Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump's Secretary of Commerce, seems to be "confused about rudimentary economic details," according to a new analysis from MS NOW, making verifiably false claims on a regular basis, and it's gotten worse with his most recent "completely wrong" defense of the economy.
Writing for MS NOW on Monday, Steve Benen, a producer for Rachel Maddow and regular contributor to the network, first highlighted claims Lutnick made back in September that "didn't make any sense." In a post to social media, the billionaire-turned-secretary claimed that the economy under former President Joe Biden "could never reach 3 percent."
However, as Benen pointed out, Biden's economy posted that level of growth "several times," and sometimes saw growth of 4-6 percent. In fact, the total growth for all of Biden's first year in office, 2021, was 6.2 percent, "the strongest in nearly four decades."
"Given that the Department of Commerce, which Lutnick ostensibly leads, is responsible for compiling and releasing GDP data, the secretary’s apparent confusion was difficult to defend," Benen wrote. Still, Lutnick's fundamentally incorrect claims got worse last week.
During an appearance on Fox News, the secretary cited recent preliminary economic data for the third quarter of 2025, including a 4.3 percent growth in the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Lutnick then claimed that this equated to American workers across the board getting a 4.3 percent raise in their income, a complete misrepresentation of what GDP actually is. As Benen explained, while wages and overall economic growth can often move in tandem, they are not inherently linked and move independently of each other all the time.
The question of why Lutnick says things like this, however, remains up in the air, but the trend suggests that he is either incompetent enough to believe the falsehoods he shares, or that he is deliberately using them to spin a narrative about Trump's economy, which voters have turned against considerably.
"The broader question is whether the head of the Commerce Department is genuinely confused about this, or whether he’s pretending to be genuinely confused about this," Benen wrote. "If it’s the former, how did Lutnick manage to get this job? (For that matter, how did he run an investment bank?) If it’s the latter, why would he deliberately choose to appear ignorant about basic information his own department released to the public?"
