In JD Vance’s most recent Fox News interview, the vice president gave Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law a sneak peek into this year’s State of the Union address. The president, Vance said, would tout the “Trump boom” in the economy.

That’s going to be a tough sell.

There’s already ample evidence the American mainstream isn’t buying what the White House is selling. The latest national Associated Press poll found just 39% approved of Trump’s handling of the economy. The latest Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll showed similar results.

The problem is not just public perception, though. There are a variety of metrics to consider when evaluating the economy, but let’s consider the three benchmarks that are arguably the most important.

Jobs: It was just a couple of weeks ago when we learned that (excluding the 2020 pandemic) the first year of Trump’s second term was the worst for U.S. job creation since the Great Recession. If we exclude years in which the economy fell into recession, 2025 was the worst year for U.S. job growth since 2003. To date, the White House has made no effort to explain why job growth in the United States got so much worse after Trump returned to power. (The unemployment rate also inched higher in 2025, which the president also hasn’t explained.)

Economic growth: Just last week, the public learned that the nation’s gross domestic product grew at a pace of 2.2% across all of 2025, down from 2.8% in 2024. Excluding the pandemic, the first year of Trump’s second term showed the weakest economic growth in the U.S. in nine years. The White House hasn’t explained why this happened, either.

Inflation: There are a handful of ways to measure inflation, but most people simply focus on the Consumer Price Index, which, according to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is down to just 1.4%.

I have no idea how Miller arrived at this statistic, but in reality, during the latter half of Joe Biden’s tenure, inflation fell sharply, dropping from 9% in July 2022 to 3% in January 2025. Over the course of Trump’s first year, the rate fluctuated, before reaching 2.4% last month — which is well above Miller’s claim and above the 2% threshold eyed by the Federal Reserve.

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To be sure, there are other relevant metrics, such as wages, where Trump’s promises have also fallen short, but the bottom line remains the same: Evidence of a “Trump boom” doesn’t appear to exist.

And yet, the president continues to play make-believe, insisting again at a White House event on Monday that American eyes have never before seen an economy as good as the one that exists right now.

It comes on the heels of Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, telling Fox News that the U.S. economy is “perfect.”

The more the president and his team try to tell Americans not to believe their lying eyes (or in this case, wallets), the more the White House appears hopelessly out of touch on the one issue the public cares about most.