Trump keeps making outlandish claims about GDP

pulse 14:58 - 10 September 2018

President Donald Trump claimed multiple times over the past week that GDP would be negative if Democrats won in 2016. That's probably a stretch, but it's also impossible to prove.

If the Democrats had won the Election in 2016, GDP, which was about 1% and going down, would have been minus 4% instead of up 4.2%," Trump tweeted Monday.
While it's hard to evaluate the claim, the economy prior to the election was resilient, and it's unlikely that such a large downward move would have occurred if Trump did not win.

President Donald Trump's cheerleading of the economy has been a constant since he took office in early 2017, but new claims over the past week have exaggerated the US's economic strength and falsely painted his administration as overseeing unprecedented success.

Contrary to Trump's claim, however, this is the 64th quarter in the past 70 years during which the unemployment rate was below the quarterly GDP number. The most recent was in 2006.

Trump also incorrectly claimed Monday that the economy is "