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A graphic circulating on social media compares Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s economic records as president and cites FactCheck.org as the source. But two of its figures are way off, and others are out of date — creating a more unfavorable comparison for Trump.
The graphic also doesn’t mention that Trump’s numbers, for his first term, were negatively affected by the economic decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
We became aware of the graphic this week, after a reader asked if we produced it. We didn’t.
We don’t know who created the graphic, or when it first appeared online. But at least one April 17 post of it on X has garnered roughly 98,000 “views” and been reposted about 4,200 times. Some posts on other platforms have gained traction as well.
The top of the graphic features a quote that says, “Joe Biden Is The Worst President In The History Of The Country And It Isn’t Even Close,” which is attributed to “DJT,” the initials of Trump, who has made that claim about Biden several times.
But the graphic goes on to suggest that Biden was better for the economy than Trump by comparing Biden’s presidency with Trump’s first term, using statistics for job growth, unemployment, manufacturing employment, economic growth and trade deficits. The figures are listed in a table with cartoon images of Biden and Trump.
Biden’s Numbers
Biden’s figures, which are in green, appear to come from our article “Biden’s Numbers, April 2024 Update” – but two of the figures have been inverted. In our article, we reported that the most recent economic growth rate under Biden at that point, for the first quarter of 2024, was 1.6% – not 18.8%, as the graphic says. And we reported that the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services under Biden had grown 18.8% at that time – not 1.6%.
Our “numbers” series, which we launched during Barack Obama’s presidency, provides quarterly updates on various statistical indicators of what’s happened in the country under the president.
The graphic’s other figures for Biden were accurate as of last April, but are now out of date.
When he left office in January, the unemployment rate was 4%, and total employment for the entirety of his presidency had increased by more than 16.1 million jobs, including 610,000 manufacturing jobs. Those are the most recent figures according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Also, economic growth, as measured by real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product, in Biden’s last year as president was 2.8%, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Meanwhile, the trade deficit in 2024 had increased 40.4% from 2020, based on the most recent BEA data.
We plan to publish our full report on Biden’s final numbers this fall, when some of the annual data for 2024 is available.
Trump’s Numbers
For Trump, the creator of the graphic appears to have pulled his figures, which are in red, from our original version of “Trump’s Final Numbers” that was published in October 2021. (The graphic’s figure for job growth under Trump is a typo.)
But we updated that article in July 2024 because we found that several of the statistics – due to periodic revisions to government data – were no longer accurate.
The current version of that article says that when Trump left office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4%, and there was a decrease of about 2.7 million jobs during his presidency, including a drop of 178,000 in manufacturing employment. In addition, economic growth in the last year of Trump’s first term declined 2.2%, and the trade deficit in 2020 had increased 36.3% from 2016, which was the year before Trump first took office.
More importantly, the graphic being shared online doesn’t mention the negative impact that the pandemic had on the economy in 2020 under Trump. As we said in our article, “Some of these figures, notably the net job loss and gross domestic product, were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck in Trump’s final year in office, becoming a defining issue of his tenure.” Our report mentioned the pandemic nearly 40 times.
There had been an increase in employment under Trump before the pandemic caused the loss of more than 20 million jobs in April 2020, as attempts to stop the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 led to business closures and layoffs. Also, prior to the pandemic, the unemployment rate was 3.5% in February 2020, and the economy had grown by 2.3% in 2019.
We don’t know if those economic gains would have continued if not for the pandemic, but it’s misleading to present Trump’s first-term economic record without mentioning the COVID-19 caveat.
We will publish the first “Trump’s Numbers” article on the president’s current term in January 2026, at the one-year mark of his time in office, just as we did for our first pieces on Biden and Trump, in his earlier term.
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