I was sort of surprised to see this story at CNN today. In advance of the State of the Union, where President Trump is expected to say a lot of positive things about the economy over the past year, I would have expected CNN to publish some kind of anticipatory strike saying actually, the economy is rubbish.
To my surprise they actually did the opposite. The published this story on the front page under the headline "The state of the union's economy is surprisingly strong." Maybe they got complaints about that because the story now has a much less enthusiastic headline: "The state of the economy, in charts."
Headline aside, the story itself is still pretty upbeat.
The state of the union’s economy is surprisingly strong.
On paper, anyway. Jobs, wage growth, consumer spending and inflation under President Donald Trump look pretty decent or have been mostly stable and the stock market is near a record high.
Yet Americans despise this economy. Consumer confidence is near record lows and recent polling shows Trump’s economy gets dreadful grades from potential voters – a political liability for Republicans ahead of this year’s midterms.
They're coming really close to saying that people are being unfair to President Trump or judging him to harshly. They don't actually say that but that's the implication.
Despite a recent tariff- and AI-induced sell-off this year, stocks remain near their all-time highs. The market is decidedly not the economy, but enthusiasm from Wall Street helps pad retirement accounts, which can give consumers the confidence to spend their money.
The US economy grew 2.2% in 2025. Although that was the slowest pace since 2020, it was very much in line with the last three years of robust economic growth. And the longest-ever government shutdown shaved a bunch of productivity off the books in the fourth quarter – growth that the US economy should be making back this quarter.
There are various estimates but the shutdown probably cut a full point or a bit more out of the growth numbers last quarter. (And it may even be the case that cutting growth was part of the Democrats' unspoken plan all along. After all, they didn't accomplish anything else with that shutdown.) And there's more good news:
US job growth was significantly stronger than expected in January, the unemployment rate remains low, and the economy doesn’t actually need to create that many jobs because of historically low immigration and birth rates. Economists believe the job market may be on the path to recovery
The bad news: Paycheck growth has been on a steady slide for more than three years. The good news: so has inflation, which is slowing at a faster rate.
The bad news, which CNN eventually gets to, is the claim that we're in a K-shaped recovery, meaning that people near the top are recovering pretty well but those near the bottom aren't feeling it as much or at all. So, for instance, lower-income Americans are struggling with a lot of debt.
Lower- and middle-income Americans have leaned more heavily on credit cards and other loans to help them try to keep up as many aspects of life grow increasingly unaffordable.
But a growing share of American households are finding it increasingly difficult to pay down bloated credit card bills, to keep up with pricey car payments, to make student loan payments, and to have enough money in the bank to cover their monthly mortgage check.
The percent of auto loan and credit card balances that were seriously delinquent (90 days or more late) were the highest in roughly 15 years, according to the latest household debt and credit report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Of course we're arguably here because of the pandemic and the world shutting down and the subsequent excessive spending during the Biden administration that resulted in high inflation. The recovery from that hasn't caught up to everyone yet.
But let's face it, even if CNN says the economy is pretty good on most fronts, that won't matter to most Democrats whose feelings come down to one thing: President Trump. So long as he is in office, most Dems will keep telling pollsters the economy is bad. There's probably no economy that is ever going to win those folks over.
