President Donald Trump on Wednesday blamed former President Joe Biden for the U.S. economy contracting in the first quarter of 2025 — and suggested he will blame Biden again for the second quarter’s results.
“This is Biden,” Trump said after the Commerce Department reported gross domestic product declined in the first three months of this year.
“And you could even say the next quarter is sort of Biden because it doesn’t just happen on a daily or an hourly basis,” he said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.
Trump noted that he did not take office until late January.
“The stock market in this case is, it says how bad the situation we inherited,” he said. “This is a quarter that we looked at today, and I, we took, all of us, together, we came in on January 20th.”
The president’s remarks came hours after his first defensive response to the Commerce report showing GDP fell at a 0.3% annualized pace in Q1. It was the first quarter of negative growth since 2022, when Biden was in the White House.
“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
“Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang,’ ” he claimed.
“This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!” Trump wrote.
Trump’s claim that the negative GDP and subsequent market declines were a result of Biden’s policies is inaccurate.
According to the Commerce report, the GDP figure reflects a wave of imports that companies made to try to get ahead of Trump’s promised tariffs.
Also weighing on GDP was a drop in government spending, driven largely by a cut in defense.
A separate report from ADP earlier Wednesday showed that private payrolls rose by just 62,000 in April, far below the Dow Jones consensus estimate for an increase of 120,000.
The weak hiring report was the smallest gain since July 2024. It also showed a stark drop in payroll growth from the downwardly revised gain of 147,000 in March.
Markets fell sharply at the open after the GDP report and disappointing corporate results. Stocks clawed back some of those losses later in the trading day.
The bad economic data could hang over Trump’s meeting with more than two dozen business leaders at the White House later Wednesday.
And his blame-casting on Biden could trip up his recent efforts to take credit for what he asserts are a slew of positive economic developments.
In a speech Tuesday evening celebrating the 100th day of his second presidential term, Trump boasted that “prices are coming way down,” claiming, “that’s what I’ve done.”
But the latest GDP report showed the personal consumption expenditures price index, which is the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure, sharply increasing by 3.6% in Q1, up from the 2.4% rise in the prior quarter.
Meanwhile, experts have pegged the shrinking payroll numbers and cratering consumer confidence to uncertainty and fear surrounding Trump’s tariff policies.
Trump’s current attempt to shirk responsibility for the economy is a mirror image of his effort to take credit for the stock market when it was on the rise during the Biden administration.
On Jan. 29, 2024, the then-presidential candidate wrote on Truth Social, “THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN.”
Andrew Bates, a former White House spokesman under Biden, tore into Trump over his latest claim.
“When Joe Biden handed Donald Trump the best-performing economy in the world, experts praised the U.S. for leaving every other wealthy nation ‘in the dust,'” Bates said in a statement.
“Now we’re plummeting toward a Trumpcession,” he said.
— CNBC’s Jeff Cox and Sean Conlon contributed to this report.
