By
Partway through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia focused attention on an underappreciated story: just how weak the U.S. economy has been since Donald Trump returned to power.
Noting that the Cabinet secretary has been successful in the past, the congressman asked, in reference to recent economic data, “Isn’t this embarrassing?”
Bessent seemed to think he had the upper hand. “I’m sorry, congressman, but you seem not to have seen the economic data. The GDP growth has been quite substantial, job growth is solid.”
When Beyer tried to present the treasury secretary with facts, Bessent replied, “No, no, no.”
The trouble is, reality was on the Virginia Democrat’s side, whether the president’s treasury secretary realized it or not.
Some political debates are subjective and deal with gray areas; this is not one of them. Bessent referenced the gross domestic product, for example, which broadly reflects economic growth. That was a poor choice: The GDP shrank in the first quarter of 2025, marking the worst quarter for the U.S. economy in three years.
What’s more, Bessent told Beyer more than once that American job growth is “solid.” What he neglected to mention is the truth: Over the first five months of 2025, the U.S. economy — according to the Trump administration’s own data — has added 619,000 jobs. That’s not awful, but over the first five months of 2024 (when Trump said the economy was terrible) the total was 898,000 jobs.
In fact, if we exclude 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, the first five months of this year are the worst since the Great Recession. That’s not a matter of opinion; it’s simply what the arithmetic shows.
If the president and his Cabinet secretaries want to say that they need more time to produce better results, fine. If they want to say conditions will improve in the coming months and years, once their regressive policies and radical trade tactics take root, they’re welcome to make their case.
But that’s not what they’re saying. On the contrary, not only did Bessent pretend the bad news is good, leading to a rather brutal real-time fact-check from Beyer, but Trump has spent recent weeks acting like a cheerleader who’s pretending his team isn’t losing.
Last week, for example, confronted with the worst job growth in 16 years, the president wrote to his social media platform, “GREAT JOB NUMBERS.” Earlier in the week, he added that “our Economy is BOOMING!”
I wish that were true, but the evidence clearly suggests otherwise.