MSNBC contributor and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt parroted Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s false claim that he weathered “an economic depression” in the 1990s, with Hewitt blaming a so-called “Clinton-triggered recession” that did not actually happen for Trump’s disastrous business failures throughout that decade.

During an October 3 speech in Pueblo, Colorado in which the GOP nominee attempted to deflect criticism in the wake of a devastating New York Times investigation into a decades-long period where he may not have paid income taxes, Trump blamed his business struggles in the 1990s on “one of the most brutal economic downturns in our country’s history” that he claimed was “almost as bad as the Great Depression of 1929.” Immediately following Trump’s speech, frequent Trump apologist Hugh Hewitt gave cover to Trump’s dubious claim, saying that President Bill Clinton’s policies and a supposed “Clinton-triggered recession of those years” were to blame for Trump’s business collapse, where he reported losses of over $900 million in 1995:

Unfortunately for Trump and contrary to Hewitt’s claim, there was no recession during the Clinton administration, much less an economic contraction as severe as the Great Depression of 1929 or the profound economic and financial crisis of 2007 through 2009, which was inherited by President Obama.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the institution responsible for delineating and analyzing American economic cycles, there was a mild recession from July 1990 to March 1991 during the George H.W. Bush administration, and another from March 2001 to November 2001 during the first term of George W. Bush. Neither recession occurred during the period of time covered by the Times' report on Trump’s nearly billion dollar loss, or during Bill Clinton’s presidency, which was marked by steady economic growth and job creation. As you can see in these data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the 1990s resembled the exact opposite of the economic tumult Trump had described (recessions are noted in gray):

The 1990s weren’t the only time when Trump’s real estate empire has been bedeviled by losses in the midst of an overall economic expansion. According to the latest reporting from Forbes magazine, which has been tracking Trump’s wealth for nearly four decades, the GOP nominee has lost almost $800 million over the past year mostly thanks to the declining value of his real estate while the rest of the economy performed admirably with a robust increase in median household incomes and historic reductions in poverty.