Biden vs. Trump: How the economy fared under each president

As the nation prepares for the upcoming election, Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman examines the economy's performance under current President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump. Newman explains how factors such as employment rates, GDP growth, and inflation have fared under each administration, discussing the future economic landscape under their respective leadership.

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This post was written by Angel Smith

Video transcript

As part of the Bidens report card.

Yahoo Finance is comparing the performance of the Biden economy with the Trump economy at the same point in their presidencies.

Rick Newman joins us now for more.

Rick Hey guys.

Uh well, uh there's this famous question in politics.

When somebody's running for re-election, the challenger might often ask, are you better off four years ago than you are today?

Ronald Reagan used that formulation for the first time in 1980.

He won, of course, because a lot of people said no inflation back in 1980 when uh people voted was almost 13%.

And people said, no, I'm not better off than when Jimmy Carter came into office.

So you might hear this this time around except I think Donald Trump is not going to be asking this question because he doesn't want people to remember the way the economy was four years ago.

And just to remind everybody four years ago, we were smack in the middle of the um COVID pandemic lockdowns were happening everywhere.

And if you just put this up on these charts, I've been keeping comparing the uh the Biden economy with the Trump economy.

Uh There you're seeing, uh that's a weird one.

Income.

We'll talk about that later.

But um GDP growth was falling off a cliff at this time in 2020 employment, we lost 22 million jobs in just two months in the year 2020.

Uh And we had a really short but a really deep recession.

Uh it only lasted two months but um a huge wipe out in employment.

So, uh you know, during the rest of the Trump presidency, his last year in 2020 the economy did begin a slow recovery helped in large measure by all that fiscal stimulus and a lot of monetary stimulus by the Federal Reserve.

But it just took a long time.

So the economy in the last year of the Trump pres presidency was pretty bad.

And I think you could even argue that some of the things that were happening then laid the groundwork for the inflation that surged uh in President Biden's 2nd and 3rd year.

Don't you think though Rick, a lot of Americans might sort of give Trump a pass in some sense?

You know, he just happened to preside over this once in a century pandemic.

Yes, I I think the data actually shows some voters do give Trump a pass.

But I think you're also gonna start hearing President Biden trying to flip that story around and uh telling about, I mean, he's already out on, on the trail saying it trying to uh associate Trump with the, with the COVID pandemic with uh the chaotic handling of the COVID pandemic and with a lot of the economic problems that happened that during that time.

So it does seem that, I mean, some people call this Trump amnesia or Trump nesia that uh some voters seem to remember what was good about the Trump eco economy and they don't remember what was bad about it during the last year.

So, if you're somebody who thinks of the Trump economy as the pre-covid economy, um yeah, that was pretty good.

I mean, we didn't have any inflation to speak of gas prices were pretty low.

I mean, we didn't have runaway growth either, but uh the economy was doing pretty well on a steady state basis, but I can guarantee you during the next four months.

Uh President Biden and his campaign are gonna be doing everything they can to change that narrative to change what voters remember about the Trump economy and get them to focus on the COVID recession.

All right.

Thank you, Rick.

I appreciate the time you.