Trump Didn’t Read the Fine Print on His Election Win
The next to last draft of this column started with the line: “Both consumers and the markets are showing serious signs of the jitters.”
But then my plane landed, and I checked the markets again, once they had closed for the day. At that point, “jitters” seemed like a bit of an understatement. The Dow average of 30 major stocks dropped 890 points for the day, a decline of 2.08 percent and 4 percent below its level at the time of President Trump’s election last November. The broad-based S&P 500 declined by 2.7 percent and the Nasdaq Composite dropped by 4 percent. Taken together, these are not the signs of investors who are getting tired of winning.
The behavior of investors comes on top of the growing concern among consumers, whose spending represents about 70 percent of the U.S. economy.
The prospect of widespread tariffs has taken the trade-policy debate from the abstract to the very real. Increasingly, tariffs are seen less as giving the finger to countries that some think have taken advantage of us, and more as an act of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
We are all quite familiar with the politics of it. Trump’s base will not be concerned in the least, those in the opposition would be sour no matter what, but watch those in that narrow and more malleable slice in the middle who are not locked in for either side. While they tend to read, watch, and listen to less news than partisans and typically are slow to react to political events, persistent inflation and the higher interest rates that come from efforts to tap down the inflation do get their attention.
Even before his start in politics in 2015, Donald Trump had come across to many as impulsive. But since the last few months of his campaign and into the early part of his second term, he’s more aptly described as erratic. Words and acts previously seen as petty now seem vindictive. With worries about reelection prospects no longer applicable, the prospect of “letting Trump be Trump” is appearing even more problematic.
The stop-and-go on tariffs and sanctions against Canada and Mexico is hardly reassuring to those who had come to question his judgment on problems domestic and foreign. Those more high-minded worry about America’s place in the world, the leadership position the U.S. enjoyed for three-quarters of a century, and our closest and longest-standing allies not only no longer trusting us but seeing us as a bully. The Oval Office conflagration between Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky only underscored those concerns.
Others are concerned with more pedestrian things like putting food on the table and ability to pay their rent or mortgage.
We are living in an era in which more swing voters cast their ballots against someone or something rather than for them. Trump seems not to realize that these swing voters did not invite him into the White House. Instead, they pushed out both the previous tenant as well as the sub-tenant. Just as the 2020 election was a referendum on Trump, in which former Vice President Joe Biden had little to do with the outcome, 2024 was more about the Biden-Harris administration than Trump. In both cases, the incumbent (or the stand-in incumbent, in Kamala Harris’s case) was rejected.
Trump’s sweep of the seven swing states obscures the recollection that the race had been close all the way to Election Day. A critical sliver of about 2 or 3 percent of voters in swing states held out, quite familiar with Trump but not so much with Harris. They seemed to be waiting to hear Harris say what she would do differently than Biden, but she never did. As a result, the group moved, en masse, into the Trump column. Their fear of the unknown was greater than that of the known quantity.
Come Friday, there could be some kind of government shutdown. Nine times out of 10 in these situations, just as nerves approach a breaking point, an accommodation is worked out. Could this become a 1-in-10 that actually does blow up? Of course.
But there are lots of adverse outcomes with higher probabilities than that. In the absence of a depression, the overall cost of living is not going to go down, even if the price of some individual commodities, goods, or services drops.
Trump didn’t read the fine print before the election. It is one thing for the cost of living to remain higher than it was just a few years earlier. It is something else for it to skyrocket. The cumulative rise in the cost of living matters more than the individual month's inflation rate.
As pivotal as this week (at least on a Monday) seems likely to be, there are going to be plenty more for the rest of next year and for that matter, the next as well. Misinterpreting an election is an egregious sin in our politics: If an elected official doesn’t know why they won, it’s hard for them to know how to govern.
This article was originally published for the National Journal on March 10, 2025.