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Former President Donald Trump appears in an ad by his campaign that criticizes his opponent, Kamala Harris, over the economy. (Screenshot)
As Election Day nears, former President Donald Trump released an ad chock-full of economic claims.
Many are misleading or wrong.
Here’s a look at some of the claims in his Oct. 25 ad, "Never Quit."
This is a falsehood Trump said repeatedly during his presidency. (The Washington Post Fact Checker found that this was Trump’s second-most-commonly repeated false claim, shared 295 times during his presidency.)
In inflation-adjusted dollars, the 2017 tax bill Trump signed was the fourth-largest since 1940, and as a percentage of gross domestic product, it ranked seventh.
This is close to true if someone erases the final year of Trump’s presidency, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Through February 2020, the number of nonfarm U.S. jobs rose by 6.7 million.
If the pandemic period is included, Trump ended his presidency down 3.1 million jobs.
Annual increases in gross domestic product — the sum of a country’s economic activity — were broadly similar under Trump and the final six years of his predecessor, Barack Obama. And GDP growth under Trump was well below that of previous presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Trump has a point that household net worth had hit a new high by the end of his presidency. But he omits an important bit of context: This metric kept rising under his successor, President Joe Biden.
Today, household net worth is 24% higher than it was when Trump left office.
A related metric — household net worth as a share of disposable personal income — shows a similar increase under Biden. This figure is 12% higher now than when Trump left office.
False. Under Trump, the unemployment rate did hit lows unseen since the 1950s, although that rate dipped even lower under Biden.
But other metrics under Trump — including gross domestic product, as noted above — did not break U.S. records.
Adjusted for inflation, wages began rising under Obama and kept increasing under Trump. But economists say these gains were modest compared with what was seen in the 1960s.
Another metric economists use to address this question — the growth in goods and services consumption per person, adjusted for inflation — wasn’t higher under Trump than previous presidents. In Trump’s three years in office through January 2020, real consumption per person grew by 2% a year. Of the 30 nonoverlapping three-year periods from 1929 to the end of his presidency, Trump’s ranked 12th from last.
Trump has a point with inflation. The consumer price index has risen by 19.9% over Biden’s nearly four-year presidency, leaving earnings slightly trailing prices during that stretch. Under the equivalent period under Trump, consumer prices rose by 6.7%.
Economists have told PolitiFact that although some Biden policies exacerbated inflation, the primary drivers were the supply chain’s inability to meet demand during the pandemic and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which caused global energy prices to spike.
However, some of the biggest negative economic changes occurred during the final year of Trump’s presidency, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. These include an increase in the unemployment rate, which peaked at 14.8% in April 2020 and remained at an elevated 6.7% during Trump’s final full month in office.
By comparison, under Biden, the number of employed workers has risen to almost 16.6 million more than the level when Trump left office, and 6.8 million more than Trump’s prepandemic peak. And during Biden’s almost four years in office, average hourly earnings for private-sector employees have risen by 18.1%.
Both numbers are exaggerated.
The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage reached a low of 2.65% shortly before Trump left office, but rates had fallen amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic hit in early 2020, mortgage rates were about 3.5%. For Trump’s entire term prepandemic, the average rate was 4.12%, and the peak rate was 4.94% in November 2018.
Mortgage rates have been higher under Biden, because the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates to stem inflation. But mortgage rates never reached 10%.
The peak rate under Biden was 7.79% in October 2023. It has since dropped to 6.54%.
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