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Of course, Trump would never deliberately take responsibility for anything bad that happened under his own administration, much less during Biden’s administration, but that is what would logically follow from one of his comments in Detroit yesterday. 

When asked about the fact that prices are still high, even though he promised to bring them down on day one of his administration, Trump told a reporter: “I’ve only been here for 11 months.”

Apart from 11 months being considerably longer than day one, the implication would be that the prior president, in this case Joe Biden, was still responsible for the inflation and the price level 11 months into a president’s term in office. Presumably that same logic would apply to inflation during the Biden administration.

If we look at the inflation story in December of 2021, 11 months into Biden’s term, it doesn’t look very good. Year-over-year inflation had risen to 7.2 percent, most of the way to its peak of 9.0 percent six months later. It turns out that most of the Biden inflation was actually left over from Trump’s economic policies.

That would be the story that would logically follow from Trump blaming current inflation on Biden, but we know Trump and his backers couldn’t care less about logic and the real world. The Biden economy, that Trump keeps calling a disaster, was widely touted as the envy of the world by the business press. We had low unemployment, strong growth, rising real wages, an unprecedented boom in factory construction, and an inflation rate that was falling towards the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. 

But more seriously, there is a question as to how much credit or blame a president deserves for the economy under their watch. Turning back to Biden, the strong growth under his term was pretty clearly due to his recovery package passed shortly after he took office. 

Job growth had slowed to a trickle in the last three months of the Trump administration, the strong bounce back from the spring shutdown was over. The unemployment rate stood at 6.4 percent in January of 2021. Biden’s recovery package hyper-charged growth, pushing the unemployment rate down to 3.9 percent by December, something no one was forecasting at the time he took office. 

The unemployment rate remained at or below 4.0 percent until the summer of 2024, the longest stretch of low unemployment in 70 years. It was still just 4.0 percent when Biden left office in January of last year. 

The strong stimulus did add to inflation, but there was a worldwide surge in inflation due to supply chain issues stemming from the pandemic. Countries in Europe, Asia, even Japan saw a comparable rise in inflation. It is likely that the Biden stimulus added 1-2 percentage points to inflation in the U.S., but that seems a rather small price to get people back to work. And the inflation rate was falling back to normal levels by 2024, with the Fed expecting it to hit its 2.0 percent target in 2025. 

And the factory construction boom was clearly triggered by Biden’s three big bills: the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. These are all places where we can draw clear lines from policy to outcomes.

In Trump’s case, we can also draw a clear line from policy to outcome. His tariffs reversed the downward course of inflation. They added perhaps a percentage point to the rate of inflation in the second half of 2025, as tariffs got passed on in higher prices. It is likely we also are seeing some effect of his mass deportation policies, as many sectors are having trouble attracting workers. 

Tariffs also slowed growth, pulling hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy. They also created uncertainty, reducing investment. The Biden boom in factory construction is cooling rapidly under Trump. And contrary to Trump’s boast of a revival in manufacturing, the sector continues to shed jobs. 

But this is talking about the real world. In Trump’s imaginary world he is pulling in tens of trillions in foreign investment and trillions of dollars in tariff revenue that is paying down the debt. Too bad no one lives in that world other than a 79-year-old man with serious cognitive problems. 

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