Americans No Longer Trust Trump To Handle Inflation
The president has spent six months promising to make everything more expensive, and polls show that Americans have noticed.
President Donald Trump swept into office in January with a promise to tackle what he called the "inflation crisis" that had kicked off under his predecessor.
"I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices," Trump said during his inaugural address.
Since then, however, the Trump administration has spent nearly six months imposing myriad tariffs whose sole function is to make prices rise. Trump has raised tariffs on finished goods and raw materials indiscriminately. He's targeted imports from American allies and geopolitical foes alike. And even though there have been pauses and retreats at times, hardly a week seems to have passed without a tariff hike (or the threat of one), regardless of the signals sent by economists and the stock market.
Yes, the president has been working hard to make stuff more expensive. And Americans seem to have noticed the effort.
A weekly tracking poll run by The Economist and YouGov shows that Trump's approval rating on his handling of "inflation/prices" has tumbled by 30 percentage points since January. The president's approval rating on that issue started off in positive territory—back when he was promising to defeat inflation—but has fallen to -25 in the most recent tracking poll. Trump's approval rating on inflation has fallen significantly farther than his ratings on crime, immigration, and foreign policy, even though all categories have dropped since January.
Those marks are particularly important, as 21 percent of respondents in the poll said "inflation/prices" was the most important issue—more than any other topic included in the poll—and 47 percent of respondents said inflation is the most important issue facing the country. Meanwhile, 43 percent said they expect inflation to be higher six months from now, while just 21 percent expect it to drop.
From a political perspective, perhaps the most worrying part of that poll is how far Trump's approval rating has fallen while inflation remains relatively tame. Data released this week showed a 2.7 percent annualized inflation rate through June.
The report also showed that tariff-induced price increases are starting to hit, as Reason's Liz Wolfe detailed yesterday. Prices for new "appliances jumped the most in nearly five years, toys increased at the fastest pace since early 2021 while household furnishings and sports equipment climbed by the most since 2022," Bloomberg reported.
Keep in mind that the most potent of Trump's tariffs have not gone into effect yet. Unless the president changes course again, a huge set of new tariffs will be imposed on August 1. On top of the tariffs already in place, those August 1 tariffs would amount to a $2,800 annual tax increase per household, according to an estimate by the Yale Budget Lab.
What do you think that will do to his approval rating?
Tariff advocates like American Compass founder Oren Cass have argued that the price increases caused by Trump's tariffs are not inflation because they are the result of "an explicit policy choice" rather than an expansion of the monetary supply. As an economic matter, that distinction might matter. But telling Americans they should ignore rising prices because the president is causing them on purpose is…well, probably not as strong of a defense as Cass thinks.
The real irony here is that much of Trump's successful bid for the presidency last year was built upon general dissatisfaction with how the Biden administration had triggered and then struggled to control inflation. "Americans don't like paying higher prices for things" is perhaps the defining political lesson of the 2020s, so far, but it's a lesson that the Trump administration apparently has not learned.
If Trump is going to continue deliberately increasing prices, then he'll be deliberately sinking his approval rating too.