President Donald Trump keeps claiming that affordability is a Democratic myth, one created to harm him politically. Yet according to a political analyst, Trump’s plan of simply denying that inflation and stagnating wages hurt Americans is doomed to fail.
“This is the president who got elected because people were mad about inflation, and said on the campaign trail, ‘When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,’” wrote MS NOW’s Paul Waldman on Sunday. “In the story he told, inflation would disappear (it hasn’t), tariffs would bring a manufacturing boom (they haven’t), and everyone would thank him for creating such boundless prosperity.”
By contrast, Waldman noted that a recent CNN poll found 65 percent of respondents believe Trump’s policies have worsened the economy and only 22 percent believe they have improved it. Similarly statistician Nate Silver’s polling average puts Trump’s overall approval on the economy at minus 27.7 percent.
“Trump’s answer to that disgruntlement is to just tell people they’ve never had it so good,” Waldman observed, quoting the president as bragging that “we had the best economy in the history of our country in my first term” and “we’re blowing it away now, despite our little diversion to the lovely country of Iran … the economy is booming.”
Unfortunately for Trump, a poor economy impacts every voter directly, and therefore it is logistically impossible to convince anyone who is not already partisan in Trump’s favor to disbelieve the evidence of their lived experiences.
“In a career as a real estate developer, TV personality and purveyor of small-time grifts, the president learned that there is power in lying about the facts and promising the moon,” Waldman said. “But an administration can only get away with that for so long. And since people experience the economy in their own lives, the picture the White House paints has to have at least some relationship to reality. “
Speaking with AlterNet in July, economist Dr. Robert J. Shapiro — who served as a top adviser under President Bill Clinton — described Trump’s approach to economics as crony capitalistic.
“Trump operates with a form of crony capitalism,” Shapiro explained. “The people who get US contracts, the people who get preferences on tariffs, are those who have influence with him. It ranges from the absurd — where the guy who did the coating for the swimming pool gets a no-bid contract to do the reflecting pool — to all the other no-bid contracts. That’s all crony capitalism. And certainly, opening this up could create more opportunities for that.”
When AlterNet heard from the White House about criticisms of Trump’s economy in April, they disputed all of the negative analysis.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers instead claimed that “the United States’ energy dominance status, as the world’s leading producer and a top exporter of oil and natural gas, has positioned us to not rely on the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz like other countries. If anything, Operation Epic Fury actually underscored the importance of producing reliable, affordable, and secure energy here at home. Many of our allies that have tried transitioning to intermittent and unreliable renewable energy sources have predictably failed to break their reliance on foreign oil that goes through the Strait.”
She continued, “Several countries from around the world are now looking to emulate the President’s energy dominance agenda and are advancing new partnerships that enhance their energy security with the United States.”