Trumping Trump

“Our country is being lost. We are a failing nation!”

At least that’s how former president Donald Trump assessed the state of the nation during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Are things really that bad? What has happened in America that prompts a former president to declare on a national stage that we are destined to become “Venezuela on steroids”? 

I’m shocked at how a candidate for president can make such statements without being challenged. The media tries to fact-check the statements of both candidates, but propaganda, misinformation, exaggerations, charges, countercharges and lies buzz about in America’s political climate like a swarm of starlings. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up. For such a dramatic assessment to go unchallenged, though, suggests a dystopic political discourse in America.

The latest wave of misinformation by Trump and his MAGA allies involves false reports that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is ignoring the plights of communities suffering catastrophic flood damage from Hurricane Helene. In fact, governors and mayors of the communities involved, both Republican and Democrat, say that’s not true. To the contrary, they’ve been thanking federal officials and the Biden administration for the swift reaction the the tragedies they face.

photo by Hartono Creative Studio

I’m not going to get into why a candidate for public office would make such dire pronouncements. That would take me into the dangerous terrain of motives and, as a journalist, I’m not qualified to probe the mischievous mazes of the mind created by a lust for power.

I spent much of my decades-long career as a journalist writing and editing stories about measures the nation uses as yardsticks for America’s well-being, and I challenge the former president’s pessimism about America. His statement about the state of the nation just doesn’t square with the facts. To say America is destined to be “Venezuela on steroids” is nonsense.

We as a people use numerous methods to measure America’s well-being: population health indicators, including life expectancy and mortality; disease prevalence and incidence; social measures of health, including economic health, unemployment, wages adjusted for rising prices; healthcare; the environment.

You don’t get much clarity from short-term comparisons, such as how things were in 2024 compared to 2023. Longer-term views, like over the last decade, give the number context and meaning. In the case at hand, looking at the measures from 2014, when Barack Obama was president to 2024 cover Democrat and Republican administrations, relatively normal times, and extraordinary events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

All statistical measures the government gathers are important but economic health often rises to the top. Historically, a good economy makes Americans happier. On this count, the nation’s doing quite well despite Mr. Trump’s claim to the contrary.  

Economists usually look at the broadest measure of America’s economic health. It is called the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. That’s the number that makes Wall Street crazy when it starts to decline and politicians happy when it rises. The per capita GDP measures the value of all goods and services the economy produces in a certain period for each person in the country. Between 2014 and 2022, the per-capita GDP rose 38.4 percent. That’s outstanding. The final numbers for 2023 and 2024 aren’t in yet but they are likely to make things even better.

One reason for the rosy economic portrait is unemployment. The jobless rate, which gives us a rough idea of the percentage of the population out of work, is now at 4.3 percent compared to 5.6 percent in 2014. The rate has glided downward since 2014 with some fluctuations along the way, particularly during COVID-19 when it spiked at 6.7 percent. Real wages, or those adjusted for inflation, have fluctuated but overall increased over the decade. Inflation, which stood at 1.6 percent in 2014, stayed relatively stable over the decade except for June 2022 when it peaked at 9.1 percent thanks to economic stimulus measures passed by Congress and pushed by President Biden to pull the economy out of a threatened pandemic-related recession. This has been a stubborn rate of higher prices, but the rate of price increases stabilized recently at around 2.5 percent in August 2024.

Life expectancy and mortality changed significantly since 2014, when Americans were expected to live 78.9 years. The measure declined to 76.1 years by 2021, largely thanks to COVID-19, which erased nearly two decades of life expectancy progress in the U.S. The nation saw a slight rebound to 77.5 years by 2021, but this is still below the pre-pandemic levels. And it’s not so hot compared to other large, wealthy countries, where life expectancy declined but not by as much as in America. The leading causes of death in the U.S. — heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, accidents and strokes — remain the leading causes of death in that order, a relatively consistent pattern over the decade.

If you listen to the campaign rhetoric around the country, you’d think that hordes of evil-minded immigrants are storming the nation’s borders, poised to overrun American cities. There’s no question that immigration is a problem, particularly on the southern border of America. In 2024, U.S. Customs Bureau data suggests that net immigration to the U.S., or the number of people coming into America minus those who leave, will total 3.3 million compared to. an average of 990,000 in 2014. Illegal immigrants are included in those numbers. So former president Trump is right. Immigration is soaring, fed mostly by a surge of people fleeing Latin American countries such as Venezuela, which is led by a corrupt dictator. The data doesn’t support Trump’s characterization of immigrants as gun-toting criminals, though. A study of crime rates since 1960 says immigrants to the U.S. are sixty percent less likely to be jailed for crimes than those born in the U.S. The study was done by Northwestern University economist Elisa Jácome and three other academics from Princeton, Stanford, and the University of California at Davis.

The data needs some context, too. The 3.3 million net immigrants to the U.S represent about one percent of the American population, not exactly a flood of foreigners. The total of those born outside U.S. borders now stands at 51.4 million, or 15.5 percent of Americans. In 2014, about 42.2 million people in the U.S. were foreign-born, or about 13.2 percent of the population.

Moreover, Senate Republicans, at the urging of former president Trump, killed a bi-partisan bill designed to cope with many of the current problems at the southern border. The only Republican who voted for the legislation was Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski. During the Vice Presidential debate on Tuesday, Senator J. D. Vance repeatedly blamed many of the nation’s problems on Vice President Kamala Harris and her inaction on immigration. Although Governor Tim Walz pushed back somewhat, no one asked Vance point blank to explain why he voted against a bi-partisan bill that would have addressed many of the problems Vance was complaining about. On immigration, the facts speak for themselves. If you want to vent your anger at anyone, look at Republican candidates for the Senate in the next election. 

I could go on listing many comparisons of conditions in the country over the last decade, such as the crime rate, which is down between 2014 and 2024, or the poverty rate, which is down, too. More Americans have health insurance, too, thanks to Obamacare, the program Trump and his MAGA allies want to kill as proposed in their Project 2025, which Trump conveniently claims to disown.

This report also isn’t meant to diminish that America has problems. Nevertheless, the overwhelming flow of data from serious people committed to producing facts about the state of America hardly suggests that the U.S. is the lost and failed nation former president Trump portrays in his campaign to reclaim the White House. 

Trump has a history of saying things that are simply not factual. In an age where the press is struggling to survive and misinformation is rampant, I urge you once again to remember the old Chicago newspaper adage: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.