Trump’s primetime speech was a master class in gaslighting

For an administration leading an all-out assault on vaccines, Wednesday night’s primetime address by Donald Trump from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House was all about inoculation. After weeks of losing control of the political narrative — of refusing to release economic data, of alternately embracing and rejecting the term “affordability” — the president attempted to project dominance going into the 2026 midterms and tout what he deemed the successes of the Trump economy.

“One year ago our country was dead,” he said in the combative 18-minute speech. “We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail — totally fail. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, and that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months.”

Trump rattled off a number of demonstrably false claims, including that “inflation is stopped” and prices are falling, while laying the blame for everything bad at the feet of Democrats and, you guessed it, former president Joe Biden.

In many ways, Trump is facing what stymied both Biden and Kamala Harris. One of the bigger mistakes both Democratic presidential candidates made during the 2024 election was to under-appreciate how much voters were reeling from the experience of inflation. When it peaked at 9.1% in 2022. Americans hadn’t experienced anything like that in 41 years. Coming as it did on the heels of the Covid-19 pandemic, the soaring prices and supply chain delays felt like a body blow. To make matters worse, the Biden administration tried to spin the country’s rapid recovery — to a much more normal rate of 2.5% — as a big win when the American people were still experiencing sticker shock at the grocery store.

The truth of the matter was that the Biden administration had done an admirable job of engineering what economists call a “soft landing” by taming inflation quickly without driving the economy into recession. An analysis of the final numbers released before the election showed a resilient economy that still faced some challenges but was, overall, on the road to recovery, so much so that the Economist famously featured a cover with the headline “The American Economy: The Envy of the World.”

Still, the economic vibes people felt were a real thing — and trying to gloss over voters’ concerns was a mistake. Now, over a year later, Donald Trump seems intent on making the same error, telling POLITICO’s Dasha Burns in a recent interview that he gives his economic performance in the past year an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” 

The administration has added the flourish of blame casting by saying that they inherited an economy that was the worst the world has ever seen. In their telling, the country was on its last legs, barely functioning. Only through the masterful economic stewardship of the best leader in history have we managed to turn things around and create the greatest economy the world has ever known.

In truth, the economy has been more or less frozen for the past year. Despite Trump’s claims that he inherited the worst inflation on record, consumer price index numbers were at 3% when he took office and have remained steady for much of the year. New figures released this morning showed a modest cooling to 2.7%. The job market is cooling substantially, with new statistics released this week showing that unemployment stands at 4.6%, the highest number since the 2022 peak. With the exception of the stock market, which is riding the sugar high of the artificial intelligence bubble, the economy has been more or less frozen. 

Despite Trump’s declarations Wednesday night that his tariffs have been the country’s salvation, his erratic actions have made it impossible to anticipate beyond the next week. Consumers are seeing spikes in commodities like beef and coffee, even as the president and his people insist everything is getting cheaper — yet another false claim. Everything seems paralyzed, as if we’re all waiting for the next shoe to drop. 

That may be starting to happen. As the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey reported recently, small businesses are being crushed by the president’s tariffs, and big business has pretty much run through its inventories (and their willingness to bear the burden.) That, coupled with the recently released dismal job numbers, means the state of things is starting to look demonstrably worse. 

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For Trump, who ran his 2024 campaign on promising to lower prices on “day one” and insisting that tariffs would solve every other problem by “bringing in” trillions of dollars, that’s a lethal problem. He’s never been able to understand that those trillions are paid by Americans, whether it’s American companies or consumers. 

The president’s broken pledge explains why so much of the country is now even more upset than they were when Biden was in office. It’s bad enough to feel like you can’t easily make ends meet anymore. It’s worse when someone promises you to your face that they’ll fix that problem, and then tell you they’ve done it when they haven’t. That’s where Trump is today. 

Naturally, the president cannot admit any of this is happening. He claims the Democrats have created an “affordability hoax” and falsely insists that polls show him with the highest approval rating ever. In fact, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday showed that approval of Trump’s handling of the economy slipped from 36% to 33%, while those who said they disapprove increased from 52% to 58%. Last week’s AP/NORC poll had his economic approval rating all the way down to 31%. Once his strength, his handling of the economy is becoming his worst issue — and is undoubtedly the most important one. 

According to POLITICO, Trump voters who backed Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia in November’s off-year elections were motivated by their angst over the cost of living. They were apparently not persuaded by Trump’s insistence that we are on the cusp of a new golden age which will manifest itself over the next six months or year. 

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff who set off a political firestorm this week with a candid profile in Vanity Fair that featured unflattering quotes about Trump, apparently plans to have him out on the campaign trail all next year selling this new snake oil — that, as he insisted in Wednesday’s test-run, manufacturing and mining jobs are coming back, even as they remain in decline.

Vice President JD Vance is also getting in on the act to sell the administration’s economic policies. On Tuesday, he too told a crowd in Pennsylvania that he gives them an “A-plus-plus-plus.” He also spent a lot of time blaming others, first saying with his trademark snarl that “Democrats on affordability is like Charles Manson criticizing violent crime,” and then giving an extended riff about undocumented immigrants causing the housing crisis. When they are deported, he said, there will be more houses for good, real Americans to buy. 

The vice president calls that claim “simple economics,” but it’s actually simple-minded drivel. As working-class people without much money or access to the capital needed to buy property, very few undocumented immigrants are able to own homes. They do, however, build a lot of houses, and between Trump’s deportations and tariffs on building materials, the housing crisis is likely going to become even worse, which is directly due to the president’s policies.

Like Trump, Vance is promising that everything’s going to be great in a few months. So is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who claims that “real affordability relief” is coming soon and it will be a “bountiful” 2026. 

It all sounds just terrific. But coming from the party who won a year ago promising they would fix everything immediately, the promises ring just a little bit hollow. 

At this point I have to assume that any Republican lawmaker who has the least bit of concern about winning in next November’s midterm elections — if they haven’t already announced their retirement — would love to be able to tell Trump, Vance, Bessent and others to stay home. Every time they open their mouths about the economy, their approval ratings go down. There is no way that these messengers can possibly be helpful to the GOP cause — and Trump’s primetime address was no exception.