Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday gave us a preview of the lies about the economy that Republicans will tell the American people next year to try to stave off a massive defeat in the 2026 midterm elections. At the same time, however, he also highlighted the conundrum that GOP officials face who have to blame the country’s economic malaise on the previous administration while simultaneously pretending that everything is amazing right now thanks to Donald Trump.

Earlier this year, the president himself put it this way when asked about the state of the economy and the concerns Americans have with it.

“I think the good parts are the ‘Trump economy’ and the bad parts are the ‘Biden economy’ because he’s done a terrible job,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press in May.

The problem with that message is that neither part is true. It sounds even more ridiculous coming from Vance and after the new administration has been in office for nearly a year instead of just a couple months.

“I don’t want you to think for one second that because Joe Biden gave us the worst economy in the world that we forget [who the administration is fighting for],” Vance told an audience in Pennsylvania. “No, we know. We know exactly what we were left with. We know exactly the consequences that it’s caused.”

Vance went on to claim that “there is no person more impatient to solve the affordability crisis than Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States.”

That’s curious because Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, keeps talking about how affordability is a hoax and not a crisis.

By the way, in an interview with Politico, Vance claimed that this “nightmare of an economy” that the administration inherited a few months ago now deserves an A+++, which is two fewer pluses than Trump gave it last week.

Maybe the vice president deducted a couple of points because the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced earlier on Tuesday that the US economy added a paltry 64,000 jobs in November and that unemployment rose to 4.6 percent, which is the highest level in nearly four years.

And that brings us to the veracity of Vance’s claims. Or, to be more precise, the lack of veracity.

In terms of jobs, there is no comparison.

Under Biden, the economy created lots of them. While most of those increases can be attributed to post-pandemic hiring, the previous administration added payrolls every single month, including 143,000 jobs in January of this year.

Since Trump took office, hiring has slowed significantly. There have already been three months in which the economy shed jobs.

Still, even though experts praised the American economy at the start of the year, and the International Monetary Fund predicted higher growth in the US than in peer nations, there is no doubt that it works best for the wealthy and that tens of millions of regular Americans are hurting.

While inflation has eased from its post-pandemic peak in 2022, prices never came down from that high level. That being said, it had dropped to 2.7 percent in November of 2024.

Under Trump, however, it is back up again slightly. In September, the last month for which we have data, the consumer price index was up 3.0 percent.

Part of that increase, and the affordability crisis overall, can be attributed to Trump’s tariffs, which are making incoming goods more expensive for importing businesses and, ultimately, consumers.

In other words, Vance is lying.

The American people, however, aren’t buying it.

Poll after poll shows that they primarily blame Trump — who claimed that he alone could fix it and who now pretends that everything is great — for the poor state of the economy, and there is no reason to believe that they will feel differently about things next November, seeing how Republicans will have had total control of Washington, DC, by then for two years.

So, maybe, instead of lying about the economy and who is responsible for it, the GOP should try to make things better for the American people rather than increasing their health care costs, kicking them off Medicaid, and taking away their food assistance.