President Trump and his administration have repeatedly sought to contrast the economy since the start of his term with what they claim was a disastrous Biden administration. As Trump put it on March 4, 2025 in his address to Congress, “We inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.” To hear them tell it, any lagging economic indicators are attributable to Biden; nonetheless, on their watch things have never been better. As Trump explained during his 2026 State of the Union, “The roaring economy is roaring like never before.”

In fact, by most economic measures the economy’s performance was outstanding during President Biden’s term in office. A year into the Trump administration, there are signs of concern.

This paper goes over some key measures. It compares the averages for the four years of the Biden administration, as well as giving the 2024 data, alongside the data for the first year of the Trump administration.

First, some context. When Biden took office at the start of 2021, the economy was still far from having recovered from the pandemic recession. COVID-19 was still widespread, and the vaccines were just beginning to be rolled out. Many analysts had expected the economic impact of the pandemic to quickly diminish as most of the population got the vaccine. As it turned out, the vaccines were far less effective against two subsequent COVID strains that developed over the course of the next year. This further delayed the return to normal; tens of millions of people were still not reverting back to normal consumption of services, like going to restaurants or traveling.

While these waves did not prevent employment from bouncing back quickly, it meant that the shift to goods consumption continued much longer than expected, leading to worldwide supply chain problems. This in turn caused a burst of worldwide inflation.

By the second half of 2024, inflation was coming down close to the Fed’s 2.0 percent target, with unemployment hovering near 4.0 percent, a level generally considered full employment. This was the economy that was handed to Donald Trump in 2025.

Now, let’s see how things compare between the two administrations.

Under Biden, The Longest Stretch of Low Unemployment in 70 Years

Shortly after taking office, President Biden pushed through his recovery package. The unemployment rate quickly fell from 6.6 percent in January of 2021 to 3.9 percent by the end of the year. It didn’t rise above 4.0 percent until June of 2024. The longest period where the unemployment rate has been at or below 4.0 percent since the early 1950s.

Even when it crossed 4.0 percent, it peaked at just 4.2 percent and was back to 4.0 percent at the end of Biden’s term in January. For the full term; the unemployment rate averaged 4.1 percent. It also averaged 4.1 percent in Biden’s last year.

Meanwhile, in the first full year of the Trump presidency the unemployment rate has averaged 4.3 percent.

Unemployment matters not only to the relatively small portion of the workforce that is unemployed at a point in time. Roughly 6 million workers lose or leave their jobs every month. That comes to more than 70 million over the course of a year, although many change jobs more than once. If the labor market is strong, these workers will be able to quickly find a new job with decent pay and working conditions. In a weak labor market, their prospects for finding a good job will be far worse. The number of people quitting their jobs has fallen sharply in the last year, although the decline began in 2024.

Job Growth Soared with Recovery Act, Then Slowed with Curbs on Immigration

When Biden took office in January 2021, the immediate bounce back in jobs from the ending of the shutdown was over. Job growth averaged just 150,000 a month........

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