Donald Trump’s real problem is now coming back to bite him
I’ve long said that while a popular President can get away with anything, an unpopular President can’t get away with anything. I’ve also said that two-thirds of what makes a President popular is whether average Americans think the economy is good or bad. The economy was good under President Biden, but the (entire) media spent four years pretending it was bad. So the average American thought the economy was bad, and didn’t turn out for Biden’s party in the 2024 election.
Donald Trump is not immune to this either. For all of his bizarre and unholy antics of late, a lot of average Americans reluctantly chose him in 2024 because they were under the mistaken belief that he could improve the economy. And while most Americans have long incorrectly defined “the economy” as the stock market, more Americans are now defining “the economy” based on consumer prices.
The catch is that, once again, it’s not about what consumer prices are actually doing. It’s about what average Americans think consumer prices are doing. You can easily look up the numbers and see that consumer prices, which had leveled off as the Biden administration went on, are now suddenly skyrocketing under Trump. Given that Trump keeps bragging about the impact that his tariffs and trade wars are going to have on the economy, Trump has fully married his political fate to consumer prices – or what Americans think about consumer prices.
To that end, new polling from CBS News and Yougov says that 62% of Americans think prices have gone up in the past few weeks. Another 33% of Americans think prices have stayed the same. And only five percent of Americans think prices have gone down in the past few weeks. In other words, most Americans are noticing the problem. They’re not being distracted by Trump’s foreign policy antics. Nor are Trump’s promises about tariffs conning anyone into believing that prices are going down – even within his own base.
Two-thirds of the country has noticed that prices have skyrocketed since Trump took office. And literally 95% of the country has observed that prices have not come down like Trump promised they would. Those are dealbreaking numbers for any U.S. President. Throw in how unpopular Trump was before he retook office, and how his approval rating is already at a record low for a President in his first hundred days, and Trump has a real problem. Presidents derive most of their political power from their popularity, but Trump has no such popularity – and darkening economic sentiment suggests it’ll only get worse for him.
