Trump's Plan to Gaslight the American Economy

The economy may be tanking, but Trump's charts will look terrific!

by Jeremy Novak

One of the more frightening aspects of a Trump administration is the potential for the politicization of government data. Under such a hyper-political regime, even the most trusted economic indicators could be warped to serve their propaganda.

Release of health-related data has been frozen, resulting in a country essentially flying blind in an age of rapid spread of illness and food contamination. If we don’t know when or where contagious disease is spreading, or what foods are carrying deadly bacteria, how can we avoid getting sick?

And there are also signs that government agencies that gather and analyze data are being targeted for the purpose of manipulating it to paint the current administration in a more favorable light.

Manipulating this economic data could potentially affect the economy in a real way. It could steer some of the most influential economic actors into a direction they otherwise would not take. And it could paint a broad picture for the public of a healthy, robust, and growing economy when the reality is an anemic, stale, and failing economy.

Trump’s motivation for this would apparently be to make everyone think the economy is great for the next three-and-a-half years, leading to him remaining in power for an unconstitutional third term; or at the very least going down in history as one of the best presidents ever!

But he’s forgetting something about the electorate. Most of them are not “influential economic actors”. They are just regular people buying life’s necessities. They don’t seem to notice or care much for government data, so manipulating it may not matter in the slightest.

And we have direct recent evidence of this: The last two years of the Biden administration.

An economic boom, unnoticed

Joe Biden oversaw the recovery from one of the most economically challenging times in our history. The tail end of the covid pandemic was a rough recovery back to for labor and goods affecting millions of people. And this pent-up demand plus pandemic-related supply shocks created the perfect storm for high inflation.

2022 saw the highest rate of inflation since the early 1980’s. After multiple decades of historically low inflation, consumers suddenly saw prices grow uncomfortably high, uncomfortably fast. Everyone noticed and was affected by this sudden change.

But over the next two years the economy recovered, and the rate of inflation went steadily downward as employment rose upward. The last few months of Biden’s term saw the rate of inflation go below 3%, after peaking at 9% in 2022. 2023-2024 saw job creation progress at an historically high pace. Economic growth was robust—in fact, the envy of the world. Income inequality actually improved: the lowest 20% had a higher income rise than the upper 5%, which hadn’t happened in 50 years.

But one of the puzzling things about the 2024 election is that the good economic data didn’t seem to matter. Despite data showing a robust economy and incomes rising faster than inflation, people were fixated on high costs. They apparently weren’t happy that much of their newfound income was being cancelled out by higher prices.

Inflation Nation

If the 2024 election taught us anything it’s that people really, really don’t like higher prices. That was a major driver of Trump’s election victory, perhaps the main problem that Trump was elected to solve.

People understood loud and clear when inflation rose by almost 9% in mid-2022. If Trump has his way, his preferred across-the-board 10% tariffs would exceed that number. But then when you include selective additional tariffs on Chinese imports combined with supply shortages caused purely by uncertainty due to Trump’s chaotic and haphazard tariff “policy”, you have a classic perfect storm for skyrocketing prices.

If an average person’s afternoon shopping trip to Walmart costs 30% more, will the shopper care more about that, or the fact that unemployment is at 1.5%? Or that the GDP rose by 8% in 4Q 2025? Or that Qatar donated $50 Trillion to Trump’s presidential library? These would certainly be great looking stats, but will anyone care?

The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment rating hit the lowest point ever in July 2022, which is exactly the same period that inflation was at its highest in the 21st century. Right now, this rating is close to that 2022 level, and inflation hasn’t even risen yet in Trump’s term. But given his unstable behavior and habit for touting excessively draconian tariffs on allies and enemies alike, people expect it to rise, and they don’t feel good about it.

It’s one thing to put on a show like The Apprentice, where economic effects don’t trickle into regular folks’ households. But the economy is not a television show. People live and feel the economy.

Trump might convince enough people that tariffs are going to bring in a golden age of America where everything we consume is manufactured in huge American factories that families can work at for generations. But the reality of the price increases that tariffs bring will still be noticed by those gullible people.

Because of this, the battle for victory in the elections of 2026 and 2028 may be between reality and Trump’s propaganda in an even sharper way than ever before. If so, reality may finally have its best chance of winning in the Trump era.

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