08/16/2026
One important distinction: these dots do not grade Donald Trump’s personal honesty. They grade the current measurable condition of the country in each category. Whether Trump deserves credit or blame is a separate causation question.
Rating key
🟢 Favorable / improving
🟡 Mixed / improvement and weakness together
🔴 Unfavorable / worsening / major affordability pressure
🔵 Not enough current national data to make a responsible call
The overall public economic mood is currently 🔴 negative. Preliminary August consumer sentiment fell to 51.0 from 55.2, Gallup recently found 67% saying the economy was getting worse, and an August 7–10 poll found 53% of registered voters saying they were financially worse off than when Trump returned to office. 
Trump’s Truth: USA — Current Dashboard
# Category Rating What the numbers are saying now
1 Crime 🟢 Violent crime falling strongly
2 Murder / homicide 🟢 Major decline; historically low territory
3 Property crime 🟢 Falling substantially
4 Housing prices 🟡 Some prices cooling, but affordability still poor
5 Rent 🔴 Still rising
6 Mortgage rates 🔴 About 6.67%, still very expensive
7 Homelessness 🟡 Down about 3%, but still near historic highs
8 Medicine / prescription drugs 🟢 Drug-price measures showing improvement
9 Healthcare costs 🔴 Overall healthcare remains expensive
10 Health-insurance premiums 🔴 Significant premium pressure
The strongest statistical bright spot here is crime: FBI data show 2025 violent crime down 9.3%, murder down 18.1%, and property crime down 12.4%. Mid-2026 city data show homicide continuing to fall. However, that decline began before Trump’s second term, so claiming Trump alone caused it would go beyond the evidence. New-home prices are cooling, but the average 30-year mortgage was still 6.67% on August 13. 
# Category Rating What the numbers are saying now
11 Groceries 🔴 Prices +2.7% year over year
12 Restaurant food 🔴 +3.4%
13 Gasoline 🔴 +24.6% year over year
14 Electricity 🔴 +4.2%
15 Natural gas / utilities 🟡 Natural-gas service +4.3%
16 Air travel 🔴 Airfares +25.5% year over year
17 Hotels 🟡 Recent hotel/lodging prices falling
18 Car rentals 🔵 Need a dedicated current series
19 Overall inflation 🔴 3.4%, down slightly but above target
20 Wages 🟡 Nominal wages +3.2%, roughly losing to inflation
July’s CPI makes the affordability problem very clear. Inflation slowed slightly to 3.4%, but consumers aren’t comparing today with last month—they remember what groceries, gasoline, housing and travel used to cost. 
# Category Rating What the numbers are saying now
21 Real wages after inflation 🔴 −0.2% year over year
22 Household income 🟡 Income growing slightly; purchasing power weak
23 Jobs 🔴 Payrolls −23,000 in July
24 Unemployment 🟡 4.1%, still relatively low
25 Manufacturing jobs 🟡 Small recent gain, weak broader picture
26 Small-business growth 🟢 Optimism at an 11-month high
27 GDP / economic growth 🟡 Q2 growth 1.5% annualized
28 Federal deficit 🔴 About $1.8 trillion FY2026 so far
29 National debt 🔴 About $39.77 trillion through July
30 Federal spending 🔴 Spending remains very high
This is one of the biggest challenges to the administration’s economic message. Nominal hourly earnings are up, but real hourly earnings fell 0.2% over the year, while July payroll employment fell by 23,000. Small businesses are a notable exception: their optimism index jumped to 99.8, above its long-run average. GDP remains positive but slowed to a 1.5% annual rate in Q2. 
# Category Rating Current condition
31 Taxes 🟡 Tax reductions for many; fiscal/distribution tradeoffs
32 Interest rates 🔴 Borrowing remains expensive
33 Credit-card rates 🔴 Still high by recent historical standards
34 Consumer debt 🟡 $18.8T; slight quarterly improvement
35 Auto prices 🟢 New +0.5%; used −1.9% year over year
36 Auto-loan payments 🔴 Financing remains costly
37 Auto insurance 🟡 Stabilizing somewhat, but expensive
38 Homeowners insurance 🔴 Premium pressure remains severe
39 College / education costs 🟡 College tuition +2.2% year over year
40 Student debt 🔴 Delinquency remains a major concern
The Fed’s policy rate remains 3.5%–3.75%, and the Fed says credit-card and short-term borrowing costs, although somewhat lower, remain high by recent standards. Household debt stood at $18.8 trillion in Q2, while auto and student-loan stress remains important. 
# Category Rating Current condition
41 Childcare 🔴 Daycare/preschool +3.4% year over year
42 Poverty 🔵 2025 national report not released yet
43 Food insecurity 🔵 Latest comprehensive figure is still 2024
44 Social Security 🟡 Benefits intact now; long-term financing problem
45 Medicare 🟡 Drug improvements offset by higher Part B costs
46 Medicaid 🔴 Coverage/funding uncertainty and pressure
47 Veterans benefits 🟡 Mixed; requires separate VA performance dashboard
48 Oil production 🟢 Domestic production remains extremely strong
49 Natural-gas production 🟢 Headed for another record
50 Manufacturing production 🟡 Resilient, but not a clear manufacturing boom
Social Security is a good example of why “today” and “future” must be separated: scheduled benefits are being paid now, but the 2026 trustees project the OASI trust fund reserve could be depleted in 2032, at which point current law would permit roughly 78% of scheduled benefits. Medicare is similarly mixed: the 2026 standard Part B premium increased to $202.90, while some Part D costs and negotiated drug prices improved. Natural-gas production, meanwhile, is forecast at a record 122.5 Bcf/day in 2026. 
# Category Rating Current condition
51 Imports 🟡 Recent declines, but longer trend mixed
52 Exports 🟡 Stronger year over year, weaker most recent month
53 Trade deficit 🔴 Still very large
54 Tariffs 🔴 Poor public sentiment; consumer/business cost concerns
55 Immigration / border encounters 🟢 Border encounters dramatically lower
56 Deportations / removals 🟡 Enforcement high; broader outcome highly contested
57 Legal immigration 🟡 Restrictive changes create mixed economic effects
58 Infrastructure 🟡 Large projects continue; attribution crosses administrations
59 Farm income 🟡 Real net farm income forecast down
60 Bankruptcies 🔵 Needs dedicated current bankruptcy dataset
June’s trade deficit was $73.3 billion. Southwest Border Patrol apprehensions fell to 9,295 in July, an unmistakably strong result if the metric is unauthorized border crossings; however, current polling shows broader immigration enforcement itself is much more divisive, with Trump’s immigration approval around 39% in recent AP-NORC reporting. USDA forecasts real net farm income down about 2.6% in 2026. 
Tariffs deserve their own 🔴 because the political claim and economic result must be separated. Tariffs can produce revenue and protect selected industries, but consumers and import-dependent companies can bear part of the cost; polling has also shown substantial public opposition to Trump’s tariff handling. 
# Category Rating Current condition
61 Foreclosures 🔵 Needs dedicated current foreclosure data
62 Stock market 🟢 Financial markets remain a relative strength
63 Retirement savings 🟡 Markets help; inflation/health costs hurt retirees
64 Tourism 🟡 Travel-cost and geopolitical headwinds
65 Defense spending 🟡 Very strong funding; fiscal and policy tradeoffs
66 Foreign aid 🟡 Major policy shifts; no simple good/bad metric
67 Government employment 🟡 Workforce reductions versus service-capacity tradeoff
68 Energy independence 🟢 Very strong domestic oil/gas production
69 Business investment 🟢 Private domestic demand/investment improving
70 AFFORDABILITY 🔴 The biggest weakness
Private domestic demand strengthened in Q2, with real final sales to private domestic purchasers rising at a 3.9% annual rate, supporting a green business-investment rating. Defense spending is much harder to grade: the FY2026 national-defense request represented a substantial increase, but more spending does not automatically equal better defense outcomes. 
The Bigger Picture
If I reduced all 70 measures to Trump’s strongest and weakest areas right now, I would put them this way:
🟢 Strongest measurable areas: crime reduction, homicide reduction, property-crime reduction, border encounters, domestic natural-gas production, oil/energy production, improving small-business confidence and business investment.
🔴 Greatest weaknesses: affordability, gasoline, airfare, healthcare/insurance costs, mortgages, housing affordability, groceries/restaurants, real wages, job growth, deficits/debt and consumer confidence.
And the most important finding is #70 — Affordability.
The latest numbers show why many Americans can hear positive statistics and still say, “That is not what my life feels like.” July inflation was 3.4%, gasoline was 24.6% more expensive than a year earlier, real hourly earnings were down 0.2%, and August consumer sentiment weakened sharply. 
So for Trump’s Truth: USA, I would make the guiding question:
“What was claimed, what do the numbers actually report, and can the American people feel the difference?”
That gives you something much more credible than pro-Trump or anti-Trump reporting. It allows good numbers to be green even when they help Trump, and bad numbers to be red even when they hurt him. Then we apply exactly the same standard to every president.
* Financial Times
