Trump’s Manifestly Bogus Narrative of American Decline
The country is way ahead of its peers but he and Harris are both proposing economic policies that’ll kill a good thing.
On the campaign trail Donald Trump likes nothing more than talking about American failure. Time after time, the Republican former president and current nominee has called America “a nation in decline” that only he can “make great again.”
He often depicts America’s infrastructure—its roads, bridges, and airports—in a state of total collapse, crime as out of control, and its people trapped in poverty as industries flee abroad or cheap imports kill American jobs. Meanwhile, rising energy costs and inflation are decimating American pocketbooks. If you were to believe Trump, it would seem that America is fast degenerating into a “Third World country” while its competitors race ahead.
However, when we check Trump’s claims and compare the United States with its international peers, this entire narrative falls apart. The irony is both his own policies (insofar as he has them) and those of the Democratic Party could bring about the very decline he so often talks about.
American Economy: Pulling Way Ahead of its Peers
Let’s start with the facts: since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the economies of the United States and the European Union—home to the only other wealthy economy close in size to America’s—have diverged significantly. In 2008, the United States and the Eurozone as a whole had almost exactly the same GDP in current dollars: $14.2 trillion for the United States and $14.8 for Eurozone countries. Fast forward to 2023, and the gap has widened dramatically. The EU’s GDP has increased to only $17 trillion (an inflation adjusted decline on a per capita basis) or about $56,000 per capita while the U.S.’s GDP hit $27.94 trillion or just over $81,000 per capita. Median household income, the best measure of financial well-being for a typical person, tells a similar story: it stood at $74,000 in the United States in 2022. This is down a bit from its high in 2019 but, contrary to conventional wisdom on both left and right, significantly higher than 30 years ago. But for the EU as a whole, it was a little less than $45,000, by my calculations. There are lots of ways of looking at or adjusting these numbers but major academic institutions and leading news sources on both sides of the Atlantic have come to the same conclusions: the United States has outpaced the world’s other large, wealthy economy by a lot.
The technological gap is even starker. While European firms like Siemens, Nokia, and Olivetti once stood as peers to U.S. companies, that’s no longer the case. Europe has fallen far behind the United States in nearly all areas of high technology other than civilian aircraft manufacture and, even there, it must source the engines from U.S. and U.K.-based firms. Europe’s largest computer firm, business-to-business software vendor SAP, would barely break the top 20 on a roll call of American tech firms and not a single one ranks among the world’s 30 largest overall.
Comparing the United States and Chinese economies isn’t really fair to China. To start with, China is an authoritarian communist state with little respect for basic human rights, a history of fudging economic statistics and may be vastly exaggerating growth. Even if we take the Chinese Communist Party’s numbers at face value, China’s GDP per capita is about a quarter of America’s after adjusting for purchasing power parity and the country has roughly the same (rather high) level of income inequality. To put this in perspective, after adjusting for purchasing power, a Walmart cashier’s earnings at the company’s lowest hourly wage ($14.55) would be considered solidly upper middle class by Chinese standards; a truck driver earning $52,000 would be among the Chinese elite; and a typical American nurse in a big city hospital (earning about $125,000) in the top 1% of income earners.
Of course, numbers don’t tell the whole story. U.S. median household income rose constantly during Trump’s time in office. Meanwhile, though the unemployment rate has fallen under Biden (hitting pre-pandemic levels in early 2022), inflation and declining workforce participation has led to its decline in real dollars.
China, despite being a poor place to live under its repressive regime, has admittedly seen living standards rise for many more-or-less continually since it abandoned orthodox communism in 1978 and some of the country’s major infrastructure projects are undeniably impressive. Likewise, life in most EU countries is certainly pleasant in many respects and a few economies in the EU—Poland’s most prominently—have performed well. Yet, it’s hard to argue that a group of heavily regulated states with stagnant economies, or a repressive regime that may be cooking its books, somehow proves American decline.
U.S. Infrastructure: Very Respectable
And for that matter, many of Trump’s most repeated lines about America’s ills just aren’t true either. Take infrastructure for example: Not only did Biden just sign a massive and pricey bipartisan infrastructure law of the sort Trump said he favored but could never get through Congress, but the country’s infrastructure has always been in pretty good shape. Americans have the shortest commute to work in the G-7 and take more flights per capita than anyone else save the residents of tiny countries with huge air hubs like Iceland, Ireland, and the United Arab Emirates. Likewise, the state of the nation’s roads has continually improved since the 1990s.
Crime Rate Is Falling, Not Rising
The same goes for Trump’s tales of out of control American violence. Crime has, indeed, risen a bit since the pandemic (but the increase started during Trump’s own last year in office) and lax enforcement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder has increased perceptions of disorder in many cities. While fear of crime is rising overall, crime rates are still vastly lower than they were in the 1990s, much less the 1970s. Furthermore, 2024 statistics to date show significant declines in many major cities.
And none of this even touches on the fact that America has the world’s most powerful military, dominates world popular and high culture, consistently wins a majority of Nobel prizes in the sciences, and just triumphed at the Olympics. By any reasonable measure, America is not in decline.
Trump and Harris’s Ruinous Economics
That said, Trump himself could well move in directions that cause further decline. His first term saw a number of clearly bad policies—particularly trade protectionism that Biden has only expanded—that could send the American economy down the same path as Europe’s. Other things Trump has mused about doing, such as subjecting the Federal Reserve to more political control, deporting low-skilled immigrants who are undocumented, limiting high-skill immigration, and opposing any real changes to the Medicare and Social security programs that drive most spending, could very well make things worse in a second term. Given that Trump is wildly inconsistent—he has also proposed policies that would increase skilled immigration and shown some openness to changing the entitlement programs—it’s hard to know for sure. But this uncertainty combined with bad stated policies gives investors and entrepreneurs more than a few reasons to worry that Trump himself could cause a decline.
However, if Trump’s narrative is simply false and many of the policies he has considered deeply problematic, the Democratic Party has offered policy positions that seem like an almost sure recipe for fulfilling Trump’s prophecy.
Indeed, the Democratic Party platform that Kamala Harris is running on reads like a blueprint for turning America into a replica of Europe. It promises massive restrictions on the labor market intended to promote old-line unions, higher taxes, tax laws that might make it nearly impossible to invest in startups, vast new social programs, and sweeping regulations for the tech, health, and energy sectors. It’s also the party’s first platform since 1840 (the first time it issued one) that can fairly be considered anti-free trade. (Despite Biden’s own continuation of trade protectionism, his 2020 platform actually denounces Trump’s “reckless trade war with China.”) Even if it contains some ideas like paid family leave that may have merit on their own, implementing them all could turn America into a clone of a continent where such policies have largely failed. And this sets aside a number of provisions under pleasant-sounding rubrics like “fighting special interests” or “cracking down on corporate greed” that could give the government vast, vaguely defined powers to go after businesses and individuals it simply doesn’t like.
America is not declining. It does face significant challenges in areas like a massive national debt—a problem that both sides have exacerbated—opioid abuse, and prejudice. Addressing these issues requires targeted, practical solutions rather than radical changes.
Fortunately, there are serious leaders on both sides who have a demonstrated willingness to tackle unglamorous issues and, in more powerful positions, could even confront these national ills. Governors like Colorado Democrat Jared Polis and Utah Republican Spencer Cox, as well as quietly effective House of Representatives members like Nebraska Republican Don Bacon, Ohio Republican Brad Wenstrup, and Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly, are focused on tackling unglamorous but crucial issues like insulin prices, water availability, and veterans’ benefits. Despite their different ideologies, they share a commitment to getting things done—an approach that could start to address America’s real problems.
In short, Donald Trump’s portrayal of American decline doesn’t hold up to any level of scrutiny. But preventing the decline he talks about requires a careful, pragmatic approach—one that neither Trump himself nor the Democratic platform provides.