President Donald Trump proclaimed an economic golden age under the Golden Arches. But while he may have a regular guy’s taste in fast food, he’s looking oblivious to the wrenching price pressure haunting millions of Americans.
“There’s never been a time like this,” he declared Monday at a summit of McDonald’s franchise owners in Washington. The president waxed lyrical about his favorite Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and fondly recalled his turn working the fry station at one of the fast-food giant’s Pennsylvania restaurants last year.
But Trump’s overall message was jarring, as he argued the economy was super-sized even while millions struggle to afford the cost of living. “You know, I just might add, this is also the golden age of America, because we are doing better than we’ve ever done as a country. Prices are coming down and all of that stuff,” Trump said.
He went on, “We are looking at affordability — we are going to bring it down for everybody because not everybody understands the fact that a great stock market is great for everybody,” including 401Ks.
Citizens lucky enough to have pension funds linked to record stock markets have done well recently. But they’ve also been punished by daily costs and the money in their paychecks not going as far. And that leaves the common touch Trump effectively highlighted as a candidate now in question. Political peril lurks for him in the gap between a complex reality and his happy talk about the economy — punctuated in his speech Monday by digressions over his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and his obsession with slow-running taps.
Trump came over all poetic about the unique place of McDonald’s in American communities. “Before the sun rises, you’re up serving hot coffee to construction workers, nurses and police officers on the way to the job,” he said. “In the evening, you stand ready with the fast dinner and the smile for busy moms and their children. There’s a race from school to soccer practice, really, it’s Americana.”
This was high praise coming from a master of branding. But as he often does, Trump explained his political rationale out loud. If he couldn’t truthfully claim to have delivered lower prices, he can try to steal his opponents’ branding on the issue.
“The word is affordable,” Trump said. “And affordable should be our word, not theirs, because the Democrats got up and said ‘affordability, affordability’ and they don’t say that they had the worst inflation in history, the highest energy prices in history, everything was the worst. What they are great at is lying.”
Trump’s speech came across as an attempt to show understanding about daily costs and to repair Republican vulnerabilities exposed by a big night for Democrats in gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey this month. But it would be hard to conclude his rambling cheerleading fulfilled either goal.
First, and most dauntingly, for Trump, the high prices for most food, housing and health care that are antagonizing Americans and souring their confidence in his leadership are almost certainly not coming down.
While inflation, the rate at which prices are rising, is at 3.0% — far lower than the 9.1% peak during the Biden Administration — costs are still going up. No economist wants to see prices go down in a cycle of deflation — that would be a harbinger of a big recession with massive job losses. But at the same time, and after decades of low inflation, voters have yet to adjust to the post-pandemic price shock.
Maybe voters were insulated from economic pressures for decades and have unrealistic expectations. But that doesn’t make it feel any easier.
And after driving Democrats out of the White House partly over their poor record on inflation and affordability — and 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s lack of answers on those issues — Trump is now suffering the incumbent’s curse. He’s been office for nearly 10 months and voters aren’t feeling better, so he’s getting the blame. Affordability can get a politician elected. But it then becomes their problem.
The statute of limitations for blaming the Biden administration is running out. “(Democrats) are saying that the runaway spending that we gave you guys, that created runaway inflation, is 100% your fault,” Kevin Hassett, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, said on CNBC Monday. But those are the breaks, even for a president who’d prefer the buck didn’t stop with him.
How Trump is trying to ease costs
Trump has made significant policy steps to try to alleviate the burden on working Americans. He’s trying to bring down the cost of prescription drugs. He temporarily eliminated tax on most tips in his big domestic policy legislation. In his speech to McDonald’s franchise owners, he argued that his slashing of regulations that constrain small business growth would end up helping everyone.
But insecurity felt by many Americans who are one layoff away from losing health insurance is structural and long-term; it can’t be fixed with a few quick policy initiatives.
It’s going to need more than Trump’s first big political point in his Monday speech: “You are so damn lucky that I won that election.”
There’s growing evidence his policies may be making things worse. Global trade wars and high tariffs are contributing to rising costs, according to multiple independent analyses. The conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, for instance, reported that the tariffs amounted to an effective tax hike on the average American household of $1,200, a figure set to rise to $1,600 next year. A CNN poll this month found 61% of Americans said Trump’s policies have “worsened economic conditions in this country.” And everyone who does their own shopping feels the pain every time they go to the grocery store.
Alleviating the situation will be tricky. Trump’s newest proposals look buzzy and may help at the margins. A potential plan to send out $2000 tariff revenue payments is one idea — though such a rush of cash into the economy could spike inflation. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted Monday that such checks wouldn’t fix the damage and added “who knows if they’ll ever come.”
Officials are thinking aloud about 50-year mortgages. This might get people into homes — if there’s sufficient supply. But they may never be able to pay them off.
Tariffs may be the problem
More fundamentally, the White House seems to be implicitly admitting that the tariffs are partly to blame, while insisting publicly that they are not. Trump issued an executive order on Friday cutting duties on beef, tomatoes, coffee and bananas. “The prices for those goods weren’t necessarily going up just because of tariffs,” Hassett said on ABC News “This Week” on Sunday, said on ABC News “This Week” on Sunday. But he added, “The prices will go down,” arguing that this was not due to removing tariffs but rather an increased supply of goods.
But Trump isn’t slashing tariffs across the board. To do so would repudiate the central principle of his entire economic policy — which is designed to trigger a revival of American manufacturing. The downside of this strategy was always that if even if it works, it will take years to fully play out, after a period of economic adjustment and pain in the meantime. That’s time Trump doesn’t have, with midterm elections less than a year away.
And the president has left himself politically exposed after attempting such a risky strategy to remake the global trading system that almost every economist predicted would raise prices. It was probably just a coincidence, but he blamed his raspy voice Monday on having to shout at somebody over trade policy with an unidentified country. “I blew my stack at these people,” he told a reporter.
Another complication for Trump is that his impressive power at defining the political narrative may be starting to fail him. He was just forced into a complete reversal by calling on the House of Representatives to vote to compel his own Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein files to avoid an embarrassing political defeat.
Even one of his top supporters, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, is rebuking him for losing sight of the concerns of the MAGA base, including on costs. Convincing millions of voters that an election was stolen is one thing. Telling them the economy is in a “golden age” when they know well that it is not won’t work. Trump seems to be coming dangerously close to the inflation denial of the Biden administration, which helped cost Democrats the 2024 election.
Trump has hardly been helping himself. Obsessing over personal legacy projects like the new White House ballroom, dining with corporate CEOs and flying around the world in search of a Nobel Peace Prize isn’t exactly the look of a president laser-focused on the uncertainty facing millions of Americans.
And his speech at the McDonald’s event did not offer any real sense of empathy for people who were hurting. He threw in the new Washington buzzword “affordability” a few times. He offered a litany of statistics that were often misleading about prices coming down. Such claims are often incomplete or untrue, as CNN’s Daniel Dale has documented.
But Trump did show flashes of what makes him a compelling political personality. He quipped that some people might not want to hand down wealth to children they didn’t like. If only that were a concern for most Americans. And he revealed striking new operational details about the daring US stealth bomber raid that targeted Iran’s nuclear sites earlier this year.
But his levity felt off-key given the subject, and politically unwise amid claims he’s out of touch. Trump aides are thinking about sending him around the country to give a series of economic speeches. But the president himself identified a potential flaw with that strategy, celebrating his refusal to stick to a script during his appearance on Monday.
Trump said he’d given a McDonald’s executive a signed page of his printed speech offstage. “‘I said, do you want to keep this? You can either hang it, you can give it to somebody, you can throw it away. I don’t care.’ But I don’t stay on the speech too long anyway, you know, so usually those speeches aren’t too accurate.”
And one more thing. The next time the Beast presidential limo shows up at a drive-thru, the commander-in-chief has a special request. “I like the fish. I like it,” Trump said. “You could do a little bit more tartar sauce someplace, seriously.”
