Last Wednesday, President Trump delivered a primetime address about the economy. The quick speech was supposed to highlight his administration’s supposed triumphs, but it came off as strangely defensive.
For almost twenty minutes, the president seemed to scold the American people for not appreciating how good they had it. He showed charts that made it appear, incorrectly, as if Trump has reversed the recent inflation surge and brought about deflation. At other points, he seemed to start yelling into the camera. Trump is clearly frustrated that the American people don’t believe him when he says the economy is excellent.
It was around this time two years ago that the Joe Biden administration began experiencing the same thing. As the pace of price increases eased back down from the forty-year highs reached in the middle of 2022 and the president’s agenda of heavy government spending helped to prop up GDP and jobs numbers, establishment-friendly economic “experts” heaped praise on Biden for successfully “rescuing” the economy from the chaos of the Trump years and the covid pandemic.
But the public did not fall for the hype. Poll after poll showed that, despite all the seemingly strong economic indicators, the American people did not feel good about the economy. And rightfully so.
For at least the last century, the government has intervened more and more in various important sectors—like housing, education, and healthcare. These policies have always been sold as ways to make the respective industry better and more affordable, but they always end up worsening the problem.
In that same timeframe, the federal government took complete control over the institution of money. This power grab has allowed the American political class to attempt to maintain a global empire, all bankrolled with money printing that has inflated away the value of the dollar and trapped us in a recurring nightmare of economic recessions.
The aim of all this government intervention in the economy has not been to make life better for everyday people but to enrich well-connected companies and empower the federal bureaucratic elites. It is not a broken system; it’s a system designed to rip us off, and it does that very effectively.
But the economic and societal problems created and exacerbated by all these interventions have been growing worse in recent decades. That is most viscerally seen in the three major crises that have largely defined the twenty-first century so far—9/11, the Great Recession, and the covid pandemic.
In all three cases, the crisis was caused by previous government intervention, everyday people bore the brunt of it, and the political class used the resulting chaos as an excuse to accelerate and expand the very interventions that had led to the crisis in the first place.
The 9/11 attacks were the result of unnecessary US meddling in the Middle East and were then used to justify a significant expansion of that same kind of meddling—to the benefit of weapons companies and Washington’s allies in the region.
The Great Recession was caused by the Fed’s credit expansion, kicked off by the government’s intervention in mortgage markets, and then used to justify massive wealth transfers to well-connected big banks and an even more extreme round of credit expansion.
And finally, the covid pandemic played out the way it did because the government had built up a healthcare system warped to prioritize the financial well-being of pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers, the government-centered field of “public health” had recently come to disregard rights and push for a lockdown-centered pandemic approach, and decades of hiding economic pain with an inflationist monetary policy had made the lockdowns seem like a feasible option. In fact, it may have even begun in part because the US government was helping to fund risky gain-of-function research at the lab in China where the virus may have originated.
But, regardless, the political class then used the pandemic to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to big pharma and other well-connected businesses and to print trillions of new dollars that were then injected straight into carefully-curated parts of the economy that all came together to constitute one of the largest inflationist wealth transfers in human history.
It should not surprise anyone that right in the wake of what was, in effect, a massive robbery, people were not feeling great. While the establishment’s propaganda mostly obscured the actual cause, it could not hide the fact that something was deeply wrong with the economy.
Joe Biden and, later, Kamala Harris chose to double down and outright deny people’s economic pain. They paid the price in 2024. Trump was able to capitalize on that strategic blunder and ride the public’s displeasure with the economy back to the White House.
But Trump and the people around him either don’t understand the policies that are necessary to right the economic ship or, more likely, are not actually interested in pursuing them. Many “new right influencers” have either dismissed economics as an antiquated field that’s not worth obsessing over or come around to advocate for left-wing economic policies. Other officials around the president are actively interested in defending the economic status quo. Together, MAGA’s combination of disinterest, economic leftism, and outright subversion has ensured that this administration has left virtually all the crony interventionist and inflationist rackets fostering our economic rot in place.
So, Trump has landed right back in the same situation that doomed his predecessor. And he’s decided to adopt the same strategy of telling the people struggling that their pain isn’t real. A common conclusion is that this will help the “populist” wing of the Democratic Party take power in the midterms and the next presidential election. And, while that’s probably true, they’re just as unable or unwilling to meaningfully address this problem as Trump has proven to be.
This first year of the second Trump term has made it clear that any anti-establishment political movement that genuinely wants to stop the deterioration of our country needs to make economics a priority. It’s not everything, but it does lie at the root of so many of our problems. Ignoring economics and allowing us to continue along our terrible financial trajectory will constrain any progress that can be made on other fronts and make it more likely that people will flock back to the political establishment that created this problem to begin with.
