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Trump’s Oval Office ‘session’ on the economy? Charts about Biden.
President Donald Trump had just named a new nominee to the board of the Federal Reserve and imposed hundreds of billions of dollars in new import taxes when he quickly summoned the White House press pool Thursday for what was described as an urgent economic announcement.
But in the Oval Office, the president stood with an easel, poster-sized charts and longtime conservative economist Stephen Moore, an informal Trump adviser.
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“We’re going to have a quick session with Steve Moore,” Trump said, then yielded the floor.
What followed was an eight-minute pep rally on Trump’s economy vs. that of his predecessor, Joe Biden.
The urgent economic news, the president said, was “these numbers that were just released. I mean, literally just released.”
Moore and his team at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a nonpartisan advocacy group for conservative economic ideas, had devised a new model to use Census Bureau monthly data surveys to predict future releases of national income data with a 3 percent error rate, Moore told The Washington Post.
“This is going to be a big deal for us because no one else has just figured out how to do this,” he said in an interview.
Moore said he meets with Trump every few months or so – “I don’t see him unless there’s something, you know, that is important to tell him” – and felt the numbers warranted the president’s attention.
“I saw the data, and I knew he would like it. It’s very positive for Trump,” Moore said. “ … I thought this was pretty important. He likes data, especially if it’s good news.”
Trump was so pleased, he asked his staff to usher in the press to see the numbers, Moore said.
A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss scheduling, confirmed that Moore had a meeting with the president and brought the charts – and that Trump, after seeing them, was delighted and wanted to show off his success.
The charts, five of them, indicated that they showed revisions of Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs data, median household income and net change in household income. The Post was unable to immediately verify the data. The White House and Moore did not immediately share the charts or the underlying figures used to produce them.
But in each, the posters showed soaring red lines or bars (denoting Trump’s term) and diminutive blue ones (showing Biden’s). The message, Moore said, was clear: “You can see every income group did better under Trump than Biden by a wide margin.”
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Recent economic numbers tell a far more complex story.
The economy appears to have slackened in recent months, experts say, as employers pause workforce investments in the face of Trump’s tariffs. Inflation on producers increased modestly in June, according to federal data, along with prices on consumer goods and services.
Trump last week fired the head of the agency that collects that data, falsely accusing her of fabricating the figures to make him look bad. There is no evidence to support his claim. He has yet to name a permanent replacement.
Meanwhile, the Fed is considering cutting interest rates in the coming month, but it must balance the rates against potential inflation caused by the tariffs.
Trump’s tariffs may collect $50 billion a month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Thursday, money the government could desperately use to improve its poor financial health.
Trump and Republicans’ massive new tax and immigration law will add $4.1 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If lawmakers extend the measure’s most popular components, it will add another $900 billion to the deficit. Spiraling annual deficits can increase prices and send borrowing costs spiraling upward.
Moore’s presentation largely didn’t look at the current economy – most of the charts compared Trump’s first term with Biden’s term, he said in the Oval Office.
In an interview, he said the effect of the import taxes – Trump’s signature economic policy in his second term – was still uncertain.
“There’s so many moving parts to it that it’s hard to parse out. All you can do is really look at what has happened, and I think that there might have been some impact on prices, but those price increases might have been offset by reduction in prices and other areas,” Moore said. “The answer is, I don’t think we know yet how the tariffs have affected the economy. It’s too soon to tell.”
Trump seemed to like the numbers, regardless.
“When you look at them,” the president told reporters as he flipped through the charts one last time, “they’re all something.”
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Emily Davies contributed to this report.
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