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Lutnick Moves the Goalposts After Bad News for Trump Economy

The Commerce Secretary swears blind that things will turn around—eventually.

Howard Lutnick tried to defend President Trump’s economic plan after damning data revealed a rise in inflation and jobless claims.

The Commerce Secretary expressed confidence that the economy will start booming in 2026 and reach “full fire” in 2027 after the Labor Department reported Thursday that consumer prices rose for the fourth month in a row to 2.9 percent, and the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits hit 263,000 last week, the highest in almost four years.

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Lutnick told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street that a “huge amount of construction jobs” will be generated by a push to bring factories onshore to escape the Trump administration’s sky-high tariffs.

“So I would say the first quarter of next year will be the best quarter of construction jobs this country’s ever seen,” he said. “And that’s going to roll all the way through ’26, so I think you’re going to see GDP growth next year over 4 percent.”

Lutnick predicted that Americans who were “sitting on the sidelines because they just don’t want to be in the marketing department of this or that company” are going to rejoin the workforce to fill some 5 million openings for roles that require technical training.

“These people are going to be the arms and legs of the 5 million construction workers and the 5 million factory workers that are coming to America,” he said. “You’re going to see it start in ’26 and it’s going to be full fire in ’27.”

The Commerce Secretary also waved off concerns that the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies could lead to a shortage of workers, arguing that vocational schools could help fill that gap.

“If Harvard settles with Donald Trump, you know what he’s going to do with the $500 million? He’s going to have Harvard build vocational schools, the Harvard vocational school, because that’s what America needs. We need to train people for the jobs that are coming. Fixing robots, right? HVAC systems,” he said.

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It’s not the first time that Lutnick has issued a fearless forecast for when the economy will boom.

In March, Lutnick told Fox Business that Trump’s leadership would soon be reflected in the economy.

“You’re worried about someone pre-announcing? What they should announce is in the fourth quarter of 2025, this economy is going to be humming,” he said.

That same month, he told the network that “shovels in the ground” to build factories and bring production back to America would “start really strong in the third quarter.”

In July, after the Commerce Department reported that the GDP grew 3 percent, Lutnick announced in an X post that “the Trump Economy has officially arrived.”

Lutnick also told CBS News that month that the “next two weeks are going to be weeks for the record books.”

The administration quietly changed its tune in September, when President Donald Trump said ahead of the release of the latest jobs report that “the real numbers” will come out “in a year from now.”

Trump made the comment during a private dinner with high-flying tech executives, including Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and Sam Altman of OpenAI.

“When these monstrous, huge, beautiful places—they’re palaces of genius—when they start opening up, I think you’ll see job numbers that are going to be absolutely incredible,” he said. “Right now, it’s a lot of construction numbers, but you’re going to see job numbers like our country has never seen before.”

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