Speaking at an event in Asheville, North Carolina, former President Donald Trump tried to claim that Americans "never had it so good" as they did at the end of his term in January of 2021—only to be bluntly fact-checked in the process.
The speech was meant to offer a platform for Trump to discuss his economic proposals but quickly devolved into a typical Trump campaign rally characterized by lies and distortions, this time about the state of the country under his leadership.
Trump claimed:
"It was under President Trump we passed the largest tax cuts in American history, the largest regulation cuts in history. We unleashed American energy and real income surged by more than $4,200 in just a short number of months."
"You never had it so good. Now you’re not doing so well. We had the strongest economy in history. There's never been a country that had an economy like us."
"I have [Vice President Kamala Harris] and [President Joe Biden] an economic miracle and they turned it into an economic nightmare with a nation-wrecking agenda ripped out of Kamala's San Francisco liberal playbook."
You can hear what he said in the video below.
In January 2021—best known as the month when Trump's followers attacked the U.S. Capitol on the false premise the 2020 election had been stolen—the economy was not in the "good" place Trump purports it was.
Supply chain shortages were a fact of life due to COVID-19 disruptions and there were several weeks at the height of the pandemic in spring 2020 when millions of people couldn't find a single roll of toilet paper anywhere, the result at least in part of panic buying as state and local governments issued stay-at-home orders that were largely ignored by Trump's followers.
Well over 1.2 million Americans have died since the COVID-19 pandemic began during Trump's final year in office. Many of these people could have been saved had Trump's administration taken the situation seriously from the start.
In fact, January 2021 marked the deadliest month of the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming over 95,000 lives.
Trump was almost immediately fact-checked.
Of course, there's more about the country's economic condition in January 2021 that Trump did not mention.
In January 2021, just before the conclusion of Trump's term, the Labor Department disclosed that total U.S. employment had plummeted by 140,000 in December, resulting in a total of 142.6 million jobs—approximately 10 million fewer than pre-pandemic levels.
The unemployment rate surged from a 50-year low of 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.8% within two months, with over 22 million people losing their jobs. Although it later decreased to 6.7%, that figure was still 2 percentage points higher than when Trump took office.
In this regard, Trump isn't alone; he is the third consecutive Republican president to leave office with a higher unemployment rate than at the start of his term, following both President George H. W. Bush and President George W. Bush.
Additionally, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a progressive American think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state government budget policies, the 2017 Trump-era Tax Act was "skewed to the rich," noting that:
"Households with incomes in the top 1 percent will receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60 percent."
The organization said in March that the tax cuts were "expensive and eroded the U.S. revenue base," remarking that at this moment there is "simply not enough revenue given the nation’s investment needs and our commitments to Social Security and health coverage."
