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Trump administration officials keep making specific promises about economic performance. They also keep failing to deliver on those promises.
As this week got underway, Peter Navarro, the White House’s top trade adviser, boasted on Fox Business, “Inflation is going down.” It would’ve been great if that were true, but as is too often the case with the White House’s economic claims, it was not.
The public learned in early April that the consumer price index, which is the most common way to measure inflation, surged in March, making a bad situation worse. As April came to an end, the discouraging news continued, with the Commerce Department also showing a jump in the core personal consumption expenditures price index, which reached its highest level in nearly three years.
The inflation data roughly coincided with the release of the latest data on economic growth: In the first quarter of 2026, spanning January through March, the gross domestic product grew by 2%, which was better than late 2025, though it fell short of expectations.
At a White House event last week, Donald Trump once again said the status quo is “the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” The president wasn’t just wrong, he also offered a timely reminder about just how out of touch he’s become: The latest national Associated Press poll found only 30% of Americans approve of the Republican’s handling of the economy, which is the lowest of his second term.
But as the public comes to terms with the latest in a series of economic disappointments, there’s a related question White House officials should at least try to answer: Whatever happened to all of those assurances from last year?
As recently as August, for example, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confidently predicted to a national television audience that the U.S. economy is “really going to pick up in the fourth quarter” of 2025. It did not, and as the spring of 2026 continues, Americans are still waiting for conditions to “really pick up.”
Similarly, in early September, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during a CNBC interview that Americans will see robust growth “six months from now.”
That was eight months ago. He’s still wrong.
Earlier this month, Howard Lutnick predicted the economy would grow by 5% in the first quarter of the year.It only grew 2%, and it was largely because of AI investment, not the manufacturing and job creation boom Trump promised.
What’s more, earlier this year, Lutnick predicted, “I think we’re going to grow more than 5% GDP this quarter.” We now know that growth wasn’t even half that strong.
The point isn’t to mock the false predictions; the point is to press the Republican administration on the results. In fact, the questions for the president and his team couldn’t be more obvious: Why have you failed to meet your own expectations, and when do you expect to deliver the results you promised?
Steve Benen
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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