The chaos
As the receipts of the first 100 days of the Trump presidency pile up, on the economic front, the tariffs have caused chaos due to a poor assessment of their consequences, and the economy has contracted by 0.3%. The president is trying to place the blame on an old friend, though.
Biden
On Truth Social, Trump once again found the perfect culprit to point the finger at, posting a message accusing... Joe Biden of being responsible of this disaster.
The trigger effect
«This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s», the president wrote on his social network, accusing Joe Biden of being behind the spectacular market plunge, including, it seems, the trigger effect of his own tariff announcement on April 2, which caused a stock market collapse not seen since the Great Depression.
In record numbers
Pointing out that he only took over the presidency on January 20, Trump is trying to reassure that the tariffs «will soon start kicking in», as he says companies will be moving into the US in record numbers.
0,3%
Meanwhile, data for the first quarter of 2025 reveals a 0.3% decline in US gross domestic product (GDP), signalling the first economic contraction in almost three years.
«NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS»
Trump blames Biden, not the tariffs. According to him, this economic contraction has «NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS», and would only be due to the fact that Biden «left us with bad numbers».
Some statistics from the Biden era
Under Joe Biden, the post-pandemic US economy grew at an average annual rate of 3.2%, compared with 1.8% under Trump, with 16.2 million jobs created between 2021 and 2024 (+11%). Unemployment fell from 6.4% to a low of 3.4%, then to 4.1%, and inflation fell from 9.1% to 2.7%.