President Donald Trump frequently touts trillion-dollar figures as evidence that his “America First” economic agenda is working, but those numbers are far from reality, say experts.
And some of those experts, according to NBC News, work for Trump.
Trump’s recent fixation is $21 trillion — the sum he claims to have pulled in for the U.S. economy through his policies and deal-making. He repeatedly invokes that $21 million ahead of the midterm elections as an unmatched achievement. Trump claimed just weeks into his second term, that the number stood at $1.7 trillion, NBC reports. And last month he predicted it could climb as high as $25 trillion.
The numbers are on a scale that are “unfathomable to many,” Trump wrote in a January op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
“And for good reason, economists say: They aren’t real,” reports NBC.
“Trump’s claim is clearly inaccurate,” said former treasury secretary Janet Yellen, , told NBC News. “It matches no meaningful measure of foreign investment in official statistics.”
But NBC did not have to turn to former Biden-era employees to smash Trump’s bloviation. The White House website carries its own page, entitled “The Trump Effect,” which tallies the U.S. and foreign investments “made possible by President Trump’s leadership.”
The total it claims is just $11.2 trillion.
“That’s just over half the figure Trump has been mentioning of late, most recently in a speech Tuesday,” reports NBC News. Namely, while announcing a new Baltimore shipyard project , Trump said, “The big thing is $21 trillion being invested by others into our country. There’s never been a country that’s even close to that.”
But when asked to cite the specific investments backing up the $21 trillion figure, NBC News says the White House did not do so.
Instead, NBC News says White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers submitted a flurry of non-specifics: “President Trump’s America First trade agenda has ushered in a re-industrialization and manufacturing renaissance, drawing tens of trillions of dollars in private and foreign investment into the United States. In less than two years, President Trump has already attracted more than Joe Biden did in all four years—many times over.”
NBC reports Trump’s self-claimed “American economic miracle” keeps growing with every telling.
In June, NBC News reports Trump claimed “we have $18 [trillion] to $19 trillion being poured into our country.” By July it had bumped up to “$19.2 trillion … going toward building factories, plants, AI, automobile.” In August, it apparently ticked up to “almost $20 trillion now of money coming into the United States that we would never have had,” according to Trump, while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office.
And then, at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas in September, Trump told the crowd: “Think of it, $22 trillion coming into this country …” NBC recalls.
“The whole list and the whole sum and the whole score is delusional and not rooted in reality at all,” said Justin Wolfers, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Michigan, of Trump’s investment figures. “Investment in the U.S. economy today largely tracks what you would have extrapolated from the past. That’s a fancy way of saying it looks the same as recent history.”
And if the money coming in has produced record-breaking investment in new factories, technology and infrastructure, NBC News reports Americans apparently aren’t feeling it, with even Fox News showing difficulty in disseminating the facts as good news.