Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency was made possible by two conclusions reached by a crucial bloc of swing voters: that Democratic management of the economy had become intolerably bad, and that in retrospect Trump’s management of the economy during his first term had been tolerably good, despite dire circumstances (the 2020 pandemic) for which no one blamed him. So as he moved back into the White House, he might have enjoyed an extended honeymoon in public opinion, with Joe Biden’s administration continuing to bear the blame for continuing economic problems and Trump being given the time to put his own domestic and international agenda into action.
Instead, as became almost instantly clear, Trump chose speed and audacity for the implementation of his second-term plans, dominating not only the news but every counterforce in Washington, D.C., or around the country that might have slowed the pace of breakage. And while his job-approval ratings have eroded slowly, the 47th president might have given himself a lot more leash to do destructive things had he let the economy run itself for long enough to achieve the “soft landing” from the previous era of inflation that the Fed and indeed the Biden administration had prepared for him.
But instead, Trump destabilized the global economy for the foreseeable future by pursuing a trade war that Wall Street wizards chose not to anticipate in their wishful thinking about his priorities and his advisers. Now any given day markets may rise or fall, projections of catastrophe may wax or wane, and wishful thinking may be revived. If Trump takes his Treasury secretary’s advice, he will feed hopes that his tariff program will go away once he’s secured from U.S. trading partners the kind of kowtowing concessions his ego demands in every circumstance in life.
But the sickening lurch of markets and the anxious fears of impending recession (if not the immensely more destructive condition known as “stagflation”) that greeted Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcements put an emphatic end point to any fantasies that hard times could be retroactively blamed on Joe Biden or prospectively attributed to some bipartisan “Establishment” determined to thwart American Greatness. Trump has placed his personal stamp on the 2025 economy as emphatically as he possibly could, defying every bit of conventional wisdom about how to navigate a complex and even fragile global environment. He broke the economy as we knew it, so now he owns it, for good or for ill. Since he also totally owns the Republican Party that in turn totally owns the federal government, we have now definitively entered a Trump era where not a sparrow may fall to the ground without full presidential responsibility for the consequences.
Trump’s determination to break things has, as my colleague Ross Barkan noted, made life immensely easier for the opposition party whose divisions and lack of leadership hardly matter at present. But more generally, Trump and his party now bear the entire burden of chronic American unhappiness with living conditions and with a government they expect to make life better. To get a sense of Trump’s public standing going forward, we should look not just at his job-approval ratings (which have been underwater most of his political career) but at public sentiment about the direction of the country. And while MAGA excitement over Trump’s unlikely comeback has initially put a floor beneath “wrong track” sentiment, it’s still strong and probably about to get a lot stronger.
According to the RealClearPolitics averages, 41.9 percent of Americans think the country is on the “right track,” and 52.0 percent think it’s on the “wrong track.” It will be interesting to watch that number as the recent stock-market carnage sinks in, and as it becomes clearer that the administration is pursuing the eternally unpopular agenda of cuts in programs like Medicaid in order to finance upper-end tax cuts, even as the wrecking ball of DOGE makes government more dysfunctional than ever and secret police snatch people off the streets. It’s Trump’s, not Joe Biden’s, America now, and its blood — financial and human — is on his hands.
