The US economy is thriving, according to Donald Trump: jobs are surging, prices are falling, wages are soaring. The government’s own official statistics paint a more complicated picture of 2025.
“The Trump Economic Golden Age is FULL steam ahead,” the president claimed on social media, after growth data for the third quarter of the year – covering July, August and September – was unexpectedly strong.
But other key indicators have been far less robust in 2025. If Trump is right, and an unprecedented economic boom is about to take hold, the foundations appear fragile.
Inflation
The cost of living – and its sharp rise, for many Americans, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic – was central to Trump’s fight for re-election in 2024. While inflation peaked at its highest level in a generation in 2022, prices remained high.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised to tackle this problem and bring down not only inflation – the rate at which prices rise – but prices themselves.
But inflation held firm in 2025, as the White House pressed ahead with Trump’s flagship economic policy. Despite his rhetoric on reducing prices, many economists feared the president’s sweeping tariffs on imports from overseas risked driving them higher.
Interest rates
Price growth fell sharply after policymakers at the US Federal Reserve launched an aggressive campaign to cool the US economy, rapidly increasing interest rates in an attempt to reduce inflation.
By the turn of the year, the Fed had already started to bring rates down from their two-decade high. But policymakers, led by the central bank’s chair, Jerome Powell, wanted to tread carefully – and were anxious that cutting rates too aggressively would imperil the progress they had made on inflation.
Trump, no careful treader, returned to office demanding a rapid return to low rates to spur economic growth and berating “numbskull” Powell (whom he appointed). His public demands and attacks were coolly brushed off by Powell. But by the end of the year, Trump had tried to bolster the Fed’s rate-setting board with officials who were more in line with his thinking, dividing opinion on the Fed. Next year, he gets to replace Powell.
Employment
A post-pandemic surge in jobs growth was already losing steam by last year. Trump tapped into Americans’ frustrations with the economy, promising a “manufacturing renaissance” that would set the stage for another jobs surge.
The renaissance has yet to arrive, however, and over the summer, growth in the labor force appeared to stall altogether. Rather than add jobs, the US economy actually shed them in June and August. And in October, amid the longest government shutdown in history, it lost an estimated 105,000.
The unemployment rate – the percentage of the US labor force that is out of work – has meanwhile been rising throughout the year, and in November scaled its highest level since September 2021.
The president tried to push back, claiming “the only reason” unemployment had climbed was because the federal workforce had declined – although the federal workforce has fallen 271,000 since January, while the number of unemployed Americans has risen by about a million.
“I wish the Fake News would report the 4.5% correctly,” he added on social media earlier this month, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics put November’s unemployment rate at 4.6%.
Growth
By the main measure of economic growth – gross domestic product, or GDP – the US economy has endured a rollercoaster year. It shrank in the first quarter, amid an influx of imports ahead of Trump’s expected tariff onslaught, before bouncing back in the second and gathering steam in the third.
After growth of 2.8% in 2024, the US economy is expected to expand by 2% this year, and 2.1% next year. But many economists did not anticipate such a robust GDP reading for the third quarter, which came ahead of the federal shutdown.
The last time growth was this strong, during Joe Biden’s presidency, rising prices and patchy labor growth left many struggling to reconcile the headline figures with the day-to-day reality of their lives.
Trump is promising a historic economic boom. Like Biden, he may well find the real task is not just to deliver it – but to ensure Americans feel it, too.
