A leech and a parasite

 "I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country. And now we have almost no inflation," lied Donald Trump in an NBC News interview on February 4.

Inflation hit 9.1 percent in the summer of 2022 as a consequence of Covid-era supply chain disruptions, but that was not nearly the "worst inflation in the history of our country," and Trump wasn't in office to bring it down. By January of 2025, when Trump was sworn in, inflation had fallen all the way to 3 percent. That was the inflation Trump "inherited." A year later inflation is 2.4 percent, all thanks to the Federal Reserve, at which Trump has continually sniped and griped for its inflation fighting efforts.

Not only did Trump not inherit high inflation, but he also didn't do anything to bring down the modestly elevated inflation he did inherit. Trump, however, is always eager to take credit for the accomplishments of others.

Like with this disparagement of Joe Biden at a rally on Thursday, in which Trump said Biden "was sleeping while you were trying to get a job. You weren’t working, and now we have the most people working in history."

Now? I wonder why there are so many people working right now. Maybe it's because Biden created an astonishing 15.4 million jobs during his four years as president. It's an all time record: no other president has come anywhere close to that many jobs created in a single term. So what Trump actually did inherit, thanks to Biden, is a country with lots of people working, for which he's suggesting you should give him credit.

What, you might wonder, was Trump's contribution to our "now [having] the most people working in history?" This: Trump added a paltry 359,000 jobs total in his first full 12 months of his second term, for a dismal average of just 30,000 per month. Joe Biden, who Trump denigrated as "sleeping," averaged 321,000 per month over four full years. Now that's impressive. (Authoritative job creation numbers are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

Trump would like you to think he brought down historically high inflation when it wasn't historically high and when he had nothing to do with bringing it down. And he certainly didn't bring down prices, as he promised he would. (Prices and inflation aren't the same thing.) He'd like you to think the country's record number of people working is his doing too, but his actual job creation performance has been underwhelming, and that's being charitable. He actually had the gall to slander Biden, who really did create unprecedented numbers of jobs. Truly, Trump is a leech and a parasite, always trying to adulate himself by taking credit for the accomplishments of others.

And he must think you're stupid, that you'll swallow whatever he's peddling, as so many seemingly do. I have to admit that the abject stupidity of his hardcore supporters, or at least their stupendous ignorance, is about the only explanation I can come up with for how Trump gets away with continually spewing his noxious lies, and creating made-up realities that feature his godlike accomplishments. He's the ultimate con-man, and everybody is a mark. Can millions really be so gullible?

Because Trump wants credit for how many people are now working, I will leave you with the graph below showing total nonfarm employment since 2008. It comes from the St. Louis Fed, the Federal Reserve branch responsible for the Fed's economic data. I added my own annotations marking the intervals that Trump has held office. As you can see, in his first term employment continued up at about the same rate as the long term trend Trump had inherited from Obama. There was no jolt of job creation under Trump. (In fact, job creation actually slowed a bit.) So in this and other respects, Trump can rightly take credit for not screwing up Obama's economy.

Which is hardly the economic "miracle" (his word) Trump claimed he accomplished in his first term. The recovery after the Great Recession of 2008—a catastrophe Obama really did inherit—ended up becoming one of the longest economic expansions in U.S. history. Trump got in at the end, and promptly took credit for all of it. That's our Donald. Then Covid hit in the final year of his first term, and jobs were decimated.  (20 million lost in a single month, April 2020.) Counting the Covid bloodletting, Trump actually lost 3 million jobs net over his first term.

But fair persons that we are, we won't blame him for those. Yet even when we only look at Trump's first 37 months, before Covid, we see that Trump substantially underperformed Obama over adjacent intervals. (You'll need to refer to the tabular job creation data from BLS for the details, or see my previous post which gives the numbers.) Then Biden came along and obliterated all job creation records. "Sleepy Joe's" massive accomplishment is so cognitively dissonant to Trump's all-consuming self-aggrandizing ego that he simply creates his own made-up reality, and baldly lies in the face of all evidence.

Now, over a year into his second term, we can see Trump's recent contribution to the employment picture: that pathetic little flat squiggle at the right edge of the graph. That's his contribution to our "now [having] the most people working in history," for which he wants to take credit.

He really is a piece of work, isn't he?

 

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