Our unhinged megalomaniacal POTUS was at it again today, claiming to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that his first year was nothing short of spectacular:
Trump: “I had the greatest year, the greatest opening year. I ended 8 wars. The greatest economy ever. But even when you have a great president, they tend to lose the midterms. It doesn’t make sense to me. We’ve had the greatest year in the history of the presidency, first year. We should be given credit.”
We’d say, hold yur horses, POTUS! Them ain’t close to the facts. Not at all.
When it comes to triumphant first years, for example, we think of President Dwight Eisenhower’s prompt Korean War settlement versus the Donald’s utter failure to end the pointless and massive drain on American resources in Ukraine.
As it happened, Eisenhower had campaigned in 1952 on the promise that he would go to Korea and settle the war as his first and foremost order of business.
On October 24, 1952, while campaigning in Detroit, Michigan, Eisenhower announced that he would “forego the diversions of politics and concentrate on the job of ending the Korean War…” He announced to a very attentive audience, “I shall go to Korea.”
Ike won in a true landslide with 442 electoral votes versus Trump’s marginal 312-vote victory versus the 270 votes need. Yet Eisenhower didn’t wait for the grass to grow while obsessing about the size of his win or wait until a month after inauguration to stage a unproductive photo op with the leader of South Korea, as Trump famously did with Zelensky on February 28th.
Instead, Ike secretly went to Korea in late November 1952 even before he was sworn in. Once in Seoul, however, Eisenhower quickly ascertained that the real obstacle to peace was his own headstrong client, South Korean President, Syngman Rhee.
Needless to say, Ike didn’t get played like Trump has been by Zelensky in Ukraine. In the latter case, the war didn’t end in 24 hours as the Donald promised because he hasn’t grabbed the bull by the horns and told Zelensky in no uncertain terms –
“…..agree to partition your country between the Ukrainian north and west and the Russia-speaking Donbas and Black Sea rim or we’re out of here by the 4th of July.”
By contrast, Ike’s approach embodied real world “art of the deal” and on July 23, 1953 the armistice was signed. And there has been no more devastation of war on the Korean peninsula during the 73 years since then.
As one authoritative historian explained it:
The first thing that Eisenhower witnessed in Seoul was the utter devastation of the city… Seoul had changed hands several times since 1950, and the conditions in the city were horrible.
For the next three days, Eisenhower visited senior American officers and common soldiers. Just like his preparation for D-Day on June 6, 1944, Eisenhower thought that he needed to hear about the situation from the junior officers and enlisted soldiers. Ike also saw his son, John Eisenhower, on the front lines of the Korean War. The weather was bitter cold, and Ike wore a U.S. Army type B-9 parka, a fur lined hat, and thermos boots. He ate meals with the troops in the extreme cold.
In general, President Syngman Rhee of South Korea and senior American commanders wanted to expand the war with a massive offensive. Eisenhower listened to their plans and arguments, but he came to realize that a new offensive was madness. To Ike, the situation in Korea was intolerable, and another offensive in the barren and bleak hills and mountains of Korea would just continue the status quo. Ike left Korea with the belief that the bloody stalemate must end.
Not only did Ike get the job done, but the world did not even know the President-elect had gone to Korea until his trip was finished and the news black-out ended on December 5th. By then Syngman Rhee and the US generals knew there wouldn’t be any massive new offensive and that the Eisenhower, who did not feast on TACOs, meant to engage in quiet workman-like diplomacy.
Needless to say, Eisenhower was a statesman and the Donald is a showman, if that. Still, the Trump’s hollow boasting about his first year successes blatantly omits the very central success that he had promised would be a piece of cake, as evidenced by the fact that the Ukraine War is still going strong. By contrast, Eisenhower actually delivered a signal foreign policy victory by dint of quiet work behind the scenes – a success that has been proven by the course of history, not merely claimed the hosanna chorus of the Donald’s MAGA magpies.
Likewise, when it comes to the domestic economy the Trump’s boasting about his first year rings even more hollow. Ultimately, the Donald won the 2024 election by a fluke on the issue of “affordability” for average families on main street America.
Yet when it comes to this so-called kitchen table issue, there is one metric which sums up the truth better than any other: Namely, the all-in inflation rate. That’s because over short-run periods it tells exactly how much purchasing power remains from worker paychecks.
As it happens, there has been no improvement in the headline inflation trend since June 2023. As we indicated with respect the PPI results yesterday, the inflation peak in June 2022 was the downstream impact of the spending, borrowing and money-printing bacchanalia of 2020 under Trump 45. And this cyclical surge which Biden both inherited and made worse with more big spending in 2021, had abated almost entirely by June 2023, owing to the Fed’s belated pivot to restraint in March 2022.
In any event, there has been no improvement in the headline CPI since then–either when measured on a annualized monthly basis (blue line), which was up by +10.3% in March, or on the slower moving Y/Y measure (dotted red line). In fact, the latter posted at 3.29% in the just released BLS report for March 2026, which was up from 3.07% in June 2023.
So what the hell is all the Donald’s boasting about? He essentially blames Biden for the inflationary storm Sleepy Joe inherited from the pandemic madness of 2020, and then claims credit for gains since January 2025, which haven’t even happened!
It’s on the economic growth and jobs front, however, where the vacuity of the Donald’s first year record is actually crystal clear. To wit, the index of private sector hours worked is about the soundest metric available in terms of measuring the number of paychecks and jobs on an apples-to-apples basis. In the latter, 10-hours per week on a restaurant kitchen gig, for example, does not count the same as 50-hours per week in a coalmine.
As shown below, the true employment level has gone nowhere during the Donald’s first 15 months back in the Oval Office. The hours worked index had stood at 116.1 in December 2024, which figure has remained flatter than a board, posting at 116.2 in March 2026. The gain, therefore, amounted to a scant 0.07% per annum.
By contrast, the hours worked index rose by 2.4% per annum during Sleepy Joe’s tenure.To be sure, those gains occurred not due to the virtues of Biden policies but owing to the relentless quest of workers, investors, businessmen and entrepreneurs to improve their own economic circumstances.
The point is, however, all of the hurdles thrown up by the state – including massive government spending and borrowing , are still there and the Donald self-evidently has done previous little to alleviate them.
As for Trump’s allegedly “red hot” manufacturing renaissance, you certainly can’t find that in the actual numbers, either. The index of US manufacturing output, in fact, stood in February 2026 at the exact spot it occupier in September 2000.
So we’d say, going back to the future to the tune of 26 years ago isn’t exactly anything to write home about, especially when you have imposed crushing tariff- taxes on US consumers in order to even get the line on the graph below to wiggle faintly upwards.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the promised return of rust belt jobs has not occurred. The claim that the US manufacturing sector is booming, in fact, is a pure fiction wafting from under the Orange Man’s comb-over. That is to say, the Donald makes it up as he goes and has no knowledge about the context of the numbers he tosses into the ring each and every day.
For instance, we should not be bragging after a loss of 46,000 manufacturing jobs since December 2024. And, more importantly, not when the hours put on the clocks by every hourly employee of every manufacturing plant in America—old, new, big, little or marginal – posted in March 2026 at a level fully 22% below the manufacturing hours level recorded at the time of Pearl Harbor in December 1941!
That’s 85 years ago, of course. Before either the Donald or your editor were even born.
Indeed, not withstanding all of the Donald’s bluster about reviving the America’s ailing industrial economy with Big, Beautiful Tariffs, what we really have in the jobs numbers is the same old, same old. That is, steadily growing job counts in sectors basically dependent upon government spending and tax credits versus still more erosion in high-productivity, high-paying goods-producing industries, including manufacturing, construction, energy and mining.
On that score, the table below leaves little to the imagination. The number of jobs in the private education, health care and social services sector (red line) has risen by +850,000 since December 2024, while goods-producing jobs are down by -67,000.
That’s right. When you count Federal, state and local spending and various tax credits for higher education, Medicare/Medicaid, tax-subsidized employer health plans, child care credits and sundry others, government fiscal support amounts to more than $3 trillion per annum and is rising rapidly. That’s nearly $108,000 of government fiscal resources per job – so it is not surprising that the red line in the graph below continues to rise smartly.
But that’s hardly evidence of the Greatest Economy Ever or a first year in the Oval Office that tops all that have come before. To the contrary, it’s just further evidence that what ails the US economy – too much government spending, debt and intervention in the private sector – continues unabated from the UniParty legacy of decades and decades past.
Not surprisingly, with inflation climbing steadily higher and job growth tepid at best, main street households have resorted to their time old default of last resort: Namely, they have drawn down theirsavings rates from the low levels that already prevailed under Sleepy Joe. Accordingly, the meager 4.0% rate recorded in February is among the lowest observations during the last half century.
At the end of the day, sustainable growth and real prosperity require savings and investment first. Yet with the meager savings rates now being recorded and the Donald’s soaring Federal deficits there is not a snowball’s chance in the hot place of returning to the Golden Era of Prosperity that he is always gassing about.
The graphs above, of course, constitutes a spoiler alert with regard to the core economic problem of present times. To wit, the relentlessly rising public debt.
As shown below, Sleepy Joe and his co-president, Otto Penn, were no slouches when it comes to government borrowing. During their four years the publicly held Federal debt rose from $21.70 trillion to $28.86 trillion, or by $1.8 trillion per year.
Not surprisingly, however, not withstanding yet another year of economic expansion – as tepid as it was – the publicly held debt grew by $2.0 trillion during the Donald first year back in the Oval Office, reaching $30.871 trillion by the end of Q4 2025.
So, yes, when it comes to further burying the US in debt, the Donald has come out right on top, as he claims. With respect to almost everything else, not so much.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
