Trump claims America is now in a “golden age” – but is it?

“I have been right about everything.” Thus spoke Donald Trump very modestly about himself as he addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on Tuesday 23 September.

He also listed what he claims are his achievements. But is there any substance to these claims? Or was it showmanship to cover up for the fact that he has actually achieved very little of what he promised to the American people, the workers in particular?

Not everything he said was lies and distortions. The main purpose of his speech was to berate the European ruling classes and their governments, to humiliate them, and to show who is boss. There is no reason to elaborate much on this, as Alan Woods wrote an excellent piece on that aspect last week.

Suffice it to say that it was Donald Trump sending a clear message to the European bourgeois that they cannot count on the United States in the ongoing Ukraine War, and that if they are so determined that it should continue, then they must pay for it themselves.

What I want to concentrate on here is what he claims to have achieved for working-class Americans and for the American people in general. We must remember that the reason Trump was able to win the elections was due to the total failure of the Democrats to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. The Democrats do not defend the interests of the US working class; they are merely one wing of the American ruling class.

One party with two right wings

For decades, the two-party system served the American ruling class well. As Gore Vidal famously stated in his essay, ‘The State of the Union’ in 1975, “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

He felt that the Republicans were “more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats”, while the Democrats were “more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But,” he concluded, “essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

As the crisis of US capitalism deepened over the years, with debt reaching astronomical levels, there was less and less room for the Democrats to make those “small adjustments”. This exposed the true nature of the Democrats in the eyes of millions of workers. It meant that even those small differences between the two main parties had all but disappeared.

Meanwhile, from 2015, due to the same crisis that discredited the Democrats, the Republicans went through a process where the old guard was being ousted everywhere by Trump’s supporters. Candidates that had Trump’s support won the nominations.

Thus, in the eyes of many US voters, the Republican Party was no longer the party it had been, i.e. hardly distinguishable from the Democrats, a party of big business. Trump himself is a man of big business, but he successfully presented himself as representing the common American, American workers, and so on. And he is desperate to preserve that image.

In his speech, he claimed that the US now has the “best economy in the history of the world”. He clearly doesn’t know his history. The United States economy was at its strongest immediately after the Second World War, when US GDP accounted for around 50 percent of world GDP. That was what allowed the ‘American Dream’ to appear as real. There was a real improvement in workers’ wages and living conditions.

Since that period, what we have seen is a long-term, relative decline of the economic power of the United States. US GDP gradually declined to around 26 percent of world GDP by 2024. So we are in no way in a “golden age” for the American economy. We are in the age of the long-term decline of the United States, and this has been felt in particular by the US working class.

To get a picture of this long-term decline, it is worth looking at America’s slow-motion wage crisis, a report by the Economic Policy Institute, published in 2018. It provides a very graphic picture of what happened to workers' wages since the 1970s, and opens with,

“For the last four decades, the United States has been experiencing a slow-motion wage crisis. From the end of World War II through the late 1970s, the U.S. economy generated rapid wage growth that was widely shared. Since 1979, however, average wage growth has decelerated sharply, with the biggest declines in wage growth at the bottom and the middle.” [My emphasis].

The turning point was 1973. Since then, productivity growth and real hourly wage increases started to diverge sharply, with wages hardly increasing at all. Thus, there has been an intensification of the rate of exploitation of American workers to the benefit of those at the top, the CEOs, and the higher earners in general.

All the tables provided by the Economic Policy Institute show clearly that the low and middle income layers either suffered actual falls in real wages or stagnation for decades.

It was on top of all this that we had the Biden administration, which presided over prices increasing by around 25 percent in four years. This was a sharp worsening of what had already become a bad situation.

That explains why ‘MAGA’ – Make America Great Again – was able to speak to large layers of the working class and the middle classes in 2024. It spoke about WAGES and JOBS, and bringing back the glory days of the past. Trump could sense the general malaise and spoke to it. He made big promises.

Is America great again?

Part of Trump’s UN speech was aimed at showing that he has kept his promises. He boasted that today – i.e. since his election as President – we are in the “golden age of America”. He is thus claiming that he has actually made America great again, that he has delivered on MAGA. But do the facts fit his narrative?

He claims he has brought inflation down. The truth is that inflation accelerated to 2.9 percent in August, and it is at its highest since January of this year. Food price inflation is actually higher, standing at 3.2 percent, its highest since October 2023. Inflation has been going up since April and is now back at the level it had reached at the end of the Biden administration. He claims energy costs have gone down, when, since January, there has actually been a slight increase.

He claims manufacturing is up, when in actual fact, throughout 2025 and up to August, it has been slowing down. Capacity utilisation is slightly down, and fewer jobs than expected are being created, with unemployment – which stood at 4 percent at the beginning of his administration – starting to creep upwards, reaching 4.3 percent in August, its highest level since 2021. GDP actually contracted in the first quarter, made a rebound in the second, and is now slowing again.

Serious commentators are pointing to the slower-than-expected growth rates.

“Both the first- and second-quarter GDP readings are not a true reflection of the economy's health because of the wild swings in imports. Economists expect a tepid second half because of the lingering uncertainty from trade policy, which would limit economic growth to about 1.5 percent for the full year. The economy grew 2.8 percent in 2024.” (Reuters, 25 September, 2025)

According to Trump, wages have been rising at their fastest pace in more than 60 years. This is based on the figure of +5.3 percent in July. But back in December, before he came into office, wages went up by 5.56 percent. If we go back just a few years, we see that in April 2020, wages went up by 7.7 percent. Just a quick check of the actual figures shows that his statement on wages is false.

Nominal wages went up by 5.3 percent in July, but the actual real purchasing power only increased by 1.6 percent. Some analysts show that wages are still lagging behind pre-pandemic levels. And for those at the bottom, those on the minimum wage, things have actually worsened. The minimum wage hasn’t increased since 2009. So those suffering at the bottom of society are still suffering. It is worth noting that a significant layer of these people voted for Trump in the hope that he would bring them some respite.

Many among this layer saw Trump’s tariffs on the US’ competitors as a strong measure to ‘keep jobs in the US’. But the more serious bourgeois analysts have warned that, in the long run, tariffs do not achieve this aim. They quote what happened under Trump’s first term, i.e. that his tariffs were actually harmful for job creation.

In many cases, US producers import raw materials and parts, which in turn end up raising their costs when tariffs are applied. This makes them less competitive in the long run. The largest exporting firms are often the largest importing firms. Thus, while tariffs may create jobs in some sectors, in others they destroy them. This takes time, but sooner or later it will become apparent.

Trump also claimed to have ended seven wars and to have saved millions of lives. This is a lot of bluster with little substance to it. He is referring to the short-lived armed conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir; to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh; and to the conflict between Cambodia and Thailand. But the reason he made these boasts is that he has failed to sort out the two major conflicts: the War in Ukraine and Israel’s total ongoing destruction of Gaza.

In his election campaign last year, Trump vowed to end the Ukraine War within 24 hours of assuming office, and he repeated this boast dozens of times. He has, in fact, not brought the Ukraine war anywhere near to an end. Russia continues to advance slowly but inexorably.

And in the Middle East – where he promised not to get entangled in any more wars – he actually helped to heat up tensions, backing Israel in its ethnic cleansing of Gaza, in the bombing of Iran, and in the bombing of several Arab countries in the region. Trump is now hoping his latest plan for a deal will end the war, but that is yet to be confirmed, as Netanyahu is already manoeuvring so as to appear to accept the deal but then find an excuse for unloading responsibility for its failure.

Trump has not delivered

Trump hasn’t actually got much to boast about. The one thing he makes a lot of noise about is his clampdown on immigration. “ICE arrested more than 100,000 people suspected of violating immigration law from January 20 to the first week of June, according to the White House. The figure amounts to an average of 750 arrests per day – double the average over the past decade.” (Reuters, 2 July, 2025)

What this ignores is the fact that immigrant labour was actually a factor in maintaining economic growth in the United States. As a Financial Times article, ‘Immigration crackdowns are good politics but bad economics’ (14 January 2024), points out:

“...in a period in which ageing populations are gutting workforces worldwide, migrants also provide a practical, much-needed boost in labour terms. Thanks to both immigrants and more Americans returning to work, the US labour force in 2023 grew three times faster than the underlying population. This helps explain why the widely expected recession never arrived.”

It adds,

“The immigration surge contributed significantly to easing labour shortages, slowing inflation and lifting consumer demand. Net migration to the US accounted for roughly one-quarter of the increase in consumer spending — a healthy 2.7 per cent last year.”

The author of the article highlights the contradiction of anti-immigrant rhetoric: it is useful in garnering votes for politicians like Trump, but damaging when it comes to the economy.

“These steps may be good politics, in a world turning weary of outsiders, but they are questionable economics. By one recent count, the US would need to let in nearly 4mn migrants a year, every year, to prevent its population growth turning negative in the coming decades.”

So, even the one thing Trump has actually had an impact on, the presence of migrant workers in the United States, can turn out to have a damaging effect on the economy as a whole, and on the living conditions of US workers in general.

Trump still remains popular within his core base, but we can see within it the outlines of future cracks / Image: public domain

The fact is that Trump’s popularity ratings have been in steady decline, with the percentage who disapprove rising from 48 percent in February to 57 percent in September, creeping towards the 60 percent mark.

An AP-NORC poll published on 11 September showed that just 39 percent of voters approve of how he has handled the economy. And although he still remains popular among Republican voters, even among this layer the disapproval rating is slowly growing, having hit double digits for the first time.

That also explains why he is constantly looking for gimmicks to make himself look like the guy who defends the common people. His latest was his statement, during a press conference, that paracetamol [Tylenol in the United States] taken by women during pregnancy significantly increases the risk of autism.

No serious medical evidence has been provided for this. He also claimed that combination vaccines are harmful, singling out the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. He was clearly tapping into all the conspiracy theories that do the rounds on social media on such questions. By doing so, he has added his ‘authority’ as President of the US to all these unfounded claims.

Trump still remains popular within his core base, but we can see within it the outlines of future cracks along class lines. The fact that his lowest popularity rating is on his management of the economy shows that ordinary working people are not feeling any real benefits.

There was also a clear mood of opposition to the US being involved in ‘forever wars’, seen as consuming huge amounts of resources, and also the loss of life of so many young US soldiers over the years. Again, on this, Trump has failed to deliver.

And tonight (Tuesday, 30 September) the US risks another government shutdown, as the required agreement with the Democrats on a bill on government spending seems unlikely. Three such shutdowns took place back in 2018, during Trump’s previous term in office. Usually, what we observe is brinkmanship on both sides, followed by a relatively quick agreement between Democrats and Republicans on how much, and what, is to be cut, that allows government spending to then resume.

It seems that this time round, however, Trump is prepared to allow an extended period of shutdown, which his officials would use to identify what they deem to be ‘non-essential workers’, who could then be dismissed from their jobs. This comes on top of the cuts Trump has already imposed this year, including attacks on Medicaid – which is a lifeline for the low-income earners – together with the laying off of many government workers. All this is leading to a reduction in public services, which affect much more the people at the bottom.

Lenin was fond of a Russian proverb: “Life teaches”. The US working people lived through the experience of the Biden administration, which led millions of Democrat voters to turn away from the Democratic Party. As Trump reveals his complete inability to solve any of the real problems facing the US workers, they will be left with nothing but the empty rhetoric of the kind we witnessed during his speech to the UN.

When they finally see through him, they will be forced to embark on the path of class struggle. Revolutionary communists have every confidence that that is the perspective ahead of us.