Will someone please tell President Donald Trump that he’s not running against Joe Biden anymore? Almost a year into his second term, he can’t seem to let his former opponent go.
“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I am fixing it,” Trump said at the start of a televised speech Wednesday intended to reassure Americans with messages he has been pushing through months of sloganeering.
But happy days are not here again in Trump’s polling numbers. In the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll, 57% disapprove of the job he’s doing on the economy. Just 36% of poll respondents approve, a record low for both of his terms.
Yet Trump did his best to argue that down was up.
“When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country,” Trump claimed. “Inflation has stopped, wages are up, prices are down, our nation is strong.”
That’s how Biden sounded in the spring of last year, as he tried to convince skeptical voters that the struggling economy was something closer to robust. But neither Biden nor his eventual Democratic replacement on the electoral ticket, Kamala Harris, could overcome the lived experience of millions of voters whose strained household budgets told them otherwise.
Trump’s promises of lower prices for American consumers helped him to beat Harris. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Prices rose 3% in the 12 months ending in September, and consumer spending on big-ticket items fell markedly, partly because of Trump’s tariffs.
“We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, and that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months,” he said. Have world leaders told him that in earnest, or are they playing to Trump’s mountainous self-regard?
As Trump was overselling the fruits of his economic stewardship, another controversy was boiling up, this time within his own administration.
Trump’s savvy chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is generally viewed within Republican circles as a disciplined and effective political operator, a reputation grounded in her decades-long involvement in GOP campaigns and her central role in managing Trump’s 2024 campaign and early White House staff operations. That, in addition to her close proximity to the president, is why the widely talked-about interviews that she gave to Vanity Fair made headlines. In a more conventional administration, such an interview would be viewed as a scandal that would end careers, but of course the Trump White House is anything but conventional.
Among other fuel for gossip, or worse, she described Trump as having an alcoholic personality, acknowledged that Trump uses prosecutions as a means of “score settling,” described Budget Director Russell Vought as a “right-wing absolute zealot” and described Vice President JD Vance as “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”
Yet, strangely for super-serious Washington, neither the president nor the other parties named by Wiles were eager to treat this flap as anything more serious than business as usual.
Wiles defended herself by claiming that Vanity Fair omitted “significant context” in order to create “an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative.” While we can all feel for her, “chaotic” and “negative” are two words a lot of voters would agree do a nice job of summing up the Trump administration.
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