President Donald Trump on Friday morning said “we’re going to go a lot higher” than 4.1 percent gross domestic product growth, shortly after the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its estimates for the second quarter. The president’s comments came during speech from the White House South Lawn.
“We’re going to go a lot higher than these numbers, and these are great numbers,” the president said.
Trump used the event to tout his economic record and blast Democrats, trumpeting the Republican tax overhaul signed late last year, and slamming Democrats for wanting to “end that and raise everybody’s taxes.”
Trump pumped up expectations for U.S. economic growth for the remainder of the year — a potential political risk for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections and Trump himself in his 2020 re-election bid. He called the numbers “very, very sustainable” and predicted that the U.S. would “do extraordinarily well” in its third-quarter GDP report.
The president acknowledged the potential peril if the economy does not match his rosy outlook. “I won’t go too strong” in my projections, “because then if it’s not quite as good, you won’t let me forget it,” the president said.
