Golden Age Of Prosperity My Eye!
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The utterly delusional MAGA nonsense about the Trumpian Golden Age of Prosperity has gone from the absurd to the sublime. There is absolutely no foundation to it based on credible economic analysis. Even egregiously cherry-picked numbers, punctuated by the Donald’s usually baseless say-so, do not stand up to serious scrutiny.
For instance, in his error-riddled Wall Street Journal op ed last Friday, which once again ballyhooed the Greatest Economy Ever, Trump claimed that the US economy is “booming” and “with virtually no inflation”.
In fact, it’s not remotely booming and there has been no improvement whatsoever in the still high and punishing inflation rate handed off by Joe Biden in January 2025. In fact, the monthly run rate of the 16% trimmed mean CPI had already dropped to 3.58% (dotted red line) under Biden by March 2024. But after y0-yoing to-and-fro since then it actually posted at a 3.73% annualized rate in December 2025.
Obviously, these actual data have nothing to do with the round-house MAGA claim that the Donald has brought inflation down from Biden’s 9% to 2% or less today. To the contrary, what has happened is that the virulent inflation cycle triggered by the Donald’s pandemic lockdowns and runaway government spending and money-printing during 2020, which resulting inflation peaked way back in June 2022 in the 7-9% range, had already slowed to about 3.13% on a Y/Y basis (solid blue line) by January 2025. And it has now posted at 2.96% as of December.
Needless to say, 18 basis points of improvement in the Y/Y inflation rate is nothing to write home about—especially because it is essentially an arithmetic function of the anniversary effect. As the dotted red line shows, monthly run rates have simply oscillated around 3%, which means that a dollar of hourly pay or savings today would be worth only 74 cents a decade hence.
The Donald may choose to call that “no inflation”, but we doubt whether most hard-pressed main street households would even remotely agree.
16% Trimmed Mean CPI Trend Since March 2024
In that context, Trump’s claim that the real earnings of workers were up by several thousand dollars, doesn’t wash, either. Actually, real hourly earnings of private sector workers in Q4 2025 stood exactly at the level of Q2 2020 on heels of the Donald’s lockdown disaster the first time around.
That’s right. Owing to the aforementioned UniParty spending, borrowing and inflation spree authorized by the Donald himself in March 2020, there has been 0.00% gain in inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for the last five years in the entire private sector of the US economy!
