Axios (10/5/26) thinks it’s spotted a mystery: “President Trump’s economic data keeps getting stronger. His economic polling keeps getting worse by the day.”
Or as the political news site put it in an earlier story (9/30/26): “America’s economy is roaring ahead. And Americans feel lousy about it.”
As both stories note, people don’t feel like the economy is “roaring ahead.” So what’s the proof that they’re wrong? As is its wont, Axios provides bullet points in the October 5 piece to lay out the “ample evidence the economy is, statistically speaking, relatively strong.”
First up: “Economic growth is solid and accelerating.” The link that backs that up goes to the September 30 piece, which reported, “The economy grew at a 2.2% annualized rate in the second quarter, a sharp upgrade from the 1.5% previously reported.”
Is 2.2% growth “relatively strong,” though? Average annual GDP growth since 1947 is 3.2%, a full percentage point higher. If that seems like too long a time frame for comparison, the Biden years—a period when the economy was rarely described as “roaring ahead” or “relatively strong”—averaged 3.7% annual GDP growth. Leaving out 2021—an exceptional year when the economy bounced back strongly from the Covid recession—still leaves Biden’s economy growing at 2.8% a year.
Relatively speaking, then, Trump’s growth is rather weak. It’s not “accelerating,” either; over the six quarters so far of Trump’s second term, the average annual growth rate has been 2.2%—the same as in the most recent quarter.
