{"id":351738,"date":"2025-12-17T19:45:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T19:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/351738\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T19:45:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T19:45:13","slug":"the-economy-is-flatlining-and-so-is-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/351738\/","title":{"rendered":"The Economy Is Flatlining\u2014and So Is Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Economy<\/a><\/p>\n

\/
\n December 17, 2025<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s usual tricks are no match for a weakening jobs market and persistent inflation.<\/p>\n

Ad Policy<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Donald<\/p>\n

Donald Trump in the Oval Office on December 15, 2025.<\/p>\n

(Anna Moneymaker \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

In a sane political universe, we\u2019d 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<\/a> of his White House renovation to his hate-fueled brownshirt raids<\/a> targeting law-abiding immigrant communities, to his campaign of murder<\/a> in the Southern Hemisphere to his crypto-and-crony schemes of self-enrichment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s watch\u2014a 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\u2014a trend that Trump\u2019s erratic collection of unforced errors known as his tariffs policy will only compound. \u201cWith some firms now paying average import duties of around 10%, inflation is likely to keep climbing in the months ahead,\u201d The Economist notes<\/a>. Overall business activity, as measured by the S & P\u2019s index tracking services, now stands at a six-month low<\/a>. And now a new jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics\u2014the reporting agency that Trump tried to hand over to a MAGAratchik too unhinged<\/a> for even the GOP Senate to approve\u2014shows that unemployment has spiked to 4.6 percent\u2014the highest level since the Covid recession<\/a>. 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\u2014the sector allegedly at the heart of Trump\u2019s white working-class base\u2014has dropped off steadily<\/a>, again largely thanks to Trump\u2019s tariffs.<\/p>\n

Thus far, Trump and his White House lackeys have sought to deflect from these glum developments by pretending it\u2019s still 2024 and blaming everything on the Biden White House. As Tuesday\u2019s 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<\/a>. It\u2019s not a pitch likely to get much fresh traction amid an expensive holiday season<\/a>, a freezing winter with skyrocketing energy costs<\/a>, and a 26 percent rise<\/a> in the ranks of part-time workers over the past two months\u2014most of them people unable to land secure full-time employment.<\/p>\n

Still, Vance\u2019s pitch is the soul of economic sophistication next to Trump\u2019s own labored bid to defend the flagging economy. Affordability\u2014the issue that Democrats are increasingly targeting in the wake of Zohran Mamdani\u2019s successful New York mayoral campaign\u2014is simply a \u201choax<\/a>,\u201d our grievance-addled chief executive insists, alongside all the other cunning liberal-led conspiracies designed to secure his downfall, like climate change<\/a>, Russiagate<\/a>, and the investigation into the January 6 coup attempt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

His continued appeals to the most baroque strains of right-wing victimology have done nothing to reverse Trump\u2019s present polling free fall. His economic approval reached a record low in an AP poll released last week, with just 31 percent of respondents<\/a> giving passing marks to his handling of the economy\u2014a dramatic nine-point drop-off from the already low 40 percent Trump garnered in March. At the same time, a Century Foundation poll<\/a> 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\u2014including 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.<\/p>\n

Yet Trump insists that he\u2019s already tamed inflation, and that his administration deserves a grade of \u201cA-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019s nonexistent victory over inflation. He also lashed out at critics of his frequent overseas absences from the Oval Office as \u201cstupid people.\u201d If the speech\u2019s content didn\u2019t adequately scream \u201cout of touch,\u201d its setting did: the ballroom at the Mount Airy casino resort in the Poconos<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> now account for a full 40 percent of GDP growth, per the Financial Times<\/a>. 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<\/a> and further displace workers. That\u2019s why he recently signed another plainly illegal executive order that bars states from regulating AI<\/a>. Our president isn\u2019t doing anything to address the rising cost of living, but he\u2019s 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<\/a> six times over.<\/p>\n

Over the past year you\u2019ve read Nation writers like Elie Mystal, Kaveh Akbar, John Nichols, Joan Walsh, Bryce Covert, Dave Zirin, Jeet Heer, Michael T. Klare, Katha Pollitt, Amy Littlefield, Gregg Gonsalves, and Sasha Abramsky take on the Trump family\u2019s corruption, set the record straight about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s catastrophic Make America Healthy Again movement, survey the fallout and human cost of the DOGE wrecking ball, anticipate the Supreme Court\u2019s dangerous antidemocratic rulings, and amplify successful tactics of resistance on the streets and in Congress.<\/p>\n

We publish these stories because when members of our communities are being abducted, household debt is climbing, and AI data centers are causing water and electricity shortages, we have a duty as journalists to do all we can to inform the public.<\/p>\n

In 2026, our aim is to do more than ever before\u2014but we need your support to make that happen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Through December 31, a generous donor will match all donations up to $75,000. That means that your contribution will be doubled, dollar for dollar. If we hit the full match, we\u2019ll be starting 2026 with $150,000 to invest in the stories that impact real people\u2019s lives\u2014the kinds of stories that billionaire-owned, corporate-backed outlets aren\u2019t covering.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With your support, our team will publish major stories that the president and his allies won\u2019t want you to read. We\u2019ll cover the emerging military-tech industrial complex and matters of war, peace, and surveillance, as well as the affordability crisis, hunger, housing, healthcare, the environment, attacks on reproductive rights, and much more. At the same time, we\u2019ll imagine alternatives to Trumpian rule and uplift efforts to create a better world, here and now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While your gift has twice the impact, I\u2019m asking you to support <\/a>The Nation with a donation today. You\u2019ll empower the journalists, editors, and fact-checkers best equipped to hold this authoritarian administration to account.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I hope you won\u2019t miss this moment\u2014donate to The Nation today. <\/p>\n

Onward,<\/p>\n

Katrina vanden Heuvel\u00a0<\/p>\n

Editor and publisher, The Nation<\/p>\n

Chris Lehmann<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation\u00a0and a contributing editor at\u00a0The Baffler.\u00a0He was formerly editor of\u00a0The\u00a0Baffler\u00a0and\u00a0The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream<\/a>\u00a0(Melville House, 2016).<\/p>\n

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