Americans articulated a lot of gripes with Joe Biden’s term as president: the rising unaffordability of daily life; the censorship of political speech on social media; the dramatic shrinking of the welfare state, including Medicaid, after its brief expansion during the pandemic; the “wars around the world,” in Biden’s words, fought or funded by the United States that were either killing massive amounts of innocent people or felt like they were about to spin out of control any minute.
On these issues and more, many Americans cast votes motivated by a desire to protest these aspects of Biden’s presidency. And after only three months, all of these things are either already dramatically worse under Donald Trump or poised to go that way.
Take the affordability crisis. Trump promised to “end inflation” and even “immediately bring down prices” from his first day in office when he was on the campaign trail. Instead, three months in, inflation has contracted but continues to be high, and Trump is now poised to make prices skyrocket through a nonsensical tariff regime that amounts to declaring a trade war on the entire world. Biden told Americans to grit their teeth through high gas prices “as long as it takes” to beat Russia; Trump is now telling anyone upset at this that they’re “weak” and “stupid,” that they should be “patient,” and that they should simply “take the medicine.”
That inflation, by the way, is being paired with, first, one of the worst stock market slumps in history — one that has likely not reached its bottom yet and that has already wreaked havoc on people’s retirement savings to the tune of billions — and, next, the rising odds of a recession. People had very good reasons to be unhappy with the Biden economy, but if he ends up pushing the country into a state of turbocharged, Jimmy Carter–esque stagflation, Trump may, incredibly, make the US public pine for those days when they were…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
