President Trump insisted, ‘we’ve done maybe the best job ever in the first year.’
Last night in an interview with Sean Hannity, President Trump repeatedly insisted the state of the U.S. economy was “unbelievable.” That is an accurate term, in the sense that the president keeps insisting Americans are living in a “golden age,” and a majority of voters do not believe him.
“I think we’ve done a great job,” Trump insisted. “We’ve done maybe the best job ever in the first year.”
So I had the, the most successful economy in the world in my first term. We did great. I think that was the single biggest. I had that, but that was for a much shorter period of time. It’s not as good as this one. But that was the reason I believe that we were so successful.
We had great jobs. We had great everything. We had the greatest economy. This economy will blow it away. I believe this economy’s gonna blow it away, but we have that, and now, we have it for 10 years.
This morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the newest unemployment report for the month of December, with little change from the previous month. The unemployment rate dropped from 4.5 percent to 4.4 percent, but total employment increased by just 50,000 jobs. One economist characterized the current state of the economy as “no-fire, slow-hire.”
Are those terrible numbers? No, but they’re not the sort of numbers that generate a widespread sense of a roaring economy. Including the December numbers (which will get revised in the coming months), the U.S. added 584,000 jobs in 2025; that comes out to about 48,600 per month. As CNN notes, “outside of recession years, that’s the weakest annual job growth seen since 2003.”
Yes, an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent is low by historical standards. Yes, the most recent GDP number of 4.3 percent was good, and yes, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is projecting an even better figure for the current quarter. Yes, the stock market has been on a tear for the past year and gas prices have declined in recent months.
But while there are indisputable bright spots in the economy, Americans do not feel like they are experiencing a thriving economy.
But the December Marist poll found 61 percent of Americans express that the economy is not working well for them personally, including 37 percent of self-identified Republicans. The same survey found 70 percent of Americans say the cost of living in the area where they live is not very affordable or not affordable at all.
President Trump is apparently genetically incapable of describing any part of his record as anything less than the best ever. This is going to be a major problem from Republicans as they head into the midterm elections, as Americans do not feel like they are living in a “golden age,” and the president will keep insisting to voters that they’ve never had it so good.