The "best economy" claim was one of a litany of spurious brags Trump made in his debate with President Biden, and is one which he made as well in his first (2020) presidential debate with then-candidate Biden in Cleveland. He flaunted the same claim in a Facebook post October 5, 2021. And has flogged it at his rallies dozens of time since.

The way economists generally evaluate the size and strength of an economy is by charting its rate of growth. And the way they generally do that is with something called Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), an agency of the Department of Commerce, produces official macroeconomic and industry statistics including reports about the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States and its various units—states, cities, towns, counties, and metropolitan areas. BEA has about 500 employees and an annual budget of approximately $101 million.

Quarterly and annual GDP readings are the most popular way to measure how a president is managing the economy during his term of office. And economic policies are one of the main issues that presidential candidates harp on when running for office. But it should be noted that while the president plays an important role in guiding the economy, external factors such as wars, recessions or, say, public health crises significantly impact economic progress and can be out of a president’s control. Moreover, the Federal Reserve—an independent arm of the federal government—sets monetary policy, which also greatly influences GDP performance. (Ask Trump about COVID, ask Biden about interest rates.)

Even before COVID, not just GDP but other metrics such as wages and business investment under Trump were at best on par with what previous presidents turned in, or even below. In point of fact, annual increases in GDP under Trump were broadly similar to what they were during the final six years under his predecessor, Barack Obama. And all this is a part of the public record. So whence the "greatest economy" boast?

Trump did score, so to speak, two economic milestones during his four years in the White House. In the third quarter of 2020, GDP surged at what would ordinarily be a stunning 33.1% annualized rate. The President, predictably, was quick to celebrate: “Biggest and Best in the History of our Country, and not even close. Next year will be FANTASTIC!!!” he wrote on Twitter.

First of all, it's well to bear in mind that quarterly GDP growth is an artificial construct. It multiplies quarterly gain or loss by four in order to produce a picture of what a whole year at that rate would like.

Second, celebrating this particular moment was akin to telling half a story. Immediately leading up to that “milestone” measure, the second quarter had declined at a 31.4% annualized rate — the deepest downturn on record.

In other words, the US posted record growth in one period because it posted a record decline in the period prior. In fact, the US economy was still operating well below its pre-pandemic peak and GDP was still $670 billion lower than where it was at the end of 2019.

But a timing reference in the Trump Facebook post dated October 5, 2021, suggests he could be thinking of the other "record" achievement of his term of office. Unemployment in September 2019 plunged to 3.5%, a level it hadn’t touched since the early 1950s. It was essentially the lowest peacetime unemployment rate over a three-year period, going back to the Great Depression, according to Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution.

Trump's Facebook post read “In case you forgot. Two years ago today (emphasis added), we were experiencing the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

That "two years ago" time reference fits pretty well with the September 2019 report date. Could Trump be confusing unemployment with GDP, or simply deciding on his own that the former was a more flattering indicator of his economic achievement than the latter? Why not, if it suits his purposes? He’s told bigger lies than that.

But in all honesty, this was an accomplishment that would need to be shared anyway. Trump benefited greatly from the continuation of trends already well in place from the Obama “Great Recession” recovery. (Nor would Trump sustain it for long. By the following April, with COVID, it had mushroomed to 14.8%)

"While Trump can take some credit, I see it like the relief pitcher who comes in during the 9th inning with a seven-run lead, then boasts about winning the game," Dean Baker, co-founder of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, told PolitiFact. "It’s fine to get some credit for holding the lead, but this is much more an Obama story than a Trump story."

(The rate dropped later to 3.4% under Biden in January 2023. Currently it sits at 4.1%) No, Donald Trump didn’t lead ‘greatest economy in the history of the world’

But the fact remains that growth in the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) is the key tool to gauge an economy's performance, and that was just so-so on Trump’s watch. And all the former President can really claim with respect to GDP is that he achieved the second strongest growth record of all presidents in the second decade of the twenty-first century (2011-2020).

PolitiFact has twice dismissed The Donald’s “greatest economy,” claim in a one-word judgement, as “False.”

Washington Post fact-checkers, who were keeping track from the beginning, documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during Trump's presidential term, an average of about 21 per day.

"All Presidents lie. It’s a basic fact of American government," author Bill Lueders began a book review he wrote for The Progressive Magazine. some years back. The book in question was Eric Alterman's Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie, and Why Trump Is Worse. According to Alterman the tradition dates back to Thomas Jefferson who lied publicly about the true purpose of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was not primarily scientific as claimed but meant to scope out the West for acquisition.

Alterman recounts how FDR feigned reticence about entering World War II. And how Truman falsely described Hiroshima, a civilian center targeted for atomic devastation, as a “military base.” Dwight Eisenhower lied about U.S. spy flights over Russia and got caught when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev produced a downed pilot. John F. Kennedy lied about the Cuban missile crisis. Lyndon Johnson lied about Vietnam, in particular the imaginary Gulf of Tonkin attack that gave license to the war.

And evidently about whatever else came into his mind as well. Of Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Sr., (no fan of his brother's successor) once said: "He just lies continually about everything. He lies even when he doesn't have to lie." Johnson's persistent dissembling about the Vietnam War envenomed American political life to the point that journalists coined a euphemistic term for the disconnect: the credibility gap. Which in time was what brought his administration's tenure to an early and disreputable end.

Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, ran for office pledging to bring an "honorable" end to the carnage in Vietnam, before expanding the conflict by secretly carpet-bombing neutral Cambodia. Then for Nixon, of course, there was Watergate.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and US troops were rapidly scrambling to the Gulf, some segments of the American public appeared to be less than completely sold on the justification for military action. Jude Sheerin writing on the Broadcasting Corp.'s website recounts the following tale.

The Kuwaiti government-in-exile hired a US public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, whose Washington DC office was run by (President George H.W.) Bush's former chief of staff.

The PR firm coached a purported witness, introduced as a 15-year-old girl called "Nayirah," to tearfully testify to US Congressmen, in October 1990, that Iraqi soldiers had entered a hospital in Kuwait, removed babies from incubators and left them to die on the cold floor. Nayirah, reporters were assured, was using an assumed name for fear of reprisals against her family back home. Only after the war would it emerge she was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US and her story was completely baseless. Remember the movie "Wag the Dog" with Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro (also Anne Heche and a hilarious cameo by Woody Harrelson)? President Bush is recorded as having publicly touted this tall tale at least six times as he blew the bugle of war.

Leuders's book review observes that presidential lies are generally propagated to serve one of a small number of ends. Some are deemed necessary or at least justified to advance specific strategic or tactical goals, others are aimed, regrettably, at self-serving or opportunistic purposes, or worse, intended to conceal corruption. And then some were just downright pathological, as the title of Alderman's book suggests.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant regarded any lie as immoral—even one told to a murderer at the door. Kant saw lying as overriding the autonomous will of another person, unacceptably reducing that person to a mere tool. Modern-day philosophers are a little more inclined to allow exceptions to such rigidity, citing, for example, when using deception for achieving a critical political goal.

An article in the website The Conversation (an online "Ezine" posted by an independent news organization) recounts the story of how Abraham Lincoln, while himself open to the idea of pursuing peace negotiations with the Confederacy, knew that much of his own party believed unconditional surrender by the South was the only acceptable path to settling the slavery issue. Lincoln wrote a note to his own party asserting—falsely—that there were “no peace commissioners” being sent to conference with the Confederacy. A member of Congress later allowed that, in the absence of that note, the 13th Amendment—which ended the practice of chattel slavery—would never have been passed.

In that same article The Conversation suggests that Trump tends to lie in a slightly different way, the pathological one. "What is striking about his lies ... is that they have tended to be told to defend his own self-image or political viability rather than in service of some central political good." And one might add, they are never-ending.

The article further opines that some of President Trump’s more implausible lies can be best understood as tests of loyalty; those in his circle who repeat his most obvious lies demonstrate their loyalty in doing so. Most recently, he has attacked as disloyal members of the Republican Party who have not repeated his ,um, trumped up claims about electoral fraud.

But pathology aside, self-serving tactics have occasionally been employed by presidents credited with far more probity than Trump (or Clinton). In 1983, President Ronald Reagan claimed he had filmed atrocities of the Nazi death camps while serving as a US Army Signal Corps photographer in Europe. Supposedly he told this story to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir at the White House. But in fact, Reagan never left America during World War Two.

Even the Father of our Country was not above self-justifying mendacity in weaker moments. In 1788, Washington attempted to rewrite history by claiming he had been the strategic visionary behind the victory over the British at Yorktown seven years earlier, which effectively ended the Revolutionary War. But it was actually his French allies, specifically Rochambeau and Lafayette, who masterminded the decisive battle in Virginia. Washington had been stubbornly arguing instead for an attack on New York City.

The original sin, if you will, of presidential duplicity.

The CNN news clip that introduces this post is a fact-checking analysis of a Trump rally in Wisconsin. It was held the weekend before the first (and maybe last) Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It counted thirty fabrications, misrepresentations and distortions made in a soaring Trumpian flight into a make-believe where one need only need wish to make it so. Do people really believe him when he does these things? Does he even care? Are parallel universes just part of the show?

The fact-checking was the work of Daniel Dale, a reporter in CNN's Washington Bureau who specializes in assessing politicians' claims. He has since produced a similar report on the Presidential debate as well. (It can be viewed at CNN's website if the reader is hungry for more.)

The litany of claims, criticisms and assorted fantasies Trump delivered at the Presidential debate was quite similar to what he offered in Milwaukee, only a little longer and with the stunned countenance of the current President for added visual effect. It was an affair where Biden seemed surprisingly weighted down by old age and creeping perplexity and Trump seemed unusually untethered from reality.

The Biden people could hardly claim they couldn't foresee what their man would be up against. They'd have done better to just skip any effort to give voice to Biden's own future vision or recent accomplishments. And steer his entire narration toward taking the hot out of the hot air in Trump's more mind-exploding pretensions.

They could have made it simple by just schooling the President in five or six key contradictory rebuttals, and doing it over and over, to the point where he'd be able to deliver them in his sleep. Which judging from his level of alertness at the Atlanta disaster, might just be what he'd have to be able to do.

Coming up next here: a series of future posts, with small words, each addressing one specific instance of the former President's litany of louche claims and improbable reveries. Relatively short: to the point, briefly documented, simply illustrated. Watch your in-box. Copies will go to Camp David too. Even if it turns out someone else gets to take Joe's place, being Democrats it's likely they'd be able to use them too.

This shouldn't be that hard. All you have to do is convince people you're not Donald Trump. Or someone worse.