In His "official" announcement speech, Trump continued to lie because his actual record is not something worth bragging obout
Trump falsely claimed, as he has previously done almost 300 times, to have passed the “largest tax cut and reform in the history of our country by far” despite the 2017 tax cut ranking below several others. He also boasted once more to having presided over the “greatest economy.” Annual average growth, even before the coronavirus pandemic decimated the economy, was lower under Trump than under recent former Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.
Abandoning all subtlety, the Republican at one point declared that he and his team “built the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
Before we get into why this is so bonkers, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the significance of the lie. For Trump and many of his allies, this is the linchpin to the Republican’s success: Many voters, they believe, might be bothered by Trump’s corruption, bigotry, ignorance, incompetence, mismanagement, abuses, affection for dictators, divisiveness and overt rejection of democracy, but there’s a significant chunk of the electorate that will prioritize their wallets above all other consideration
Even if we exclude the pandemic-related recession in Trump’s final year in the White House, the Republican’s economic record is underwhelming. Job growth in his first three years in office actually slowed when compared with job growth from Barack Obama’s final three years in office.
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.
The point is not that the economy was awful during Trump’s first three years. Rather, by every relevant metric — job growth, economic growth, wages, manufacturing, et al. — the economy was mediocre by contemporary standards.
To believe that the former president was responsible for “the greatest economy in the history of the world” is to believe a ridiculous and demonstrable lie
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