THE FEDERAL RESERVE RAISED interest rates today, and Donald Trump is Big Mad. After all, his litmus test when choosing a new Fed chair was a pledge to cut rates, and Kevin Warsh delivered the opposite.
But if Trump doesn’t like how things turned out, he has only himself to blame.
Most of the time, Trump is a master marketer and a manipulator of media narratives, someone who can flood the zone with shit and then sculpt from that shit whatever he likes. Just think back to everything he promised as he ran for president in 2024: In Trump’s telling, as soon as he re-entered the White House, prices would immediately come down. All his tariffs would be paid by foreigners. Cleansing the country of our brown immigrants would usher in a hiring boom for “heritage” Americans. Allowing coal plants to pollute more (among other “deregulatory” moves) would precipitate a surge of economic investment. Somehow, we’d pay off the national debt and also get new tax cuts. And by sheer force of his political will, we’d all bask in his new economic “golden age.”
Before January 20, 2025, maybe some of this seemed plausible. Twenty months later, reality has finally caught up with him.
It caught up with him via his approval numbers; he’s deeply underwater on the economy and (nearly) every other issue.
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Inflation had been cooling when Trump first entered office, then began heating back up around “Liberation Day” (April 2025). But his one-two punch of tariffs and the Iran war sent prices surging for steel, oil, fertilizer, tomatoes, you name it.
If Trump had done nothing when he entered office except played golf each day — we probably would have achieved our “soft landing” on inflation and not needed additional rate hikes.