President Donald Trump’s recent commentary on the economy is drawing plenty of comparisons to then-President Joe Biden’s.
In his most dismissive remarks on the topic to date, Trump ratcheted up his downplaying of Americans’ affordability concerns in a Fox News interview on Monday. He even called them a “con job by Democrats” and said the “polls are fake.”
Four years ago, Biden and his administration made a series of wayward predictions and comments about just how significant a problem inflation would prove to be. And they wound up paying a significant political price for their economic Pollyanna act.
But the situations aren’t that analogous.
In fact, Trump has gone much further in his attempts to bury his head in the sand. And he seems to have a bigger problem politically speaking, for several reasons.
No, the economy isn’t necessarily worse under Trump than it was under Biden. But Trump seems to have turned it into a bigger political liability.
The Biden administration’s sins on this front were largely in its failure to recognize or convey how stubborn a problem inflation would be. Administration officials repeatedly and infamously used words like “transitory,” suggesting the problem would soon go away.
“We also know that as our economy has come roaring back, we’ve seen some price increases,” Biden said in July 2021. “Some folks have raised worries that could be a sign of persistent inflation. But that’s not our view.”
Their view was wrong. The annual inflation rate climbed from about 5% when Biden made those remarks all the way over 9% about a year later. In the intervening months, the administration effectively acknowledged its error.
Trump, by contrast, isn’t just downplaying inflation or donning glasses that seem a couple of shades too rosy; he’s pretending the problem simply doesn’t exist.
That escalated Monday when he was pressed by Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on whether Americans were right to be feeling the economic pinch. Trump basically suggested it was much ado about nothing.
“More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats,” he said.
When Ingraham pointed to polls that show Americans are quite anxious about the economy, the president responded: “I don’t know that they are saying that. I think polls are fake.”
CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote a good rundown Monday of Trump’s nonstop string of lies about this subject – lies that he repeated in the same Fox interview even as he accused others of misinformation. Trump has misstated a bevy of economic data points, including on inflation, grocery prices, energy prices and prescription drug prices. He keeps saying things like that there is no inflation or that grocery prices are down.
(Kevin Hassett, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, claimed Monday when pressed by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Trump merely meant inflation was down, rather than prices. But that’s not what Trump has said. And as Dale notes, inflation is not down.)
Biden’s gamble was that his and his administration’s predictions could turn out to be wrong, which they did.
Trump’s gamble is that if he can’t convince people of his alternate version of reality, he risks looking completely out of touch.
Which brings us to the other major difference with Biden.
There is no question that inflation and the economy were political problems for the Democratic president; they likely helped deliver Trump the White House in 2024. But they appear to be even bigger political problems for Trump now.
That’s because people are more likely to tie economic problems to Trump, specifically.
A number of recent polls have shown this:
-
61% of Americans said Trump’s policies have “worsened economic conditions in this country,” according to a CNN poll released last week. That number topped out at 58% under Biden in CNN polling, and it was generally in the low-to-mid-50s.
-
59% of Americans blamed Trump at least a “good amount” for the current inflation rate, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll late last month. Biden’s numbers on this question were actually lower, even when inflation was spiking in late 2021 and early 2022. He registered at 48% in November 2021 and 50% in February 2022.
-
64% of Americans said Trump’s policies were making the prices they paid for food and groceries increase, according to a CBS New-YouGov poll last month. Fox News and Fox Business polling tested a similar question from late 2021 through 2023, and those polls found between 40% and 53% of Americans thought Biden’s actions were hurting the fight against inflation.
And despite Trump’s and his administration’s attempts to blame Biden for continuing economic pains, polls suggest Americans aren’t about to buy into that.
A Reuters-Ipsos poll as far back as May showed that if the country were to fall into a recession, 59% of Americans would blame Trump, versus just 37% who would blame Biden.
So why might Americans be more likely to attach economic pains to Trump than they did to Biden?
There are a number of possible reasons.
One is that Trump pledged over and over to bring prices down quickly, and he clearly hasn’t done that.
Another is that Biden might have benefited from Americans blaming at least some of the economic problems on the Covid-19 pandemic – which rocked the economy worldwide – rather than his policies.
Another could be that Trump voluntarily took ownership of an already dicey economy by launching tariffs very early in his second term.
But arguably the biggest reason is that Americans just haven’t seen Trump take on this issue head-on. CBS polling shows as many 75% of Americans say the Trump administration has focused “not enough” on lowering prices. That includes 57% of Republicans.
(At least Biden was doing things like getting Congress to pass a bill called the “Inflation Reduction Act” – regardless of whether it actually helped with inflation.)
One way for Trump to respond to this data would be to double down on making affordability his focus. Another is to pretend 75% of Americans simply don’t know what they’re talking about or that the number is “fake.”
Trump has apparently chosen the latter. It’s difficult to see how those around him would see it as their best option.