OK, I got something wrong about President Trump. On the eve of his inauguration, I wrote a column establishing, with data, how fine an economy he was inheriting; one big financial firm declared it the “Roaring ‘20s.” My point was less to counter Trump’s claims that President Biden had destroyed the economy, and more to offer a pre-buttal to what I expected would be Trump’s efforts to steal credit for fixing what wasn’t broken.
Little did I (or just about anyone else) anticipate how quickly Trump would break that inheritance rather than let the good times roll. Certainly his billionaire backers banked that he wouldn’t ignite a global trade war — they were just counting on him to cut their taxes and regulations. Yet even those of us who took candidate Trump at his word about “beautiful” tariffs were stunned when he imposed self-punishing levies on just about every nation in the world and an Antarctic island of penguins.
So now, instead of taking credit for a good economy Biden handed off, Trump is blaming him for the damage from Trump’s own actions. Stock market slides, diminished 401(k)s, higher prices, negative first-quarter growth, recession warnings — all Biden’s fault, says Trump. “I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
As for the purported “good parts,” a new page on the White House website titled “The Trump Effect” boasts that his policies “have sparked trillions of dollars in new investment in U.S. manufacturing, technology, and infrastructure.” The Washington Post reviewed the promised investments listed on the page and found that they mostly reflected companies’ regular business costs or dated to those bad ol’ Biden days.
In any case, it’s pretty rich to have the president boasting about getting companies to invest more in the United States when his own family’s businesses are on a tear investing in the Middle East and Asia. (Except for Donald Trump Jr.’s interest in a new, invitation-only Washington club; nothing says “populist” like a half-million-dollar-plus private club fee.)
On April 30, just after the government report on the economy’s slowdown, Trump posted, “Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang.’ …BE PATIENT!!!” He won’t say how long Americans must wait, but at least past Christmas apparently. The president who’s never wanted for a thing is telling America’s girls to be satisfied with two dolls instead of 30. (His clueless Cabinet members chuckled at that during their recent meeting.)
So, Barbie will be a casualty of Trump’s trade war. Toy Assn. CEO Greg Ahearn told the New York Times that the virtual stoppage of trade with China, which makes most toys (including Barbies), is “putting Christmas at risk.” (Now that’s a war on Christmas.) Trump’s dismissive quip that the dolls that are available might cost “a couple of bucks more” is proof he knows he’s lying when he says Americans don’t pay for tariffs.
His politically tone-deaf take on dolls should stick, right through the 2026 midterm elections in Democrats’ campaign ads. It underscores why he won’t get away with the Biden-blaming: The economic chaos and uncertainty that companies and consumers are enduring are too well identified with Trump and tariffs. His job-approval slump in recent polls attests to that.
Even if Trump retreats on tariffs, as he has selectively and mostly temporarily, or comes to trade deals with various countries, he is unlikely to abandon the levies altogether. This week’s out-of-the-blue bombshell for new tariffs on films made outside the United States — “a national security threat,” he insisted — is evidence of that. What’s more, if Trump were to forsake tariffs, with them would go his entire economic rationale — contradictory and implausible as it is — for the “golden age” they are supposed to usher in: with new investments, trade surpluses and revenues so great that the income tax could be repealed.
No matter how often he bashes Biden, Trump will own the economic travails that are likely ahead. Parallel to the tariff follies, he and the Republican majority in Congress (remember Congress?) are now embarked on fiscal follies, turning the annual federal budget-writing process into an exercise in overreach and hubris. They’re trying to write a budget that is crammed with Trump’s entire legislative agenda of tax cuts and slashed spending, even calling it by Trump’s own term: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
As with tariffs, beauty is in the eye of the beholder — and the Republicans’ infighting so far is not a pretty sight.
Divided Republicans in the House delayed committee action this week and Senate Republicans held a retreat on Wednesday to air differences away from the Capitol. They aim to extend Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts and to fulfill his 2024 campaign promises to end taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits — for a cost of $9.1 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation. That’s more than Trump added to the federal debt in his first term, a record.
Republicans’ goal is to offset just $1.5 trillion of the lost tax revenues by cutting spending — more than half from Medicaid — even as they inflate spending for the military and border enforcement. Easy prediction: They’ll fall way short and the debt will explode, again. Markets and voters won’t react well. The president and his party have all the power in Washington. Which means, try as Trump might, there’s no one else to blame when things go awry.