Ex-Obama treasury official shreds Trump’s talking points in brutal fact-check

When Donald Trump gave his presidential acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he assumed that President Joe Biden would be the nominee. But only three days later, Biden ended his presidential campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

Harris, having secured enough delegates, is now the presumptive Democratic nominee.

In an op-ed/listicle published by the New York Times on July 24, Steve Rattner — a financial analyst for MSNBC and former U.S. Treasury Department counselor under President Barack Obama — fact-checks some of the talking points that have been coming from the Trump campaign.

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Trump claimed that "the only jobs (President Biden) created are for illegal immigrants and bounce-back jobs — they're bounced back from the COVID."

But according to Rattner, "Under Mr. Trump — even excluding the impact of the COVID pandemic — the economy generated an average of 182,000 jobs a month, well below Mr. Biden's 277,000 a month, excluding his post-pandemic bounce, and Bill Clinton's 242,000."

Trump said of inflation, "It's killing people. They can't buy groceries anymore. They can't — you look at the cost of food where it's doubled, and tripled and quadrupled. They can't live. They're not living anymore."

But Rattner notes that "not a single item tracked by the government is more than 56 percent more expensive than it was when Mr. Biden took office, while grocery prices overall have gone up 21 percent."

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Trump claimed that his presidency brought "the largest tax cut in history."

Ratter, however, explains, "The most analytically valid method for measuring the size of a tax cut is to compare it with the size of the economy at the time. By this standard, the Trump tax package was the eighth largest tax cut in the past century, well behind the cuts that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama signed into law."

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Steve Rattner's full New York Times op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).