MSNBC Analyst Dismantles Trump’s False Economic Boasts: Not Even the ‘Greatest Economy of the Last Two Presidents’

Former President Donald Trump often brags about his pre-Covid economic record, but MSNBC economic analyst Steve Rattner presented some numbers that showed he didn’t have much to brag about.

In a segment on Morning Joe on Wednesday, Rattner spoke to co-host Willie Geist about Trump’s economic record — not accounting for the Covid pandemic — versus President Joe Biden’s and there was a clear winner: Biden. Rattner brought some of his famous charts to illustrate the data behind the conclusion:

Well, look, this election is obviously going to be fought on the economy, like many elections. And Donald Trump has argued that President Biden has delivered the worst economy in history. And so let’s look at a few metrics that might suggest the facts are actually something different. You mentioned job growth. We can start with job growth. So this is job growth across presidents going back to [Ronald Reagan]. But let’s focus for the moment on Trump versus Biden. And let’s be fair and strip out the effects of Covid, which obviously hurt Donald Trump and ultimately helped Joe Biden during the recovery.

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So that’s these darker bars. And you can see even stripping out Covid, Donald Trump created an average of 182,000 jobs a month. Joe Biden created an average of 268,000 jobs a month. And that is not only more than Donald Trump, that is more than any president going back to somewhere before Reagan. We go back to Reagan here. So even [Bill Clinton], even Reagan, Joe Biden created [excluding] Covid, more jobs. The president’s been talking a lot about manufacturing jobs. So let’s look at the record on manufacturing jobs. It is true, manufacturing jobs began to come back under Trump. Not surprisingly, they fell off a cliff. And Joe Biden has brought them back to the highest level they’ve been at since during the financial crisis. We have 186,000 more manufacturing jobs than we had in 2008. Obviously, we’d like to have some more, but manufacturing is a very tough sector for us, and this is a pretty impressive performance.

Then Geist asked about other economic factors, the GDP and wage growth. Again, Rattner’s charts showed better results from Biden than Trump, even excluding Covid. Rattner explained:

Well, GDP is obviously the holy grail of any economy. The faster you grow, the better off people will be. Sometimes a little bit of a lag, this and that, but they’ll be better off. So again, let’s be fair and let’s strip out Covid from these results and take a look at what we see. So under Trump, GDP growth averaged 2.6 percent annual rate during his presidency, not including Covid, as I said. Joe Biden averaged 3.6 percent during his presidency. One percent on an economy that is well over $20 trillion is an enormous difference in terms of the amount of economic activity, an extra economic activity that you’re creating. And so this one isn’t even close.

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Rattner also addressed inflation, a major strike against Biden in the beginning of his term:

Look, we all have to acknowledge that inflation has been tough. There’s no doubt that we went from a very benign inflation environment to a considerably — that’s the green line — to a considerably higher inflationary environment. Some of that was driven by supply problems. When you had supply chain problems, shortages, prices tend to go up. A lot of it was driven by the Federal Reserve and not addressing that quickly enough with interest rates. And yes, some of that is on the Biden administration with the American Rescue Plan, which most people in retrospect thought was too much. But look what’s been happening in the last year. Probably people don’t realize this. First of all, inflation has come way down and it is very close, as Jerome Powell suggested in his testimony yesterday. It’s getting very close to where the Fed could cut interest rates as soon as September. And secondly, for more than a year, wage growth has been higher than inflation. In other words, that wage growth, the black line higher than the green line. And so we are making up ground and it is moving in the right direction.

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Finally, Geist asked about Trump’s repeated claims that his economy was stronger and that Biden had “ruined” the economy:

Geist: One of the arguments we’ve heard, Steve, we heard it again last night from Donald Trump is that effectively, if it weren’t for Covid, “I would have had the greatest economy in the history of America.” And in fact, he said last night “until Covid hit, I had the strongest and best economy ever.” The data you just put up there accounts for that. You said, let’s be fair and let’s consider Covid. Is there any accuracy to what Donald Trump says there?

Rattner: No, I think it is right here. It is right here. He not only didn’t have the greatest economy ever, he didn’t have the greatest economy of the last two presidents, 2.6 percent for Donald Trump, 3.6 [percent] for Joe Biden with, I will tell you, is a completely honest and, fair, removal of Covid from the statistics.

Watch the video above via MSNBC.