The Rachel Maddow Show WEEKNIGHTS 9PM ETMorning Joe WEEKDAYS 6AM ETDeadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace Weekdays 4PM ETThe Beat with Ari Melber Weeknights 6PM ETThe Weeknight Weeknights 7PM ETAll in with Chris Hayes TUESDAY-FRIDAY 8PM ETThe Briefing with Jen Psaki TUESDAYS – FRIDAYS 9PM ETThe Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnel Weeknights 10PM ETThe 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle Weeknights 11PM ET
Trump says his economy deserves an ‘A+++++’ — but his own voters disagree
“Pretty much everything I make goes towards paying the bills. With taxes, these days, though, there’s nothing in my paycheck,” one Trump supporter said.
This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 10 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Donald Trump’s second administration has a lot of political vulnerabilities. But by far the biggest issue the president is dealing with is the one that won him the election: the cost of living.
People in this country, by and large, do not like the economy. They think things are too expensive. Poll after poll shows it is now Trump’s weakest issue. Consumer sentiment is near record lows amid rising prices and the president’s tariffs.
His big solution to this problem isn’t anything substantial. It is to do rallies with big signs claiming prices are down.
On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who Trump appointed during his first term, announced interest rate cuts of a quarter percentage point.
Across the country, voters are lining up to tell anyone who will listen that they do not like this economy. Even one Trump supporter, who was asked to speak at the president’s Pennsylvania rally on Tuesday in support of the administration’s No Tax on Tips policy, gave away the game.
Donna Zajack, a single mom and waitress, told the crowd that she has been a server since she was 15 years old. She said she’s always enjoyed the job and was used to making a good income, “but lately, my money doesn’t seem to stretch that far. Pretty much everything I make goes towards paying the bills. With taxes, these days, though, there’s nothing in my paycheck.”
But the president of the United States doesn’t seem to believe his own supporters’ concerns.
When Trump took to the stage, he, once again, mocked affordability, calling it a “hoax” orchestrated by Democrats — even while acknowledging that this rhetoric might not be the best approach, politically.
Across the board, we are seeing Democrats overperforming in elections nationwide, including in special elections in Florida and Georgia on Tuesday. Voters are rejecting Trump’s record on the biggest issue of the day.
But his big solution to this problem isn’t anything substantial. It is to do rallies with big signs claiming prices are down, which is exactly what he was doing in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, with classic, wildly tangential Trump stuff.
There were racist rants about Somalians and what he calls “s–––hole” countries, as well as gross smears of his political opponents. At one point, Trump chided folks for buying too many pencils and brought back his favorite riff about daughters wanting too many dolls. Pencils and dolls — the two items our president can name that Americans are buying and apparently hoarding.
It is overwhelmingly clear that Trump has no idea what the average American buys. It is not just pencils and dolls; it is basic necessities such as food and gasoline. The president doesn’t even seem to understand how ordinary people could be cutting back on holiday gifts to prepare for rising health care costs.
On Tuesday, he told Politico that if he could grade his own economy, he’d give himself an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”
It’s almost like the plight of the average American consumer is just a completely foreign concept to him. He is seemingly incapable of relating to real people about prices.
Instead, he is running defense for his tariffs, which are making things more expensive — and the fact that he is still defending those tariffs proves that Trump is not willing to change course.
Remember, before he was reelected, he explicitly promised to bring prices down on Day 1. You can argue, as Vice President JD Vance has, that this was a ridiculous proposition on its face. But it is what Trump said, and voters believed him.
Instead, he has made things meaningfully worse for people in two huge areas: first, tariffs, which are raising the prices of goods across the board and crushing American farmers, who once again need a bailout from Trump’s trade war.
It is overwhelmingly clear that Trump has no idea what the average American buys.
Secondly, health care, where the president and his fellow Republicans refuse to take action to stop insurance premiums from skyrocketing for millions of Americans.
House Republicans are yet again scrambling to come up with more than just concepts of a plan to bring the cost of health care down. They have no real solution — as they have had no real solution for the past 15 years.
They could just vote to extend the subsidies and make everyone’s lives better and probably score some much-needed political points along the way. But they are dead set against doing that.
So instead, what we are going to get is Trump taking his road show to hotel casinos to tell people that, actually, everything is fine.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
