In the days leading up to his State of the Union address, President Trump claimed he had engineered a historic comeback.
“Just a year ago, our country was dead under corrupt Joe Biden — and he was corrupt as hell —,” he said at a rally in Georgia last week. “Now we have the hottest country. In a year we will have the hottest country in the world.”
But economic indicators and crime metrics do not show abrupt reversals from “worst” to “best,” as the president often boasts. Rather, trends on these issues that began before Mr. Trump took office continued largely unabated in his first year back.
This is what the data shows.
inflation
“I inherited the worst inflation in our country’s history. And now we have almost no inflation.”
– in an interview with NBC in February
INCORRECT. Inflation has slowed under Mr. Trump, but not to the dramatic extent he claimed. And prices are still rising above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.
Measured by the consumer price index, inflation in the summer of 2022 reached its highest level in four decades at around 9.1 percent in June. That number was not a record, as Mr. Trump said; Inflation reached higher levels in the 1910s, 1970s and 1980s.
But by January 2025, when Mr. Trump took office, inflation had fallen to 3 percent. In January this year, inflation fell further to 2.4 percent.
Jobs
“He slept while you tried to get a job. You didn’t work, and now we have the most working people in history.”
— at a rally in Georgia on Thursday, referring to Mr. Biden
This is misleading. Mr. Trump’s claim ignores population growth and mischaracterizes the employment situation under his predecessor. Other metrics point to slower job growth and rising unemployment in Trump’s first year in office.
It’s true that more people are employed now – about 159 million people in January – than at any time in U.S. history. But the population of the United States is also the largest in history, at more than 342 million people. (Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., like most other presidents who were out of office during economic downturns or recessions, could also have claimed that he presided over the most people who worked during his term.)
But labor force participation — those who were employed or actively looking for a job — has remained stable under Mr. Trump and has changed little: from 62.6 percent in January 2025 to 62.5 percent this January.
The unemployment rate rose slightly from 4 percent to 4.3 percent. The economy added 359,000 jobs from February 2025 to January 2026, compared to more than 1.2 million the previous year.
crime
“Crime has been a mess. Right now, 125 years, it’s the lowest crime we’ve had in a hundred years – since 1900.”
– in an NBC interview
That’s an exaggeration. Mr. Trump points out that homicides will reach their lowest level in 125 years in 2025 and that broader crime categories are also expected to decline. However, this did not represent a stark turnaround from 2024.
The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that the national murder rate will likely fall to its lowest level in 2025, at 4.0 per 100,000 people. (Official government estimates will be released later this year.) By comparison, the 2024 rate was 5.0 per 100,000 residents, according to official FBI data.
The murder rate has been declining since a spike in 2020. While 2025 saw the largest single-year decline in the murder rate, it followed two consecutive years of record-breaking declines.
“This change actually started in 2023, maybe late 2022, so it takes advantage of two previous huge declines,” said Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based crime analyst. “It is obvious that this is exactly what has happened before and continued.”
While the Council on Criminal Justice has not released estimates for violent or property crime rates for 2025, Mr. Asher believes preliminary data also shows declines in these broader categories. Still, he cautioned that historical comparisons should be approached with caution given the limitations in older data.
immigration
“By the way, we went from the worst frontier in history to the best frontier in history, by far.”
– at a reception at the White House on Wednesday
That’s a bit exaggerated. The number of unauthorized border crossings at the southwest border fell from record highs in 2022 and 2023 to the lowest level in more than half a century (not quite “in history”). But by 2024 the numbers had fallen sharply and had fallen even more sharply under Mr Trump.
In fiscal year 2025, which began in October 2024 and ended in September 2025, immigration officials recorded more than 237,000 encounters. That was the lowest level since 1970, when officials recorded about 200,000 encounters. (By comparison, 2022 saw the highest number of encounters on record, at more than 2.2 million.)
Monthly encounters peaked at nearly 250,000 in December 2023 and fell steadily in 2024 after Mr. Biden imposed strict asylum restrictions at the border. By December 2024, the number had fallen to about 47,000, roughly in line with the numbers at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term.
In Trump’s first year in office, conversions fell even more sharply, amounting to fewer than 6,500 in December 2025.
Lazaro Gamio contributed reporting.