The Stages of Trumpist Economic Grief

Or, how Scott Bessent (sort of) became spiritual

While much of MAGA is motivated by hatred of an open society — by racism, misogyny and the desire to end all things woke — the swing voters who put Donald Trump over the top thought they were supporting a great manager who would fix the economy, reducing grocery prices and restoring good jobs. It was inevitable that they would eventually feel buyers’ remorse, because Trump never had plans to deliver on his economic promises; on the contrary, almost everything he’s trying to do will make the economy worse.

Even so, it’s stunning just how quickly consumer confidence has fallen off a cliff:

Source: University of Michigan

What’s truly remarkable from my perspective, however, is that Trump’s economic team seems to be even more despairing than the general public.

Bear in mind that “hard” economic data ­— things like unemployment, job growth and consumer prices — are still looking fairly benign. So you might expect Trump officials to be going on television and assuring everyone that public concerns about tariffs, DOGE layoffs and all that are overblown, that prosperity like you’ve never seen is just around the corner. Instead they’re talking about pain and why Americans should accept it.

I find myself thinking about changing rhetoric about the economy as the stages of Trumpist economic grief. So far they look like this:

1. Prices will come down right away

2. Actually, reducing prices is hard and will take a while

3. Sorry, but we need a painful economic detox

4. Hey, there’s more to life than consumer goods

5. ????

As everyone knows, during the campaign Trump repeatedly promised to bring grocery prices down on Day One of his presidency. As soon as the election was over, however, he declared that “it’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.” He didn’t quite say “Nyah, nyah, fooled you!” but he might as well have. And this reversal was completely predictable.

What has happened since then has been much more surprising. I would have expected Trump officials to wait a while, to start offering excuses for a bad economy only after the economy actually, you know, turned bad. But no, they’re already telling us to expect hard times as the economy goes through a “detox period.”

Detox from what? The semi-official line is that job growth under Biden was somehow fake, that it was all low-value government employment, and that it will be painful as we move workers back to productive work in the private sector. And some in the news media are actually buying that line. The Washington Post just ran a story with the utterly credulous headline “Trump has a plan to remake the economy. But he’s not explaining it very well.”

So, first of all, why does the economy need remaking? The claim that job growth under Biden was mainly government employment is completely false:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

I don’t know whether people like Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, are deliberately lying, although they probably are — these aren’t hard numbers to check. One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that Republican descriptions of Democratic governance often reflect right-wing fantasies about what liberals would do rather than reality. Big cities must be crime-ridden hellscapes even though New York is one of the safest places in America; Biden must have presided over massive growth in government jobs, even though he didn’t.

The other problem with the headline is, “what plan?” DOGE has wreaked havoc on federal operations, but its claims to have saved large amounts of money appear to be vaporware. And in any case, most government employees work for state and local governments, not the federal government. So how, exactly, is the economy being “remade”?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Trump’s problem is that he’s doing a poor job of explaining his plan. I think his problem is that he’s offering fake answers to fake problems, and the public — unlike, apparently, the Washington Post — isn’t buying it.

In any case, the real surprise is that Trump officials are making excuses for a bad economy even though the economy isn’t actually bad — yet. Maybe they believe that their boss’s policies will do a lot of damage, realize that they have no influence over those policies, and are trying to get ahead of the curve.

But item #4 on the stages of Trumpist economic grief is even more surprising. A few days Bessent declared that “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” When asked to explain his comment on Meet the Press he sort of doubled down: “The American dream is not contingent on cheap baubles they get from China.”

OK, he didn’t exactly go all spiritual and call on Americans to reject materialism. He seemed to be saying that the American dream is really about upward mobility and affordable housing, although it’s hard to see what aspects of Trump’s policies will help on either of those fronts. But still, the evolution from promises to reduce prices on Day One to “who cares about consumer prices?” is giving me whiplash.

And does anyone expect consumers to accept this new nonchalance about inflation? I don’t. So what’s the next stage in Trumpist economic grief?

I’d say that we’re entering uncharted territory, but really we aren’t. Trump is clearly a wannabe authoritarian ruler; the only question is how successful he’ll be at turning that dream into reality. And we know how authoritarian regimes deal with economic adversity.

First, they try to hide the bad news. Trump officials have already been talking about redefining GDP in ways they imagine (wrongly) will make Biden’s economy look worse and their economy better. It seems highly likely to me that once Trump’s policies start causing inflation and, possibly, recession there will be a major push to cook the economic data.

Second, they punish the bringers of bad news. As the New York Times has reported, that’s China’s approach:

Beijing has censored and tried to intimidate renowned economists, financial analysts, investment banks and social media influencers for bearish assessments of the economy and the government’s policies. In addition, news articles about people experiencing financial struggles or the poor living standards for migrant workers are being removed.

If you say that such a crackdown couldn’t happen here, you’re being naïve. In fact, it’s already happening to some extent, largely through self-censorship by media organizations. (Hello, Jeff Bezos.) If the economy worsens, expect the pressure to stay positive to become much more intense.

And bear in mind that we’re only two months into the second Trump presidency. What will things look like a year from now?

MUSICAL CODA

From the (former) land of cooked data: