Donald Trump Jr. boasted on Friday that the economy grew 4 percent under his father’s presidency — claiming that it never even topped 2 percent under Barack Obama.
But he was wrong — 15 times over. As The Week noted, the eldest son of Donald Trump appeared to get a bit too carried away with his tweet praising his father and seemed to forget that Barack Obama topped that level of growth nearly half the quarters of his presidency.
“Incredible numbers,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote . “I remember when ‘the experts’ laughed about breaking 3 percent. Just because Obama never broke 2 percent doesn’t mean that someone with great policies can’t.”
As The Week noted, there were actually 15 quarters during Obama’s eight years in office where the economy topped 2 percent growth, including a high of 4.9 percent growth in 2014.
Despite Donald Trump Jr.’s misplaced boast, the economic growth is seen largely as a win for President Donald Trump during what has otherwise been a rough stretch for him. Bloomberg noted that the numbers for the most recent quarter come after some high-profile economic actions from Donald Trump, including a massive tax cut and economic sanctions aimed at protecting American interests.
But others have noted that the high numbers do not reflect the true state of the economy and that lower growth is likely ahead.
“This is not sustainable,” KC Mathews, chief investment officer at Kansas City-based UMB Bank, told CNN . “Maybe we get a soft landing. Growth will slow, but we may not have a recession. Growth could go back to about a 2 percent to 2.5 percent level.”
The tweet from Donald Trump Jr. came at a time when he is already facing plenty of criticism for his role in setting up a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer during the 2016 campaign who promised to share dirt on Hillary Clinton. This week, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, reportedly said he has evidence that Trump himself was aware of this meeting, which the White House has steadfastly denied.
Donald Trump Jr: “…Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” The Trump Organization’s CFO probably has plenty of insight on those assets. https://t.co/62uKpYD0RK
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) July 27, 2018
It was Donald Trump Jr. who first revealed this meeting and even shared full email exchanges in which he set up the meeting and expressed excitement at the prospect of getting dirt on Clinton.
This week’s report led Donald Trump to lash out against Cohen on Twitter, implying that the embattled lawyer is willing to share false information to get himself out of his own federal investigation. It was not clear if Cohen was working directly with Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, however.
