President Donald Trump on Wednesday blamed a quarterly drop in the U.S. gross domestic product on former President Joe Biden and said a drop in the second quarter could also be the former president’s fault, passing the blame for the latest economic woes even though he has taken credit for stock market surges as far back as 2024.
Key Facts
Trump said in a televised Cabinet meeting that the GDP’s 0.3% decrease in the first quarter of 2025 is “Biden, not Trump,” claiming the quarterly numbers do not apply to his administration since it came into power in January.
Trump added “you could even say the next quarter is sort of Biden.”
The president also said in a Truth Social post Wednesday morning “This is Biden’s stock market,” saying the former president “left us with bad numbers” and claiming the positive effects of his sweeping tariff policies, which have created concerns of an impending recession, “will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers.”
The comments from Trump contradict his own claims from last January, when he said “THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET” and took credit for market gains under the Biden administration.
Trump claimed the stock market was performing well because investors were projecting he would win the presidential election.
The president also took credit for the stock market surge during the leadup to his inauguration, saying at a rally, “It’s too braggadocious, but we’ll say it anyway, the Trump effect. It’s you. You’re the effect.”
News Peg
The GDP slid 0.3% in the first quarter, marking the weakest economic performance the U.S. has recorded since the first quarter of 2022. Outside of Wednesday’s drop, negative GDP growth has happened just three times over the past decade, with two of the occurrences happening during 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic routed global markets.
Key Background
While the economy has faltered in recent months as the Trump administration implements tariffs, cuts down on government spending and slashes the federal workforce, the president has insisted that returns on his economic policies will take time. Trump addressed his tariffs in a joint speech to Congress last month, saying, “There’ll be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that. It won’t be much.” As markets continued reeling in March, Trump blamed poor stock performances on “the really bad four years that we had.” By April, economists provided varying outlooks on the possibility of a recession, with Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, saying there was a 90% probability the U.S. will fall into a “Voluntary Trade Reset Recession.”
