The Economy Is Flatlining—and So Is Trump

In a healthy political universe, we would have reason to hope that Donald Trump would lose public favor due to his numerous crimes, moral infractions, abuses of power, and bigotry. The saga of his second term found him casually circumventing every guardrail to shore up small-time Republican autonomy in the crude pursuit of his favorite megalomaniacal obsessions, from the massive wreck of his White House renovation to his hate-fueled Brownshirt raids targeting law-abiding immigrant communities to his campaign of murder in the Southern Hemisphere and his cryptocurrency self-enrichment and cronyism schemes.

In our current world, however, Trump is primarily losing support for the same predictable reasons as American presidents: lackluster, even terrible, economic performance. GDP growth has remained below 2% under Trump’s leadership – a marked slowdown from the 2.5% recorded by the Biden White House in 2024. Inflation, the main economic scourge that Trump has pledged to bring under control in his second term, has gained ground even in the face of recent Federal Reserve rate cuts, surpassing the 3% mark during the fall – a trend that Trump’s erratic collection of unforced errors, known as of its pricing policy, will only worsen. “With some companies now paying average import duties of around 10%, inflation is expected to continue to rise in the coming months. » The economist Remarks. Overall business activity, as measured by the S&P’s index tracking services, is now at a six-month low. And now a new jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics – the reporting agency that Trump tried to outsource to a MAGAratchik too lopsided for even the Republican Senate to approve – shows that unemployment has climbed to 4.6 percent – ​​the highest level since the Covid recession. Unforced errors abound here, with 105,000 delayed resignations from federal employees besieged by DOGE terrors dragging down the overall numbers. Employment in manufacturing — the sector supposedly at the heart of Trump’s white working class — has fallen steadily, again largely due to Trump’s tariffs.

So far, Trump and his White House lackeys have sought to distract from these grim developments by pretending it’s still 2024 and placing blame on the Biden White House. As Tuesday’s dismal jobs numbers fell, Vice President JD Vance embarked on a MAGA morale-boosting campaign across Pennsylvania to once again urge donors to be patient while the administration emerges from the mess it says it inherited from Biden. It’s not an argument likely to generate much interest in the midst of an expensive holiday season, a frigid winter with skyrocketing energy costs and a 26 percent increase in the ranks of part-time workers over the past two months, many of them unable to find secure full-time employment.

Yet Vance’s speech constitutes the soul of economic sophistication, alongside Trump’s labored attempt to defend a declining economy. Affordability—the issue Democrats are increasingly targeting in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s successful New York mayoral campaign—is just a “hoax,” our grievance-filled CEO insists, alongside all the other cunning liberal conspiracies designed to ensure his downfall, like climate change, Russiagate, and the investigation into the Jan. 6 coup attempt.

His continued appeals to the more baroque strains of right-wing victimology have done nothing to reverse Trump’s current poll freefall. His economic approval reached a record high in an AP poll released last week, with just 31 percent of respondents giving his handling of the economy a passing grade — a dramatic nine-point drop from the 40 percent Trump already received in March. At the same time, a Century Foundation poll explored the impact of the Trump economy on American workers, with 29 percent of registered voters saying they delayed or skipped medical care in the past year, and 34 percent saying they skipped meals to save money. 48% had dipped into their savings to meet daily expenses, and 64% had cut back on grocery purchases or turned to budget-friendly grocery stores to make ends meet. Overall, the survey found that two-thirds of respondents said the economy was not performing well, including 45 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024. The red meat of the highly paranoid MAGA culture war is, in other words, a poor and unconvincing substitute for real red meat.

Yet Trump insists he has already brought inflation under control and that his administration deserves an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” grade on the economy. He made his own foray into Pennsylvania last week, once again to ridicule affordability concerns and lie about his White House’s nonexistent victory on inflation. He also lambasted critics of his frequent absences from the Oval Office abroad, calling them “stupid people.” If the content of the speech didn’t scream “out of touch” enough, its setting did: the ballroom of the Mount Airy Casino in the Poconos.

On the other hand, however, the location was entirely appropriate: Trump is banking on the bubble-ridden investment economy as the path to economic deliverance. As the manufacturing sector collapses, investment in phantom returns from circularly financed AI companies now accounts for 40% of GDP growth, according to the report. Financial Times. By completely mocking American workers facing an inflationary, job-starved real economy, Trump is betting everything on the imaginary returns of untested, intrusive, and repulsive technology intended to degrade the human experience and further displace workers. That’s why he recently signed another blatantly illegal executive order banning states from regulating AI. Our president is doing nothing to combat the rising cost of living, but he is working overtime to accelerate our transformation to a total casino economy. And let us never forget that he managed as best he could to plunge his former casino network into bankruptcy six times.