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No one's blaming Biden for the economy, and Trump has not delivered (wsj)
| queensbridge benzo | 02/12/26 |
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Date: February 12th, 2026 2:35 AM Author: queensbridge benzo America Is Running Out of Patience With Republicans Summarize Voters no longer blame Joe Biden for the state of the economy, and Trump’s policies haven’t delivered.
Jason L. RileyFeb. 10, 2026 at 5:17 pm image Give us time, the White House pleads. We’ll tackle the elevated costs of food, energy, medicine and other necessities that gobble up middle-income wages. We’ll address those housing prices—up more than 50% since 2019—which have made owning a home so difficult for first-time buyers. Stop all the grousing already. President Trump’s tariff strategy will work its magic any day now. We promise.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been telling anyone who will listen that things are already much better than people realize. “It’s been a great year on the economy,” he said in December, “but the best is yet to come.” Mr. Bessent predicts that 2026 will be a “blockbuster” year for economic growth once tax refunds arrive, more illegal immigrant workers are deported and the bells and whistles of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act kick in. The administration has “set the table,” he insists, and “Main Street is about to prosper.”
Give Mr. Bessent credit for acknowledging the problem, however indirectly. His boss, meanwhile, has been shouting from the mountains of Switzerland to the plains of Iowa that “affordability” is a fake issue invented by Democrats and perpetuated by the press. “This has been the most dramatic one-year turnaround of any country in history in terms of the speed,” Mr. Trump insisted in January. “It’s amazing. And it’s because of tariffs.”
Empathy might go further than telling struggling households that they’ve never had it so good, but Mr. Trump can’t help himself. His predecessor’s tenure was “defined by the misery known as ‘stagflation’—high inflation and low growth,” the president wrote in these pages last month. “Only 12 months into my second term in office, we now have the exact opposite—extremely low inflation, and extraordinarily high economic growth!”
The optimism is admirable, but the political messaging misses the mark. Most voters don’t buy the administration’s claims that things are hunky-dory. They don’t believe Joe Biden still deserves blame for the current situation, and they’re ambivalent about mass deportations. Most troubling for Republican lawmakers who will face voters in November, people may be running out of patience.
In a Fox News poll released late last month, 54% of respondents said the economy is worse than it was when Mr. Biden left office. Moreover, “only one quarter of voters say they are better off financially than they were a year ago, and more than 4 in 10 say the administration’s economic policies have hurt them, about twice the share who say they’ve been helped.” The percentage of people who believe the economy will improve this year has also declined, and the shift was driven in part by growing pessimism among Republican voters.
Nor is it clear that the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement is compensating for its low marks on other issues. A recent Harvard CAPS/Harris national survey showed that 63% of respondents oppose deporting “an undocumented person who has lived in the U.S. for many years with no serious crimes,” and 68% oppose deporting “an undocumented person who arrived as a child.”
The president’s MAGA base seems to want every single illegal alien banished from the country, no matter the circumstances or impact on U.S. labor markets. But that base isn’t large enough to keep Democrats from taking back Congress in November, and mass deportation could cost Republicans the additional support they’ll need from independents and moderate Democrats.
Were the White House to heed these warnings and pivot to an emphasis on economic growth and affordability, it still isn’t clear that the policies it favors would get the job done. Banning institutional investors from purchasing homes may be politically popular, but it will do little to address a housing shortage that results from, among other things, zoning regulations and environmental mandates that drive up prices. Institutional investors are responding to the problem, not creating it.
Capping credit-card interest rates would cause more consumers, especially low-income consumers, to lose access to credit. Price controls on drugs—TrumpRX—create the same problems as price controls on food and consumer credit. Carving out exemptions for income from tips and overtime shrinks the tax base and makes the system less fair by treating similar taxpayers differently. Taxing imports leads to higher costs for producers and consumers, and the president has been forced to use revenue from tariffs to bail out the industries they’ve harmed.
More government interference in the free market is the wrong way to address cost-of-living concerns. If Republicans can’t figure that out between now and November, they deserve to lose.
WSJ Opinion: The Biggest Threat to Journalism? Journalists. WSJ Opinion: The Biggest Threat to Journalism? Journalists. An Editor at Large: Don’t blame rapacious owners of media organizations for the loss of public trust. Blame biased, incompetent reporting. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Allison Robbert/Associated Press |