Donald Trump is, at heart, a salesman. Even so, millions of Americans struggling with a stagnant economy, a declining job market and soaring inflation will have a hard time recognizing the prosperous America he tried to sell them in a bizarre White House speech last week.
In Trump’s topsy-turvy world, everything bad is the fault of former President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats, even though Trump has now been in office for nearly a year. And vice versa — the president assures us that it’s Trump who saves us all from utter disaster. Just ignore that inflation remains stubbornly high and business layoffs are setting pandemic-era records.
Ironically, Trump’s claims about reviving the U.S. economy are cast into doubt by data produced and released by his own administration — one of the reasons the White House has limited the release of independent economic statistics over the past few months. Inflation and consumer prices both rose sharply last quarter, unemployment rose to a four-year high and Americans who worked under Biden were laid off under Trump.
Trumpworld has no shortage of shadowy enemies responsible for his economic malaise. He blames rising housing costs on undocumented immigrants, whom he claims are being offered free housing by “Democrats.” In Trump’s world, immigrants who arrive penniless somehow purchase (or are given) the entire private housing stock in the United States, with a median price of about $420,000 per home. In fact, Trump’s own tariffs are slashing new home construction, with taxes on lumber and building supplies expected to reduce total future home construction by nearly 450,000 units.
In one sentence, Trump claimed to have reduced illegal border crossings to “zero,” while boasting that “100 percent of all net jobs created” in his first year went to U.S.-born citizens. However, a sentence later, Trump blamed the waves of immigrants for taking away jobs and homes from these American-born citizens. Which one is it? Trump never bothered to elaborate — and by the time people noticed, he was already on to his next complaint.
Trump proposed no new economic policies because he had no new ideas to offer. Those Republicans just rejected extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies? Trump said that didn’t actually happen – in fact, it was Democrats who refused to extend the deadline because they wanted to keep insurance companies rich. It’s an unpopular fact that insurance companies are among Trump’s biggest donors.
It’s easy to see why Trump is so focused on trying to convince Americans that the economy is doing well. Polls show that most Americans now believe their local economy is the worst it has ever been, and even Trump’s own voters blame the Republican Party for their pain. Trump is now more unpopular than ever, with voters expressing record dissatisfaction with his handling of inflation and the economy. It will take more than a song and dance routine to convince them that everything will work out.
With no policies to promote and no solutions to offer, Trump resorted to months-old rebranding initiatives with which he had nothing to do. Donating his $1,776 “Warrior Dividend” to our Armed Forces. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that Trump’s “gift” is actually funding for housing support that Congress already appropriated earlier this year. But the motivation behind reinventing the money is clear: Trump’s inflationary tariff policies hit fixed-income military families especially hard. It’s much easier to pass off Congress’ funds as your own than to actually address the underlying problem.
Trump’s speeches won’t change the polls, because the Americans he’s trying to persuade actually have to live in the grim reality he creates. They want real action to lower consumer prices and address unemployment. Republicans have no plan to fix these problems because doing so would mean admitting that Trump’s policies created them.
As Joe Biden learned, and Trump is now learning, you can’t just tell Americans they aren’t feeling the pain of inflation. As long as consumer prices remain high and layoffs continue to make headlines, people will feel like they’re living on a knife’s edge. To tell them otherwise is not only delusional, but insulting.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and the founder of Three Degrees Strategy.
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