… and GDP growth last year was not especially impressive.
Using the most generous measure of U.S. GDP growth (Q4 2025 over Q4 2024), U.S. GDP in 2025 grew by 2.2 percent. In light of Phil Gramm’s and my recent comparison of the first full calendar year (2025) of Trump 2.0 with the first full calendar year (2017) of Trump 1.0, we can now confidently say that GDP grew significantly more slowly in 2025 than it grew in 2017, when it grew by 3.0 percent.
Please note that by comparing GDP growth in the high-tariff year of 2025 with GDP growth in 2017 – the year before Trump began tariffing – I am not saying that the slower growth in 2025 was definitely caused by the tariffs. I’m saying simply that a comparison of the two different annual GDP-growth rates cannot support the Trumpian boast that his aggressive second-term tariffing is an unquestionable boon to the American economy.
I do suspect that the 2025 tariffs did indeed cause the U.S. economy in 2025 to grow less than it would have grown without the tariffs, but this blog post isn’t a research paper. To establish firmly that the tariffs depressed economic growth in 2025, and by how much, requires more research. But, again, the data that are now in greatly decrease the plausibility of the claim that we Americans should applaud the economic consequences of Trump’s 2025 tariffs.
