After multiple Fox News and Fox Business personalities predicted delusionally high economic growth for the fourth quarter of 2025, they reacted to the huge miss on real GDP growth (reported to be 1.4% versus an expected 2.5%) with a mixture of skepticism and grim acknowledgement.
Leading up to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis’ February 20 release of its advance estimate for economic growth in the last quarter of 2025, several Fox personalities were predicting growth of up to 5%. In December, Fox Business host Taylor Riggs suggested that data show “that the economy is better than we think,” citing an estimate of 3.5% growth for the quarter. Fox Business host and former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow in November criticized “the goofball Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office” for predicting fourth quarter GDP “at like one and a half, 1.7,” claiming President Donald Trump is “scoring 4%. … He’s reinventing capitalism.” In January, Kudlow said: “You could easily have prints of 5% GDP growth. … Not every quarter, not every year.” He concluded: “Here’s what you won’t get: The Federal Reserve’s 1.8%. Take that off the board.”
And less than two hours prior to the BEA’s release this morning, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade claimed: “The fourth quarter could be in the fives [5% quarterly growth]. That’ll be excellent.”
In her initial reaction to the release this morning, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo said she’s “skeptical” of the GDP numbers “because you had a close to 5% number just a few months ago, and now you are talking about 1.4%.”
On Fox Business’ Varney & Co., reporter Lauren Simonetti acknowledged “it’s a bad miss” and said, “There is a cost to government shutdowns.” Reporter Lydia Hu also acknowledged that the PCE (personal consumption expenditures) inflation index was “hotter than expected” and “an acceleration over the prior month’s read. … Looking like we might have a little bit of concern here.”
And on Fox’s America’s Newsroom, infamous torture memo author John Yoo said that the Supreme Court decision that many of Trump’s tariffs are illegal, which occurred after the BEA report was released, “might be a blessing in disguise, because we just had GDP report numbers from last year that showed the economy significantly slowed.”
Economists and experts including the Brookings Institution’s David Wessel and Harvard economist Jason Furman, a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, noted that last year’s record government shutdown subtracted more than a full percentage point from the quarter’s growth, but the resulting figure of around 2.5% growth for the fourth quarter would still be much smaller than multiple Fox personalities had predicted.
The BEA’s release additionally stated that “real GDP increased 2.2 percent in 2025,” compared to “an increase of 2.8 percent in 2024,” and stated that “the PCE price index increased 2.6 percent, the same increase as in 2024.” As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explained upon their release this morning, those numbers — along with the Bureau of Labor Statistics releasing a jobs report last week that showed a mere 181,000 jobs created last year compared to 1.4 million jobs created in 2024 — contradict both Fox’s and Trump’s claims of creating the best economy in history.