The latest CBS News/YouGov poll, released earlier in the week, found that 60% of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump’s handling of the economy, while 51% said the president’s economic agenda had made them worse off. Plenty of other recent national surveys have pointed in the same direction.
In July, Trump took credit for “an economic renaissance” that he insisted is “already happening.” Evidently, this didn’t exactly persuade the American mainstream.
And yet, he acts as if he can bully Americans’ economic attitudes into submission through constant, reality-defying repetition.
“We have the best economy we’ve ever had,” the president declared at his latest White House Cabinet meeting. “We had the best economy in my first term, but we have an economy that’s blowing it away.”
The idea that Trump, during his first term, delivered the greatest economy ever seen by human eyes is demonstrably absurd. But the idea that our current economy has reached heights without precedent in the history of the United States is every bit as ridiculous.
This isn’t complicated. Indeed, most Americans’ dissatisfaction with the nation’s economic status quo is quite understandable: Stubborn inflation data has inched higher, while job growth and the manufacturing sector have also moved in the wrong direction amid sluggish economic growth.
What’s more, Axios reported this week:
Twenty-two states are either in a recession or on the precipice of a downturn, according to an intriguing analysis from Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. The states in contraction are spread across the country — from Washington to Virginia to Maine — and make up about a third of overall GDP. Their problems are driven largely by a mix of slowing immigration, increasing tariffs and federal job cuts, Zandi argues.
To be sure, this is not official government data — which is in shortly supply right now, as the government shutdown continues — but Moody’s Analytics has a strong reputation and a good track record, and the fact that it shows nearly half of the states either in or near a recession is tough to ignore.
The White House won’t want to hear this, but there’s other private data pointing in a similarly discouraging direction. CNBC reported this week:
Employment growth was essentially flat in September, according to data from investment giant Carlyle that seeks to fill in data gaps created by the government shutdown. The firm said its proprietary data showed job growth of just 17,000 for the month, which would be even less than the 22,000 gain in August reflected in Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
I don’t know whether Trump has genuinely convinced himself that Americans now have “the best economy we’ve ever had,” or whether he was just peddling the latest in a series of lies. Either way, if he thinks such nonsense is persuading a frustrated public, he’s going to be disappointed.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
