Trump’s bold economic promises on the campaign trail have led to a policy salad

“A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper,” Donald Trump promised Americans on the eve of the presidential election. During the US president’s first year back in office, however, food prices rose faster than they did during Joe Biden’s last.

Facing negative poll numbers, Trump is taking a tack that few Republicans have dared contemplate before: spewing out a rain of often incoherent proposals to signal he feels voters’ pain, in order to recapture their affection.

History suggests it might work. Yet, a year’s worth of policy pronouncements for the working class matched with policies to serve the rich may have exhausted voters’ goodwill toward the Trump administration.

Trump’s promise to lower energy costs hasn’t panned out. Household energy prices have risen 7.3% so far on his watch, more than twice as much as during Biden’s last year in office. His promise to revitalize the auto industry isn’t performing as planned. And he hasn’t gotten anywhere near “cutting the cost of a new home in half”.

The central economic promise of his campaign, that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country” due to the wall of tariffs he raised around the American market, is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, as US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has noted, tariffs are getting in the way of curbing inflation.

This has become a problem for the president. Forty-nine per cent of Americans think the economy is worse than it was a year ago, according to a Wall Street Journal Poll this month, while 54% disapprove of how the president has steered the economy. A survey for CNN found that 61% disagreed with Trump’s economic policies.

Trump has reacted like a whirling dervish, rattling out feel-good policy proposals even as he declares a golden age for the American economy, where “we have quickly gone from the worst numbers on record to the best and strongest numbers, and an economy that is far ahead”.

The president hopes to land on a convincing message that he is, in fact, hearing the call from distressed Americans and doing something decisive for them. Whether the proposals make any sense on economic grounds, or whether they are even legal, appears immaterial.

Take his recent proposal to cap credit card interest rates. It may sound great to the many indebted Americans struggling to make the monthly payment. But as many economists have pointed out, banks will likely respond by cutting off poorer, higher-risk borrowers, curtailing their access to credit.

Trump’s proposals to cut housing costs may also appear a clear win for homebuyers and renters. They are anything but. His plan to bar investors from buying single family homes is likely to discourage the country’s already depressed residential construction. Extending mortgages to 50 years will raise the cost of housing over the life of a loan. Allowing home buyers to use retirement accounts to finance down payments would push housing prices up by adding new demand without increasing supply.

And these are the “reasonable” moves. Some of the others, like launching a criminal investigation into Powell, a move the Fed chair has claimed was a direct result of his refusal bow to Trump’s demands for lower interest rates, or leveraging Venezuelan oil – more expensive and risky to pull out of the ground than American oil – to cut oil prices below $50 a barrel, are detached from reality.

Wacky economic proposals to signal solidarity to some political voting block are not out of character. On the campaign trail, Trump came up with a tax exemption on tips, which will benefit a tiny share of the workforce, and expire at the end of his term. He also promised not to tax Social Security payments, an idea aborted before it caused further damage to Social Security’s parlous financial footing.

From the mass deportation of immigrant workers to the tariffs on imports from all over the world; from his price caps on drugs and the equity stakes he has demanded from private firms – Trump’s proposals show little coherence. Straying well outside the Republican Overton window and its commitment to free markets, they form part of a bid to build a mirage of class solidarity with the aggrieved Americans he hopes will vote for him.

Last June, the president called Zohran Mamdani “a 100% communist lunatic” as he campaigned for the New York City mayoralty, pledging to introduce free buses and government grocery stores. Based on recent announcements, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Trump called him up for policy advice.

The new approach is characteristic of America’s political landscape in the post-globalization era. The quest for economic efficiency that dictated policy over more than four decades, demanding unfettered trade and investment in the service of economic growth, has been superseded by the imperative to acknowledge the grievances of the people and communities that lost out in the process.

Tapping into these grievances can work. Trump’s campaign trail promises to cut food and gas prices helped him win back the presidency. As for his promise to improve the lives of workers in the industrial heartland, researchers found that the tariff war he launched in 2018 and 2019 helped the Republican party even when it produced job losses.

Only time will tell if Americans welcome Trump’s spray of policy proposals and shrug off their concerns about his handling of the economy. As frustrations mount, the president appears desperate for this to work.