Steve Rattner fact checks Trump: He didn’t inherit the worst inflation in history

The polls are almost dishonest, almost as dishonest as some of the reporters themselves.

Yeah, um,

But I'm getting very good polls. I'm getting very good polls on crime prevention, on law and order, and on the border. I have to and I'm getting starting to get great polls on the economy, which I think is a

The polls on the economy aren't aren't they're not great.

They should be great.

They should be. So why aren't they if you believe that?

I don't know. I don't know.

I mean, look,

Americans tell us we hear this. I mean, we're going to get into the economy later, but I mean, they tell us they don't feel it.

Just just answer.

Yeah.

I have $18 trillion being invested into the country. Biden had less than a trillion for four years.

But what does America feel like?

And the whole country was going to credit.

What does America feel like?

You know that if they won that election, and we won in a landslide. You know if they won that election, this country was, I think it was finished.

President Trump yesterday pressed by NBC's Tom Yamas about his sinking poll numbers, yes, on the economy. This comes as his former Vice President Mike Pence is speaking out against President Trump's global tariffs. In a social media post yesterday, which included a screenshot of a front-page Wall Street Journal above the fold headline on the retreat of US manufacturing. Pence wrote, American businesses and American consumers pay for American tariffs and American manufacturing is paying the price. Time to get back to free trade with free nations.

That is from former Vice President Mike Pence.

Let's bring in former Treasury official, Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Ratner with his chart. Steve, good morning. Always great to see you. So, we're going to do some fact checks with some of the president's statements during his cabinet meeting last week. So let's start with how the president continues to claim inflation was at a record high when he took office.

Here's what President Trump said at that cabinet meeting.

We inherited very high prices and we inherited the highest inflation in 48 years. I say the history of our country. I think it sounds almost the same. Actually, I think 48 years sounds actually worse for some reason.

So, Steve, we heard sort of that same sentiment echoed from the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen at a hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday. What is the reality about what this administration inherited?

So, look, one of the things that's interesting about the president is that no matter how many times he gets corrected, he still goes back and says the same stuff over and over again. As he kind of implied in that clip, he used to say it was the worst inflation history. People kept correcting him, and so he now talks about 48 years, but in fact, look what happened. He didn't inherit the worst inflation history or any any inflation above normal to speak of. We had did have a significant amount of inflation, of course, during COVID, up to 9%. We worked our way down. This is the Biden administration. It worked its way down, down, down, down, down. It got down to right around 3% when President Trump took office, and now it's at about 2.7%. So he inherited a very stable rate of inflation, and it only got marginally better. But we're talking about tariffs, so let's just look take a look at the facts on tariffs. Look, we all know that the tariffs didn't have quite as bad of an economic effect or an inflationary effect as we thought they were. A lot of it got absorbed along the way.

But that didn't mean it had no effect. So this tracks imported and domestic goods sold at five big retailers in the US. And you can see that going back to October of 24, the trend line of both domestic and imported goods was down. In other words, they were in fact even going down in price because trade is a good thing. It brings in goods at lower prices for consumers, and then domestic consumers producers have to match that. So that's where it was going. Then you hit Liberation Day, and look what happens. It turns around. And the prices of both go up. And again, even though domestic goods, you'd say, well, why should they go up? It's because when imported goods go up in price, the domestic retailers and producers are able to raise their prices. And so, in fact, the tariffs have been a contributor of probably one or two percentage points. And Powell said this himself, actually, in testimony very recently, uh, um, have been going up in price. And so part of why inflation hasn't gotten down to 2% as the Fed wants and as has been promised is because of the tariffs, as a matter of fact.

Were you surprised, Steve, to hear Secretary Bessen yesterday claim that tariffs are not inflationary despite being presented with a letter in which he wrote, tariffs will be inflationary?

This is this is an administration, uh, in which you can only survive if you completely parrot and echo what the president says, no matter what you think.

And give him all the credit for whatever it is we're trying to give him credit for. So I was I I was surprised and I wasn't. Uh, Scott Bessen, when he was on Wall Street, was certainly thought of as a fairly, uh, typical or conventional Wall Street thinker, which is generally anti-tariff.

And I wasn't totally surprised for the reason I said.

So let's go back to the as we go to your next chart, Steve. Uh, what Mike Pence said, uh, and that's the promise that President Trump made to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

And he

They're now building additional plants in the United States as is everybody else. Uh, you have AI building, but the the car companies, I love the car companies, and you have they're they're all coming back.

Steve, what do the numbers actually show?

So the numbers show in fact that it's manufacturing construction spending. So this is money spent to build manufacturing facilities as opposed to making products has actually been going down. It did go up in fact in 23, 24, and a lot of this was under Joe Biden, of course, and a lot of it had to do with the passage of the Chips and Sciences Act, which did spur a lot of new investment in Phoenix, Arizona and places like that. But as of now, since Trump came in, it has just been going down. If you look at jobs, and if you look at jobs, you can see in fact, we had COVID back here, so job creation was really bad. Then it recovered, but it is not really recovered, never really recovered much past where it was before COVID. And again, manufacturing employment is declining. And if you talk about the car companies, theirs is also declining. One of the things that is ailing the car companies, in fact, is the way that the Trump administration is trying to kill electric vehicles, and so the car companies are cutting down back on all their investment in electric vehicles, and that is one of the factors in this employment number.

As the Wall Street Journal had in its headline yesterday, and you have now, manufacturing is not booming.

That's not a political statement.

That's data. Finally, President Trump touts since he's taken office, his administration has been able to secure trillions of dollars in investments in US manufacturing, technology, and infrastructure.

Here's what the president claimed last week.

And most importantly, if you think about it, after four years in which Biden got much less than $1 trillion of investment into our country, uh, in just actually it was taken over 11 months, even though we're 12 months, uh, in 11 months, uh, we've taken in more than $18 trillion. So there's never been anything like that.

The president loves that $18 trillion figure, Steve, but as you point out, even the White House says it's half of that.

Yeah, that's the incredible thing, Willie. Obviously, you've noticed how he talks about $18 trillion all the time, over and over and over again. But his own website, this is the most incredible thing. His own website only claims credit for $9.6 trillion. Uh, and so you think they would at least change the website, or he would stop saying it, but no, they don't do either. But in fact, there's no real evidence of that either, uh, so far. You can see that this is, uh, total private investment in in all the kinds of things the president's talking about. It's been running consistently at about a trillion dollars a quarter, and you can see here that it hasn't really gone up much. So a couple of other things about this. First of all, when he says Biden only got a trillion, Biden got a trillion a quarter, $4 trillion a year during his time, uh, in office.

The likelihood of the president producing $18 trillion when our total investment is around a trillion dollars is kind of laughable. And in fact, if you dig into some of the projects that are in in this website, you'll see some of them, like some things Apple is doing, like the semiconductor plants in Arizona that I mentioned, are already happening or would happen anyway and have nothing to do with anything the president's done.

So he loves his $18 trillion number.

But you can't find it anywhere in the data.

I suspect he'll continue to stay with it.

Steve.

If I were a betting man.

Important fact checks on all those issues, Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Ratner, Steve.

Thanks so much.