WASHINGTON — Looking back on the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump boasts that he has resurrected the American economy by imposing big import taxes on foreign products. He made his case in a recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, chiding the paper and critics, including mainstream economists, who predicted that tariffs would backfire, raising prices and threatening growth. “Instead,” he wrote, “they have created an American economic miracle.”
But the proof he offers is often off-base or wrong altogether.
Here’s a look at the facts around Trump’s assessment of tariffs.
CLAIM: “Just over one year ago, we were a ‘DEAD’ country. Now, we are the ‘HOTTEST” country anywhere in the world!’ ’’
THE FACTS: This is a standard statement from Trump. But the U.S. economy was hardly “dead’’ when Trump returned to office last year. And in Trump’s second term, it’s performed strongly — after getting off to a bumpy start.
In 2024, the last year of the Biden presidency, American gross domestic product grew 2.8%, adjusted for inflation, faster than any wealthy country in the world except Spain. It also expanded at a healthy rate from 2021 through 2023.
The numbers for all of 2025 aren’t out yet. But during the first three quarters of the year, Trump’s tariffs — or the threat of them — delivered mixed results for the American economy.
From January to March, U.S. GDP actually shrank for the first time in three years. The main culprit was easy to identify: a surge in imports, which are subtracted from GDP, as American companies rushed to buy foreign products before Trump could impose tariffs on them.
But growth rebounded in the second half of the year. From April through June, the economy expanded at a healthy 3.8% pace. And from July through September, it grew even faster — 4.4%. A big part of the surge was a drop in imports, likely reflecting Trump’s tariffs as well as the fact that importers had already stocked up at the start of the year. Strong consumer spending also drove economic growth.
Trump also likes point to solid gains in the U.S. stock market. He noted that stocks hit new highs 52 times in 2025. It’s true that the American stock market did well last year. But it underperformed many foreign stock markets. The benchmark S&P 500 index climbed 17% — a nice gain but short of a 71% surge in South Korea, 29% in Hong Kong, 26% in Japan, 22% in Germany and 21% in the United Kingdom.
___ CLAIM: “Annual core inflation for the past three months has dropped to just 1.4% — far lower than almost anyone, other than me, had predicted.”
THE FACTS: The president is using cherry-picked data to vastly exaggerate where inflation stands.
His figure for annual inflation in the past three months — which excludes the volatile food and energy prices — is low, but reflects data distorted by the government shutdown in October and November, which disrupted the government’s data collection and forced the agency that compiles the figures to plug in rough estimates in some categories that artificially lowered overall inflation.
Annual core inflation for the final six months of 2025 is higher at 2.6%. That is down from January 2025’s level but about where it was in October 2024. Overall, inflation