Trump Tells Voters: Don’t Believe Your Lying Wallets
From elections to the economy, he keeps denying reality.
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 are learning a hard lesson: A man who refuses to face facts in his own life is also unlikely to face facts about the lives of others. These voters are discovering that Trump’s denial of the election results in 2020 wasn’t a one-off. It was a forewarning of what we’re seeing now: his refusal to acknowledge the affordability crisis.
Five years ago, Trump didn’t just deny that he had lost the presidential election. He proved the severity of his delusion by trying everything, including violence, to block the transfer of power. When he ran for re-election in 2024, he made it clear that he still believed he had won in 2020.
Many people who voted for Trump in 2024 bought this absurd story. But they weren’t enough to elect him. He won because a pivotal segment of the public knew his story was bogus but voted for him anyway.
In AP’s VoteCast survey of the 2024 electorate, 65 percent of voters agreed that “Joe Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020.” But more than a quarter of that 65 percent—about one-sixth of the electorate—nevertheless voted for Trump in 2024. These people made the difference in the election. They wagered, in effect, that Trump’s refusal to face the truth about 2020 wouldn’t prevent him from running the country competently.
In particular, voters thought he could manage the economy. By a margin of 10 percentage points, they said he would do a better job on economic matters than Kamala Harris would. Among voters who named the economy as their top issue, 61 percent voted for Trump.
A year later, it’s clear that this wager was tragically wrong. Trump wasn’t just impervious to the truth about 2020. He’s impervious to the struggles of American families in 2025.
ECONOMIC INDICATORS SHOW that prices have risen this year. But Trump keeps insisting that they’re falling. “I brought costs way down, just about every cost,” he declared in July. “I can’t think of a cost that went up.” Later that month, he repeated his false story. “Prices are all down,” he said.
When reporters fact-checked his statements, Trump dismissed their corrections, just as he had dismissed the election fact checks in 2020. “I listen to these horrendous frauds on CNN and various other fake news networks, and they say costs are up,” he scoffed in August. “No, costs are down,” he said. “The price of groceries are down.”
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported bad employment numbers, Trump denounced the numbers as “rigged” and fired the bureau’s commissioner. And when his approval ratings sank, he claimed the polls were fake, too. Surveys done by the New York Times and Washington Post were “RIGGED,” he alleged. “The real Polls out there have me doing better than ever before.”
Sympathetic interviewers explained to Trump that he was mistaken. He refused to listen. When CNBC’s Joe Kernen corrected Trump’s misrepresentation of his approval ratings, the president shot back, “They’re fake polls. Joe.” And when Martha MacCallum noted that most people in a Fox News survey said “the economy is worse under this administration,” Trump trashed the network’s survey unit. “I’ve told Rupert Murdoch, ‘Go get yourself a new pollster, because he stinks,’” the president told MacCallum.
As this month’s elections approached, Trump clung to his propaganda. In a 60 Minutes interview on October 31, Norah O’Donnell mentioned that Americans had “seen their grocery prices go up.” Trump cut her off. “No, you’re wrong,” he told her. “They’re going down.”
THEN CAME THE ELECTION DEBACLE on November 4. Four years earlier, Republicans had won the race for governor of Virginia by 2 percent and had lost the race for governor of New Jersey by 3 percent. This time, Republicans lost the two races by 15 and 14 percent, respectively. In both states, nearly two-thirds of voters said they were angry or dissatisfied with “the way things are going” in the country.
Again, sympathetic interviewers invited Trump to acknowledge the economic struggles that had caused the GOP’s defeats. “You’re the head of the party,” Bret Baier reminded Trump, noting that Republican policies had essentially been on the ballot. “Do you see that at all?”
Trump conceded nothing. “We’ve done so much,” he told Baier, adding—falsely, again—that other than beef, “groceries are way down.”
Last week, in another interview, Laura Ingraham pointed out that prices for beef, coffee, auto repairs, and other items had increased. She asked Trump whether public dissatisfaction with the economy was just a “voter perception issue” or whether there was “more that needs to be done by Republicans” to solve the problem.
Trump brushed off the putative economic problem as a media conspiracy. “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats,” he told Ingraham. “They put out something: ‘Say today, ‘Costs are up.’ They feed it to the anchors of ABC, CBS, and NBC,” and the anchors “do exactly what they say. It’s such a rigged system.” In reality, he insisted, “Costs are way down.”
Ingraham pointed out that this response—claiming that people were doing well, even when they said they weren’t—was what Trump had accused Biden of doing in 2024. If the economy was in such good shape, she asked Trump, “Why are people saying they’re anxious about the economy?”
Trump rejected the premise. “I think polls are fake,” he told Ingraham, discounting surveys that purported to show financial anxiety. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”
THIS IS WHAT AMERICANS ELECTED in 2024: a man who had clearly demonstrated his unwillingness to accept unwelcome information. It shouldn’t surprise us that he’s doing the same thing now.
Baier, Ingraham, congressional Republicans, and Trump’s cabinet officers know it’s politically dangerous to deny that voters are unhappy. “What we’re not going to do is tell the American people that they don’t know how they’re feeling,” Treasury Scott Bessent pledged in a Fox News interview on Sunday. That’s “what the Biden administration did: They said it was a ‘vibecession,’” said Bessent. He accused Biden of telling voters, “You don’t know how good you have it.”
But that’s what Trump is telling them now. “Prices are coming down very substantially on groceries and things,” he declared again on Sunday night, just hours after Bessent’s interview. “We have a great economy. The prices are coming down.”
If Trump thinks he can snow voters about their own lives as he tried to snow them about the 2020 election, he might get an unpleasant surprise in the midterms.