In 2019, a CNN poll said that 56% or voters approved of former President Donald Trump policies on the economy.
Today, most polls show that most Americans believe the economy is moving in the wrong direction and blame President Biden. When asked who would be better suited to handle the economy, most say former President Trump.
If you compare the numbers pre-COVID, Trump’s economic performance outweighed President Biden’s first term.
Justin Haskins, with the Heartland Institute and a New York Times bestselling author, recently listed some statistics highlighting the differences between Biden and Trump on the issue of unemployment.
TOTAL EMPLOYMENT
The White House brags about 15 million jobs have been created since Biden came into office in January of 2021.
“The President touts a booming jobs market, but that’s a highly misleading claim,” said Haskins.
Haskins points out that most jobs were recovered after the COVID-19-related lockdowns ended. They were not newly created jobs.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), says the current employment level is around 3 million jobs higher than in January 2020, just before COVID.
Compared to Trump’s first three years in office, his policies added 6.33 million jobs to the economy, more than double the Biden jobs market.
FULL-TIME JOBS
“There is a stark difference in the quality of the jobs added under both presidents,” says Haskins.
In his research, Haskins notes that in the Biden economy, there have been months when full-time employment has gone down, and the number of part-time jobs has gone up.
The BLS shows an increasing number of Americans with full-time employment dropped by more than 1.7 million from November 2023 to the end of March 2024.
In fact, under Biden, around 1.2 million part-time jobs were added. But during Trump’s first three years, most of the jobs created were full-time. Between January 2021 and January 2020, part-time jobs under the Trump administration only increased by 17,000, less than 1% of the total number of added jobs.
The Wall Street Journal noted that 56% of the new jobs created in 2023 came from the Fed and local and state governments.
It is true that during the COVID shutdowns, millions lost their jobs under Trump’s watch, and Trump did spend trillions, which began the rise in inflation. But despite that, voters are saying the same thing as they did in 2019, right before COVID: they trust Trump on the economy more than Biden.
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