Alan Zendell, March 29, 2025

If we look at the facts and avoid partisan spin, it’s clear that the Biden administration did the heavy lifting required to restore our economy to its pre-COVID vigor. The runaway inflation that began in late 2021 was forecast quite accurately during the COVID lockdown. Farmers talked about having to destroy crops and herds of cattle and hogs, which would have to be rebuilt. The incredibly low food prices during 2020 resulted from agricultural products being dumped on the market.

Manufacturers warned of severe supply chain disruptions which would adversely affect production and raise prices, and because so many businesses failed during the lockdown, unemployment began to spike. The University of Michigan’s Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) had reached 96 in 2019, but COVID caused it to drop to 81.6 in 2020, 77.6 in 2021, and 59.0 in 2022. All this is well-documented.

With Republicans determined to prevent him from accomplishing anything, Biden and the Congress had to enact partisan legislation. The inflation rate was reduced to pre-COVID levels, and unemployment dropped to the lowest value since Ronald Reagan was president. By Election Day, 2024, financial markets were at all-time highs, and the CCI was in the 70s. But Trump and the MAGA spin machine kept sayng our economy was failing and countless bad actors on the internet, including Russian and Chinese bots, reinforced that message. Millions of voters believed the lies and elected Trump, who promised to “fix” the economy and make life better for his supporters.

During his first term, Trump touted booming financial markets as a sign that his economic policies were working. In doing so, he showed a basic lack of understanding of the economy. When he took office amid a raging bull market with the best CCI since COVID, he claimed the robust economy he’d said was failing was due to his efforts. To some extent, he was correct, but the reason says more about his ignorance than anything he accomplished.

Neither the CCI nor the financial indexes measure the strength of the economy. They both reflect what people hope the future will look like. CCI surveys ask consumers how they feel about the future based on their personal circumstances. Financial markets reflect how large corporations, wealthy investors, and conservative managers of retirement funds see the future. In December, with voters having spoken and no one attacking the Capitol, investors projected what a future in which Trump kept his promises and understood what drives our economy might look like. Both the CCI and the markets spiked upward.

But Trump’s Cabinet nominations made it clear that his administration would be a road test of Project 2025, which advocated a “hard restart” of our government. As one pundit pointed out, that’s a sci-fi reference to rebooting a starship’s engine, knowing everything might simply blow up, and it’s a perfect analogy for what the MAGA people are doing. Voters began realizing Trump’s claims that he had nothing to do with Project 2025 were lies, and he intended to do everything he said he would during the campaign: make a show of rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants, re-start a trade war with punishing tariffs, destroy the Deep State, by which he meant the structure of the federal government, and take down everyone who had ever opposed him.

Then Elon Musk started using his chainsaw to eviscerate the government with no logic or plan, and hundreds of thousands of government employees, nearly half of whom were veterans, were targeted without cause. Trump disregarded the checks and balances in our Constitution and ignored Congress. He threatened judges who ruled against his illegal actions, and tried to control what universities teach. Overall, he demonstrated that his primary goal in reducing the size of government was killing agencies he hated: those that protect consumers and the environment, FEMA, and Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which take money from billionaires and give it to freeloaders.

Most economists warned Trump’s policies would lead to more inflation and higher interest rates, and likely cause a recession. When that started getting through to voters, especially Trump voters, his approval rating began plummeting, and the CCI and financial indexes crashed. Trump’s Executive Orders were being reversed or delayed by the courts, and he was verbally assaulting federal judges and threatening to have them impeached (which he does not have the power to do.) The unsecured group war chat over our attack on Yemen enraged active duty troops, especially fighter pilots who felt exposed and compromised, and in nine weeks, Trump is already in crisis with his base.

Trump may have misunderstood how the economy works in 2016, but he understands that yesterday’s market crash and the announcement that the CCI dropped to 57 spell jeopardy for his plans to become a dictator. He pulled the nomination of Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador, because he desperately needs her vote in Congress, and if the special election to replace her were won by a Democrat, his effectiveness would be ended.

Politicians who fail to heed Jim Carville’s warnings usually wish they had.