Trump claim about negative GDP if Hillary Clinton, Democrats won

President Donald
Trump
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• President Donald Trump has claimed multiple times over the
  past few weeks that GDP would be negative if Hillary Clinton had
  won the presidency.
• “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.

“The GDP Rate (4.2%) is higher than the Unemployment Rate
(3.9%) for the first time in over 100 years!” Trump tweeted
Monday.

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
“perhaps the best in our country’s history.”

GDP growth hit 4.2% in the second quarter, the
highest level since the third quarter of 2014, but that is
still not the best reading since the most recent recession. In
fact, quarterly GDP growth has topped the 4.2% mark four times
since the recession, and the latest reading is well below record
highs.

Trump has also made the dubious claim over the past week that GDP
growth would be dramatically reduced had Hillary Clinton won the
presidency.

“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. “I opened up our beautiful economic engine
with Regulation and Tax Cuts.”

The claim closely mirrors
Trump’s comment during a conversation with veteran
journalist Bob Woodward released last Tuesday.

“If the other administration or representatives of it had
kept going, had kept — you know, if the other group had won, I
will tell you, that you would have, I think you’d have a GDP of
less than zero,” Trump claimed. “I think we would’ve been going
in the wrong direction. Because regulations are such a big part
of what we’ve done, Bob.”

The president also touted the GDP number during speeches in
Montana and North Dakota last week.

While GDP growth did pick up in the second quarter, it is
hard to determine just how much of the increase is directly
attributable to Trump’s — or any administration’s —
policies.

Economists say some of the boost was due to transitory
factors, such as
an increase in soybean exports ahead of Trump’s tariffs, and
it’s also likely recent government policies such as the

GOP tax law and the bipartisan budget agreement added another
boost.

But much of the recent strength of the economy is a
continuation of a long post-recession trend, as unemployment
continues to fall and
US consumers keep spending. This same employment and personal
consumption trends existed
before the 2016 election and its unclear what government
policy could have reversed it
 — much less push
GDP to the deep recessionary level of -4%.