Trump Claims His Pre-Pandemic Economy Was ‘The Best.’ The Numbers Say Otherwise.

A tame inflation report this week gave hope to Democrats that their biggest electoral weakness may finally be in the rearview mirror after being stubbornly persistent since 2022.

Even as inflation has been slowing since then, it’s still a big worry for voters, and in his bid to get reelected, former President Donald Trump has been hammering Democrats on the issue constantly. His press conference Thursday was called to highlight price increases on a variety of consumer staples.

And Trump has continued to tout the economy during his own tenure as president: On Thursday, he called the pre-COVID economy “the best our country would ever do.”

Was it really, though?

While inflation did hit a four-decade high in 2022, by a wide variety of measures — job growth, wages even adjusting for inflation, the pace at which entrepreneurs start small businesses — the post-pandemic economy beats the pre-COVID economy handily.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the subject.

Zach Moller, economic program director at center-left think tank Third Way, said many people don’t feel that the current economy is better, no matter what the numbers actually say, because they’re still processing what happened during the pandemic.

“COVID changed the world, and people have a bit of nostalgia for how the world was before, before COVID changed so many things about our lives,” he said. “And that’s a very powerful thing.”

Some of it may have to do with how hard it is to compare the pre- and post-pandemic economies because of shifts that happened in reaction to the pandemic.

For example, Bobby Kogan, senior director of budget policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the amount of money consumers spent on