The Economy Is Flatlining—and So Is Trump

In a sane political universe, we’d have cause to hope that Donald Trump would be losing public favor as a result of his many crimes, moral trespasses, abuses of power, and bigotries. The saga of his second term has involved his casually bypassing any and all guardrails to shore up small-r republican self-governance in the crass pursuit of his preferred megalomaniacal obsessions, from the hulking 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 to his crypto-and-crony schemes of self-enrichment.

In our actual world, however, Trump is chiefly hemorrhaging support for the same predictable reasons that American presidents usually do: a lackluster-to-terrible economic performance. GDP growth has hovered below 2 percent on Trump’s watch—a marked downturn from the 2.5 percent the Biden White House clocked in 2024. Inflation, the chief economic scourge that Trump pledged to subdue in his second term, has gained fresh traction even in the face of recent rate cuts from the Federal Reserve, passing the 3 percent mark over the fall—a trend that Trump’s erratic collection of unforced errors known as his tariffs policy will only compound. “With some firms now paying average import duties of around 10%, inflation is likely to keep climbing in the months ahead,” The Economist notes. Overall business activity, as measured by the S & P’s index tracking services, now stands at a six-month low. And now a new jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—the reporting agency that Trump tried to hand over to a MAGAratchik too unhinged for even the GOP Senate to approve—shows that unemployment has spiked to 4.6 percent—the highest level since the Covid recession. More unforced errors abound here, with 105,000 deferred resignations from federal employees besieged by the terrors of DOGE dragging down the overall figures. Manufacturing employment—the sector allegedly at the heart of Trump’s white working-class base—has dropped off steadily, again largely thanks to Trump’s tariffs.

Thus far, Trump and his White House lackeys have sought to deflect from these glum developments by pretending it’s still 2024 and blaming everything on the Biden White House. As Tuesday’s dismal jobs numbers dropped, Vice President JD Vance set off for a MAGA morale-boosting swing through Pennsylvania to yet again urge backers to be patient as the administration digs out from the mess it says it inherited from Biden. It’s not a pitch likely to get much fresh traction amid an expensive holiday season, a freezing winter with skyrocketing energy costs, and a 26 percent rise in the ranks of part-time workers over the past two months—most of them people unable to land secure full-time employment.

Still, Vance’s pitch is the soul of economic sophistication next to Trump’s own labored bid to defend the flagging economy. Affordability—the issue that Democrats are increasingly targeting in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s successful New York mayoral campaign—is simply a “hoax,” our grievance-addled chief executive insists, alongside all the other cunning liberal-led conspiracies designed to secure his downfall, like climate change, Russiagate, and the investigation into the January 6 coup attempt.

His continued appeals to the most baroque strains of right-wing victimology have done nothing to reverse Trump’s present polling free fall. His economic approval reached a record low in an AP poll released last week, with just 31 percent of respondents giving passing marks to his handling of the economy—a dramatic nine-point drop-off from the already low 40 percent Trump garnered in March. At the same time, a Century Foundation poll charted the impact of the Trump economy on working Americans, with 29 percent of registered voters saying they had delayed or skipped medical care over the past year, and 34 percent saying they had skipped meals to save money. Another 48 percent had tapped into savings to meet daily expenses, and 64 percent cut back on groceries or switched to budget grocery stores to make ends meet. Overall, the survey found two-thirds of respondents saying the economy was not performing well—including 45 percent of those who had voted for Trump in 2024. The red meat of high-paranoid MAGA culture warfare is, in other words, a poor and unconvincing substitute for actual red meat.

Yet Trump insists that he’s already tamed inflation, and that his administration deserves a grade of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” on the economy. He made his own reputation-burnishing foray into Pennsylvania last week, again to deride concerns of affordability and to lie about his White House’s nonexistent victory over inflation. He also lashed out at critics of his frequent overseas absences from the Oval Office as “stupid people.” If the speech’s content didn’t adequately scream “out of touch,” its setting did: the ballroom at the Mount Airy casino resort in the Poconos.

In another way, though, the location was entirely fitting: Trump is going all in on the bubble-ridden investment economy as his path to economic deliverance. As the manufacturing sector slumps, investment on phantom returns from circular-funded artificial intelligence concerns now account for a full 40 percent of GDP growth, per the Financial Times. By showing complete derision for working Americans contending with a job-starved, inflationary real economy, Trump is betting everything on the make-believe returns from an untested, intrusive, and repellent technology meant to degrade human experience and further displace workers. That’s why he recently signed another plainly illegal executive order that bars states from regulating AI. Our president isn’t doing anything to address the rising cost of living, but he’s working overtime to accelerate our transformation into a total casino economy. And let us never forget that he has somehow managed to plunge his former network of casinos into bankruptcy six times over.