It must be a cold day in hell apparently. Leftist fact-checker FactCheck.org actually took time to defend President Donald Trump’s first term economy from deceptive falsehoods circulating online. They were unhappy that Biden fans were misleading people about their website's economic record-keeping.
The fact-checker took particular issue with a graphic circulating online distorting data to give former President Joe Biden a much more favorable economic assessment over Trump. As FactCheck.org noted, “[T]wo of its figures are way off, and others are out of date — creating a more unfavorable comparison for Trump.”
Moreover, wrote staff writer D'Angelo Gore, “The graphic also doesn’t mention that Trump’s numbers, for his first term, were negatively affected by the economic decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
That’s certainly a factoid many in the media don’t like to point out when doing Biden vs. Trump economic comparisons. A post of the graphic on X, according to the outlet, “garnered roughly 98,000 ‘views’ and been reposted about 4,200 times.”
— Annie (@AnnieForTruth) April 17, 2025
Whoever generated the graphic reportedly relied on twisting data from FactCheck.org’s previous reports. “Biden’s figures, which are in green, appear to come from our article “Biden’s Numbers, April 2024 Update” – but two of the figures have been inverted,” Gore wrote. Specifically, Gore continued, “we reported that the most recent economic growth rate under Biden at that point, for the first quarter of 2024, was 1.6% – not 18.8%, as the graphic says. And we reported that the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services under Biden had grown 18.8% at that time – not 1.6%.”
The creator of the graphic also tried to use outdated figures from FactCheck.org’s database in order to slam Trump. According to Gore, “[T]he creator of the graphic appears to have pulled his figures, which are in red, from our original version of “Trump’s Final Numbers” that was published in October 2021. (The graphic’s figure for job growth under Trump is a typo.) But we updated that article in July 2024 because we found that several of the statistics – due to periodic revisions to government data – were no longer accurate.”
Add to that the gross omission of the COVID-19 lockdowns that sent the economy into a spiral and you have full fledged leftist propaganda, as Gore undlerined: "Our report mentioned the pandemic nearly 40 times."
In fact, as Gore conceded, Trump’s numbers are much better if one eliminates the COVID-19 pandemic year as an outlier:
There had been an increase in employment under Trump before the pandemic caused the loss of more than 20 million jobs in April 2020, as attempts to stop the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 led to business closures and layoffs. Also, prior to the pandemic, the unemployment rate was 3.5% in February 2020, and the economy had grown by 2.3% in 2019.
“We don’t know if those economic gains would have continued if not for the pandemic, but it’s misleading to present Trump’s first-term economic record without mentioning the COVID-19 caveat,” Gore concluded.
Now, of course, Gore couldn’t let himself be completely red-pilled and was guilty of leaving out context himself. When citing Biden’s jobs numbers, Gore argued that “the unemployment rate was 4%, and total employment for the entirety of his presidency had increased by more than 16.1 million jobs, including 610,000 manufacturing jobs.” The issue: Nowhere did Gore mention that much of the so-called jobs added under Biden were simply those recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, when the employment number being thrown around as a win for Biden was “15 million” jobs added last year, fellow fact-checker Snopes slapped that down as a load of bunk.
According to Snopes, “About 9 million of those jobs were lost during the pandemic, so the net jobs gain from pre-pandemic levels was 5.5 million.” In other words, the “15 million” claim was bunk. The author of the fact check, Anna Rascouët-Paz, addressed the Biden propaganda on her personal Twitter account: “Did the US economy really add 15 million jobs under Biden? *squinty face* mmmm let's not push it.”
