Copyright MSNBC
During Donald Trump’s latest interview on Fox News, host Laura Ingraham heard the president claim the current U.S. economy is “as strong as it’s ever been.” She asked a reasonable follow-up question: “Why are people saying they’re anxious about the economy?” He questioned the premise. “I don’t know that they are saying that; I think polls are fake,” Trump replied. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” The rhetoric was wrong but familiar. During his interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last week, the president similarly boasted, “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country, but my second term is blowing it away.” A couple of weeks earlier, during a White House meeting with the Cabinet, he also declared, “We have the best economy we’ve ever had.” To hear Trump tell it, the current state of the economy isn’t just amazing, these are quite literally the single greatest economic conditions ever seen by American eyes in the history of the United States. Sure, there have been a great many boom eras over the course of many generations, but according to the Republican incumbent, they all pale in comparison to the magnificence of the 2025 economy. At this point, I could spend several sentences explaining why these boasts are demonstrably ridiculous, pointing to sluggish economic growth, stubbornly high inflation, a weak manufacturing sector and the slowest U.S. job growth since the Great Recession. I could point to a series of recent independent polls, each of which have found widespread public dissatisfaction with the health of the economy, with most Americans blaming the president for having made conditions worse. We could even kick around the political significance of Trump’s apparent indifference to Americans’ attitudes, reinforcing the larger pattern of him appearing hopelessly out of touch with the lives of real people. But there’s another dimension to this that’s just as notable, and that’s too often overlooked: The president isn’t merely failing to tell the truth, and isn’t only failing to persuade the public to distrust their lying eyes, he’s also failed to convince his own economic team. Last week, for example, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent conceded to CNN that there are “sectors” of the U.S. economy “that are in recession.” A few days later, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council and one of the most influential voices in Trump’s inner circle on economic policy, admitted during a Fox Business interview that the U.S. employment market is “a little bit softer right now” than officials would prefer. In that same interview, Hassett went on to endorse Bessent’s line: “[W]e’re starting to see pockets of the economy that look like they might be in a recession.” The line from the Republican administration is increasingly divided against itself. Either Trump is right and the U.S. has “the greatest economy” in the nation’s history, or Trump’s economic team is right and the job market is struggling amid signs of a recession. It can’t be both.
