When Will Americans Realize the Truth? Republicans Wreck the Economy.

Donald Trump is different in many ways from the Republican presidents who preceded him. But there’s one way he’s exactly the same.

Will 2026 finally be the year when a critical mass of Americans wakes up and realizes that Republicans always screw up the economy? I doubt it. The idea that the party of big business must surely be more trustworthy on economic policy just seems intuitively right to most people, and the Democrats, in their typical way, have done a horrible job explaining this truth to people. Still—the evidence is getting hard to ignore, so perhaps there’s some hope.

Donald Trump inherited an economy from Joe Biden that was perhaps not firing on all cylinders but was in pretty good shape all the same. Real GDP grew at 2.8 percent in 2024. Wages were growing at a higher rate, 4.8 percent. Inflation closed out 2024 at 2.9 percent—high, but way down from the 7 percent of 2021. Compared to the EU and China, the U.S. economy was, as The Economist famously put it right before the election, “The envy of the world.”

What has Trump done? What he usually does: Make things worse. Real GDP growth in the first quarter of this year was 2 percent. Okay, you say, but that’s just a quarter. What about Trump’s first full year back on the job, so as to compare apples to apples? GDP growth in 2025 was 2.1 percent—substantially lower than Biden’s 2.9 for 2024. And inflation right now in the United States stands at 3.8 percent, way above the 2024 number.

And now, The New York Times told us Sunday, we’ve hit another grim milestone: The national debt is bigger than the economy. It’s true that presidents of both parties have racked up big debt numbers. In this century,........

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