Why Trump's Efforts to Blame Biden for the Economy are Doomed to Fail

Trump wants to blame Biden for the bad economy, it won't work

Last week, the Department of Commerce announced that the economy shrunk for the first time since 2022. This latest datapoint shows that the economy has turned very negative, very fast since Trump took office. As Larry Summers, former economic adviser to Presidents Clinton and Obama, put it on Twitter:

This has probably been the least successful first hundred days of a presidency on the economy in the last century. We have seen the stock market go down, the dollar go down, forecasts of unemployment go up, forecasts of inflation go up, forecasts on the odds of a recession go up. We've seen consumer confidence collapse. We've seen businesses take back all their previous earnings projections. So, this has been a disastrous hundred days for the US economy.

The S&P 500 performed worse in Trump’s first 100 days than any president in the last 80 years. Trump’s political problem is massive — he was elected to strengthen the economy and lower prices, and now the economy is weaker than it has been in years, and prices are skyrocketing.

Trump has a two-pronged approach to deal with this problem. For Trump’s base, the first solution is just to pretend like everything is fine. This will work with his most ardent supporters and most shameless media allies. For everyone else, Trump plans to blame Joe Biden for his problems. Trump posted this on Truth Social Wednesday morning:

In an interview with Fox News's Brett Baier, Vice President Vance declared this the “Biden Economy.”

Trump is desperately trying to shift the blame away from himself. It’s not going to work this time — here’s why:

Trump Misplayed the Expectations Game

Politics is about expectations. It’s often not about a great performance, but whether you did better than people expected. Trump barely won the popular vote. His margin of victory was smaller than any other election in nearly a quarter century. However, because most experts believed he would lose the popular vote, his razor-thin victory was widely regarded as a massive triumph.

Trump could have modulated expectations on the eocnomy. A competent president tells voters, as Barack Obama did when he took office amidst a financial crisis, that recovery takes time. Obama used to repeat, “We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and we won’t get out of it overnight.”

Trump took a different, more bombastic approach. A few examples of Trump’s promises include:

• At an August 9, 2024 rally in Bozeman, Montana, Trump declared, “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.” ​