Trump’s GDP Puffery

President Donald Trump wrongly described the estimated 2.6 percent growth in the nation’s gross domestic product for the second quarter as “a number that nobody thought they’d see for a long period of time.”

In fact, real GDP growth was higher than 2.6 percent in eight of the last 18 quarters, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That includes a 2.9 percent increase in the third quarter of 2016, which the Trump campaign dismissed at the time as “modest.”