A Second Trump Presidency Would be Terrible for the Economy
“But the economy” is no excuse for supporting him.
FOLLOWING THE PEOPLE-EATING-PETS imbroglio, one would think that undecided voters would have their doubts quelled about how to vote in November. But that’s not the way we roll here. Nearly everyone has made up their minds, sure, but we’ve reached that time of the quadrennial cycle when we turn the fate of our nation over to the least informed and most distracted members of the electorate.
Though I’m giving undecideds a little side-eye, let me hasten to add that being sure about who you plan to vote for isn’t any guarantee of good judgment. About half of those who’ve made up their minds seem to have chosen a not-right-in-the-head aspiring autocrat who attempted a violent auto-coup. Knowing that the outcome will turn on a few thousand not-terribly-knowledgeable voters in seven states makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
It presents difficulties for those of us who believe that persuasion still matters in politics, because if you’re setting out to make a case against Trump now—after everything the past nine years have wrought—you just want to throw up your hands. What more is there to say?
This sociopath stood by while his violent mob smashed their way into the Capitol searching for the vice president in order to lynch him for disloyalty. When asked about this later, Trump didn’t deny encouraging the attempted murder. He justified the mob.
This moron advised injecting disinfectant into the bodies of people with COVID and thinks tariffs will supply magic funds that will eliminate the deficit. (Apropos of nothing, he boasts of his high IQ because he’s related to someone who taught at MIT).
This would-be autocrat has called for military tribunals to try his critics, promised pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists, and cannot focus sufficiently to remember at the end of a sentence what he started to say at the beginning.
Though his supporters perceive him to be strong, he is in fact a weakling looking for approval from the thugs of the world. He will abandon Ukraine to suck up to Putin, which will end the war all right, but by a method no American should countenance—surrender. That betrayal will in turn leave other American allies naked, and the power and reputation of the United States in tatters. He cites democracy-crushing Viktor Orbán as a character witness.
Kamala Harris, by contrast, is a sane, somewhat-left-of-center Democrat who is making a bid for centrist voters by deep-sixing her Medicare for All dalliance and other 2019 bids for progressive credibility. On the matters over which presidents have the most sway, foreign policy, she is more “conservative” than Trump in that she promises unflinching support of NATO, Ukraine, and vigorous U.S. world leadership. Her bold declarations of solidarity with Ukraine and NATO at the debate offered a brutal contrast with Trump’s unwillingness even to say he wants Ukraine to win.
On matters over which she has the least scope of action, domestic policy, she is likely to be thwarted by Republicans in Congress. And this is key: She will not attempt to overrule domestic opposition by unconstitutional means.
A new Pew survey sheds further light on this crucial distinction. Not only does Harris not promise to “be a dictator on day one,” but her party would not support her if she tried. When supporters of the two candidates were asked whether it would be acceptable for their nominee to take certain actions as president, Democrats were far less likely than Republicans to countenance unethical, illegal, or unconstitutional behavior. Only 27 percent of Harris supporters said it would be acceptable for her to “order federal law enforcement officials to investigate political opponents” whereas 54 percent of Trump supporters were fine with it. Only 12 percent of Harris supporters say it would be acceptable for her to fire “federal government workers . . . who were disloyal” to her. Among Trump voters, 41 percent approved. And while 8 percent of Harris supporters approved of her granting pardons to “friends, family, or political supporters who have been convicted of a crime,” 42 percent of Trump voters signed off on it.
SO IT WOULD NOT SEEM to be a tough call for undecideds, and yet, as we know from surveys, most low-information voters will not be prioritizing preserving democracy, the rule of law, or America’s role in the world when they come to decide whom to support. If the polls are correct, their decisions will rest heavily on the economy. A June Washington Post survey found that 61 percent of undecided voters rate the economy as the most important issue in the election, and 50 percent rated inflation as the top concern for the nation.
It’s safe to assume that when voters cite the “economy” as their biggest worry, they’re really talking about high prices (because other aspects of the economy are remarkably strong.) The high cost of housing and groceries bites, particularly for those at the lower end of the income scale.
It’s worth bearing in mind that inflation has cooled dramatically since its post-pandemic spike to 9.1 percent in June of 2022. In August, the Consumer Price Index dropped to 2.5 percent, low enough that a Federal Reserve rate cut is widely expected this month. This soft landing is an accomplishment.
It’s also true—though the number of voters who believe this can meet in a closet—that presidents have little ability to bring down inflation. Together with Congress, presidents can contribute to inflation, and both Biden and Trump arguably did that. The massive COVID relief bills passed under Trump and Biden flooded the country with cash. The CARES Act under Trump which sent $1200 to each American, the additional $600 to each family passed in December 2020, and the American Rescue Plan under Biden spent trillions. One study from the St. Louis Federal Reserve estimated that fiscal stimulus could have been responsible for an increase in inflation of 2.6 percent.
But the relief packages were thoroughly bipartisan efforts, and who’s to say they were even wrong? While some of us thought the ARP was too much stimulus considering all that had already been passed, one cannot reasonably argue that providing a backstop to the economy in the face of a 100-year health emergency was an example of wasteful spending. The economic suffering the fiscal stimulus averted would almost certainly have been far worse than the two-year bout of inflation we got. There is no free lunch. There are always trade-offs. Europe, by the way, also experienced a post-pandemic burst of inflation but didn’t enjoy the same rapid recovery.
PEOPLE ARE UPSET about high prices and inclined to believe that Trump would be a better steward of the economy than Harris. According to Gallup, 18 percent of voters rate the economy the most important issue in the election (41 percent if you include jobs, inflation, and other economic issues). Only 4 percent rated abortion as the most important problem facing the country. Additionally, by 52 to 48, voters think Trump is better positioned to handle the economy as president.
Well, that’s bonkers. This is where Trump’s gross misbehavior may serve him well. His opponents spend so much time responding to his flagrant lies, unprecedented threats, invitations to violence, and crude sexual innuendos that we have little bandwidth to deal with his completely fantastical and absurd policy proposals.
We caught a glimpse of what passes for an idea in his rubber room of a brain when he was asked how to bring down the cost of child care. His answer, if you can call it that, seemed to suggest that the tariffs he proposes (anywhere from 20 to 100 percent tariffs on foreign made goods depending on the day you ask him) would generate so much free money that it would obliterate the federal deficit and have enough left over to pay for everyone’s child care. If a high school debater said something like that, he’d be laughed off the stage.
While presidents can do little to bring down inflation, the Fed can (though presidents do have a responsibility not to pressure the Fed to lower interest rates for their own political gain—something Trump did relentlessly when he was in White House), but one thing that pretty much all economists agree upon is that presidents can goose inflation by imposing tariffs. The kind of import taxes Trump envisions, according to the Peterson Institute, would cost the average American household an additional $2600 a year, because despite the repeated claims by Trump and JD Vance, tariffs are not paid by foreign countries. Tariffs are taxes (repeat three times). They are paid by Americans, and hit low income people hardest because they spend a larger percentage of their money on basics. Tariffs would also elicit retaliation from our trading partners, which would in turn hurt our own exports and dampen economic growth.
Harris would be better positioned to make this case if Biden had not maintained so many of the Trump-era tariffs, but at least she isn’t proposing a blanket 10 percent tax on imports as Trump is (though sometimes he says 20 percent, or 60 percent for China’s goods, and 100 percent on countries that abandon the dollar).
Another Trump idea is to deport millions of illegal immigrants. How would this work? As the Atlantic’s David Frum noted:
Mass deportation, in particular, has always been a dark and improbable fantasy. To round up and detain 150,000 people of Japanese descent in 1942 required dozens of assembly points and 10 full-scale internment camps operated by a specialized government agency. Trump is imagining a much more ambitious project—one that would surveil, arrest, and imprison many more people, extend across the whole country, and be followed by mass expulsions to other nations.
At present ICE has 20,000 employees and it is believed that this number is inadequate even to cope with border crossers. How many more ICE agents would be required to hunt down, arrest, and deport millions of illegal immigrants? Leaving aside the cruelty of this proposal—the American-citizen children whose parents would be deported, the hardship for people who’ve grown up here and know no other nation/language, the fear and insecurity legal immigrants would suffer—the costs would be astronomical. Even leaving aside the cost of this round-up, if millions of illegal immigrants were removed from the country, industries like farming, hospitality, and construction would suffer a loss of employees. Prices of food, hotel stays, restaurant meals, and new homes would rise. You know, like inflation. Plus, the taxes illegal immigrants now pay (including to Social Security and Medicare) would be lost.
Trump’s most dangerous tendencies concern flouting the law and using the power of the state against his opponents. But those who think his autocratic appetites are acceptable because he knows how to manage the economy are not paying attention to what he’s actually saying.