How much money has been invested in the United States during President Donald Trump’s second term? According to Trump at recent events, that number is $21 trillion. It’s also been $22 trillion. And $22.2 trillion.
In the run-up to next week’s midterm elections, Trump has hit the road, and the numbers he’s bragging about in his stump speech have grown. Trump’s growing figures on investments, crowd size at his events and the health of the economy show a pattern, according to Ryan Skinnell, who teaches about political rhetoric at San Jose State University.
“He uses ‘truthful hyperbole,’” Skinnell said. “Making things bigger and grander and larger than they are. You can see it most often when there’s some big event coming up, like an election, or he’s anxious, nervous or scared about something.”
The growth in the top-line investment number — which the White House’s website reports is $11.3 trillion — hasn’t been limited to his recent campaign events. Trump said the number was $18 trillion in May, $19 trillion in July, $20 trillion in August and $21 trillion in September.
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“The money that’s being invested is $22.5 trillion,” Trump said Sunday at a Michigan campaign rally. “We have more growth than any country has ever had. We are doing better than any country has ever had.”
White House spokesperson Matthew Middleton deferred to Trump’s claims when asked about the difference between the president’s statements and the White House website.
“President Trump is right,” Middleton said in a statement “This administration has secured many trillions of dollars in investments during his presidency.”
Economists say it’s hard to see how the investment total is rooted in reality.
“That’s a wild number with no basis in fact,” Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said in a statement to The Washington Sun. “The entire GDP of the U.S. is about $32 trillion, and business investment is around 14% of that.”
Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters — a nonprofit organization focused on misinformation analysis — said that conservative news outlets are reframing what the president says instead of parroting it as some outlets did during his first term and even earlier in this term. Trump, for instance, said more than 30,000 people showed up to his Oct. 14 rally in Kalispell, Montana. The venue’s website says maximum occupancy is around 7,000.
Carusone said he hasn’t seen Trump’s claim on the Montana crowd size repeated much by conservative media outlets. He said networks are already facing viewer pushback for defending Trump’s economy and may want to avoid further isolating viewers by defending something “so obviously dumb and untrue.”
“They’re not basically going crazy with the crowd size the way they had been in the past,” Carusone said, adding that he saw several outlets report the crowd size as being a few thousand people.
Near the end of his rally speeches, Trump often boasts of a robust economy, hitting on a similar set of talking points.
“Incomes for hardworking Americans have soared to the highest level ever recorded,” Trump said Oct. 19 at a Kansas rally. “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country. And … the poverty rate has just reached its lowest level.”
While each of those facts is true, American University economics professor Kara Reynolds says Trump often omits the context that underlies why rising prices continue to top voters’ list of the most pressing issues facing the country.
Reynolds said rising incomes and stock market gains are highly skewed to the top earners.
“The stock market has been up a lot over the last two years. But the fact is that very few Americans actually own stock,” Reynolds said, noting the “typical, median voter” isn’t benefiting from those financial gains.
The rise in incomes and the stock market is also tied to the AI boom, which Reynolds said will benefit top earners even more.
“All of that AI growth is going to the top earners in society,” Reynolds continued. “The people that are going to be struggling more with inflation, the people who spend more of their money at the grocery store, the people who might be laid off under some of this AI structural transformation are in the lower income brackets.”
Reynolds said context is also missing from the unemployment and poverty rates Trump discusses; the unemployment rate does not count Americans who have stopped looking for work, and an alternative poverty measure called the Supplemental Poverty Rate paints a very different picture from Trump’s claims.
“When you look at that poverty rate, it’s virtually unchanged,” Reynolds said. “It’s 13.1% now, compared to only 7.7% in 2021. It speaks to how much of a cut we’ve seen in government services and how that has kind of exacerbated poverty across the country.”
Skinnell said that Trump hasn’t seen much blowback from voters in past elections when he’s made similarly disputed claims.
“It seems like the things that he says should turn voters off,” Skinnell said, “But there’s a very sophisticated sort of machine that washes out, or at least tries to wash out, the most extreme things he says.”
“It often,” Skinnell added, “works well enough to get him elected.”
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