President Donald Trump appeared to have taken a page out of his sworn enemy’s playbook during his first State of the Union address in his second term.
Trump attempted to convince skeptical Americans that the economy was booming under his watch, despite the economic squeeze many feel, the same move that former President Joe Biden attempted.
In his winding speech Tuesday night, Trump said, “Inflation is plummeting,” and added, “Incomes are rising fast.”
Two years ago in his final State of the Union address, Biden said, “Inflation keeps coming down,” and added, “Wages keep going up.”
Both presidents even appeared to blame each other for the state of the economy in their respective speeches.
Trump blamed Biden, saying, “I had just inherited a nation in crisis with a stagnant economy.”
And Biden blamed Trump, “I inherited an economy that was on the brink.”
Biden and Trump both also tried to sell the economy as being one of the best globally.
“Now our economy is literally the envy of the world,” Biden said in 2024.
“Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said Tuesday night.
But Biden’s repeated attempts to tell the country that the economy on paper was doing just fine fell flat. His “Bidenomics” pitch didn’t seem to resonate with voters, as Democrats suffered a clobbering on all political fronts in the 2024 presidential election.
Former Biden administration officials saw the resemblance between their former boss’s speech and that of the current president.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say fellow alums didn’t laugh when Trump says the same things that used to come out of our White House,” Kate Berner, who worked as a White House communications adviser under Biden, told The New York Times.
“He is telling people to ignore their lived experience and that economic indicators and what the elites are saying should overpower what they feel or see,” Berner continued. “Trump would slam us for saying it, and now he’s doing the exact same thing.”
Bharat Ramamurti, who worked as the deputy director of the National Economic Council under Biden, told the Times that Trump was falling into the same economic trap that Biden fell into.
“It is like quicksand,” Ramamurti told the outlet. “It feels like the more you struggle and say ‘No, it’s really good!’ the more you get sucked in… I wish I knew the answer to get out of it. But I don’t.”
In an email statement to the Daily Beast, White House spokesperson Kush Desai refuted the comparisons and said, “Anyone seriously comparing President Trump’s inspiring speech that discussed how this Administration has flipped the script on the preceding four year disaster to Joe Biden’s naptime sessions is a fool.”
After Republicans suffered widespread losses in the 2025 off-year elections, Trump’s advisors have pushed him to focus more on affordability going into the 2026 midterm elections.
Trump, however, insists that even the word affordability is a made-up “hoax” by Democratic officials.
In his speech on Tuesday, the president mentioned affordability just once, once again asserting that it was a made-up phenomenon.
“Now the same people in this chamber who voted for those disasters suddenly use the word ‘affordability.’ A word, they just used it,” Trump lamented. “Somebody gave it to them, knowing full well that they caused and created the increased prices that all of our citizens had to endure. You caused that problem. You caused that problem.”
