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U.S. economic growth keeps moving in the wrong direction, despite Team Trump vows

MS NOW

May 28, 2026 at 9:55am UTC

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At Wednesday’s White House Cabinet meeting, Kelly Loeffler, who leads the Small Business Administration, appeared eager to toe the party line on the state of the economy. “Mr. President, you have made us a nation of builders again,” the former Republican senator said. “You’re leading us to the greatest economy that the world has ever known.”

The rhetoric was absurd but familiar. Donald Trump and his allies, on a nearly daily basis, tell the public the current American economy is the “greatest” ever. During one of JD Vance’s recent Fox News appearances, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom.” 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.”

Widespread polling shows broad dissatisfaction with current economic conditions. Team Trump seems to think incessant happy talk can change public attitudes.

The problem for White House officials isn’t just that their rhetoric appears wildly out of touch, it’s also that reality keeps getting in the way of their claims. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The U.S. economy grew more slowly during the first three months of the year, updated government data showed Thursday.

Gross domestic product, a broad measure of the goods and services produced across the U.S., rose at a 1.6% seasonally and inflation-adjusted annual rate in January through March, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The department previously estimated first-quarter GDP rose at a 2% rate. It said the new, lower estimate primarily reflected “downward revisions to investment and consumer spending.”

Throughout last year, as the U.S. economy struggled, Republican officials repeatedly insisted good news was on the way, and Americans wouldn’t have to wait much longer to see satisfying results. They didn’t have much choice but to cling to the line: The economy grew at a 2.1% pace across all of 2025 — down from 2.8% in 2024 — making last year the worst for economic growth in the United States in nine years (excluding the pandemic).

So far this year, there’s fresh evidence that 2026 is off to a rough start, as well.

This not what Americans were told to expect. As recently as August, 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, and as the spring of 2026 continues, Americans are still waiting for conditions to really “pick up.”