Throughout 2025, as the U.S. economy struggled, Republican officials repeatedly insisted that good news was on the way and Americans wouldn’t have to wait too much longer to see satisfying results.

As recently as August, for example, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confidently predicted to a national television audience that the U.S. economy is “really going to pick up in the fourth quarter” of 2025.

It did not pick up in the fourth quarter of 2025. CNBC reported:

[T]he Commerce Department reported that economic growth was even slower than previously reported for the fourth quarter of 2025. Gross domestic product, a measure of all goods and services produced, rose just 0.5% on a seasonally adjusted annualized rate. […]

The department said the downward revision came primarily to lower investment than previously indicated. A key metric for demand, called real final sales to private domestic purchasers, was cut to a 1.8% growth rate, down 0.6 percentage points from the first estimate.

The original expectations for the fourth quarter, spanning October through December, was 2.5% growth. This led to disappointment when a preliminary tally showed 1.4% growth.

That number was later revised down to 0.7% growth, before ultimately coming in at 0.5% growth.

In light of this new information, we now know that the economy grew at a 2.1% pace across all of 2025, down from 2.8% in 2024 and 2.9% in 2023. Excluding the Covid-19 pandemic, 2025 showed the weakest economic growth in the U.S. in nine years.

In other words, despite endless Republican hype, economic growth and job growth were significantly stronger during Joe Biden’s final year in office compared with the first year of Donald Trump’s second term.

The White House has not yet offered a persuasive explanation as to why the economy got worse after the Republican returned to the Oval Office.

On the contrary, during one of JD Vance’s recent Fox News appearances, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy. A week earlier, Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, told Fox News that the U.S. economy was “perfect.” The president himself has argued — before, during and after the fourth quarter — that he’s responsible for creating the strongest economy in American history.

If leading White House officials were trying to appear out of touch, would they have said anything different?

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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