his team have spent far too much time and energy lying to the public about a great many things, including their Democratic predecessor and the state of the U.S. economy — then and now.
But if the White House wants to take this opportunity to pause, reflect and have a public conversation about Team Trump’s inheritance, we shouldn’t just reject efforts to rewrite recent history; we should also acknowledge the facts that Republicans prefer to ignore.
In the last full month of his presidency, Biden took a bow of sorts in a published piece for The American Prospect. “It is worth reviewing the facts on the U.S. economy that I am handing off to my successor,” the retiring Democrat wrote. “Unemployment has been at the lowest average rate of any administration in 50 years. We have created over 16 million new jobs, and more than 1.5 million of those are in manufacturing and construction. Inflation has been brought down close to 2 percent, the same level as right before the pandemic.”
“Incomes are up by nearly $4,000 adjusted for inflation, and unions have won wage increases from 25 percent to 60 percent in industries like autos, ports, aerospace, and trucking,” Biden said. “We’ve seen 20 million applications to start small businesses. Our economy has grown 3 percent per year on average the last four years — faster than any other advanced economy. Domestic energy production is at a record high, and gas prices are around $3 per gallon.”
He wasn’t the only one to have noticed. Last fall, a Wall Street Journal analysis described the state of the Biden-era economy as “remarkable,” which coincided with a Bloomberg analysis that said, “The nation is experiencing a dream combination of strong growth and low inflation.”
There was more where that came from. A month before Election Day 2024, The New York Times reported that the U.S. job market was “as healthy as it has ever been” — as in, in the history of the U.S. — and described economic growth as “robust.” A few days later, The Washington Post’s Heather Long explained in a column, “We are living through one of the best economic years of many people’s lifetimes.” The same day, Politico described the status quo as “a dream economy.”
The Economist, a leading British publication, also described the U.S. economy as “the envy of the world,” adding that the American economy “has left other rich countries in the dust.” Or put another way, when Trump told the nation, “One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead,” he was lying. When Vance insisted that Biden “gave us the worst economy in the world,” that turned reality on its head. In fact, it reached the point that in the days leading up to Election Day 2024, Trump actually started telling the electorate that he wanted credit for all the good economic news, despite the fact that he hadn’t been in office for nearly four years. A year later, with the economy worse than it was a year ago, he’s pretending there was no good economic news. Stepping back, it’s worth appreciating the recent pattern of events: In 2017, Trump inherited a healthy economy from a Democratic president and falsely told the public, “I inherited a mess.” In 2021, Trump bequeathed an actual mess for his Democratic successor and falsely told the public the conditions were “perfect.” And in 2025, after Trump inherited an economy with low unemployment, shrinking inflation and steady growth, the Republican is keeping this going, smearing a president to whom he owes a thank-you note. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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