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It’s not uncommon for Democrats to note that Donald Trump left the White House with the worst record on job creation since the Great Depression, with a net loss of over 2 million jobs over four years. Technically, that’s true, but I’ve never been altogether comfortable with the talking point because it lacks context.
To be sure, if we simply tally up all of the monthly job totals from January 2017 (the month of Trump’s inauguration) to January 2021 (the month he grudgingly stepped down), the results look dreadful: The Republican was the only president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with the United States having fewer jobs than when he came in.
But the context matters: To arrive at this conclusion, one has to include the Covid-era data, when the pandemic sparked a sudden and sharp recession. To hold Trump directly responsible for the fact that the U.S. economy lost over 20 million jobs in April 2020 has never struck me as altogether fair.
A better assessment, I’ve long argued, is to focus on the first three years of Trump’s term, which have never been as amazing as he’s claimed.
The GOP candidate, however, has apparently concluded that my approach is all wrong — and that there’s no reason to exclude the 2020 data. Trump sat down with personal-finance author and radio host Dave Ramsey this week and boasted:
“I had the country going, just prior to Covid coming in, at a level that nobody had ever seen. And even if you go all four years, it was so good that even with that terrible interruption that destroyed the world, we had the greatest four years. The economy was so great. The job numbers were the best ever, et cetera.”
None of this is true. Not even a little.
If we exclude 2020, and focus just on the former president’s first three years, Trump’s economic record appears fine, but underwhelming. Job growth during the Republican’s first three years, for example, not only fell short of his pre-election promises, they were also lower than the job growth from Barack Obama’s final three years in office.
How has Trump explained why job growth slowed down after he took office? So far, he hasn’t. Instead, he claims the job numbers “were the best ever,” which is demonstrably wrong.
Meanwhile, 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.
But in light of his latest comments, if we take the former president’s advice, “go all four years,” and include the 2020 data, all of the data looks even worse.
I’m mindful of the fact that Trump might very well win a second term, largely because Americans have been told ad nauseum that his economic record is amazing. But reality tells a very different story.