Donald Trump has declared “affordability” a Democratic “hoax and con job”. He has insisted that tariffs are paid by foreigners and do not raise prices paid by American consumers. Clearly a job for Taco Trump, the Trump who Always Chickens Out. Or, if you prefer, Trump the realist, his signature sharpie marker at the ready, adaptable, never the prisoner of his first position.
The president now says he plans to “make America affordable again for all Americans”. In effect conceding that import taxes do drive up prices, he has ordered a roll-back in hundreds of tariffs, including those on coffee and beef — the prices for which have risen by 30 and 20 per cent, respectively, since he re-took the White House. Chickening out in the face of unaffordable steaks is the better part of valour.
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There will be more, including steps to boost that centrepiece of the American Dream, home ownership, and to lower the cost of car ownership by making interest on car loans tax-deductible. Trump might even defy the wishes of Maga’s xenophobic wing — which includes the anti-Israel and overtly antisemitic gaggle — and increase the rate of innovation by issuing more H-1B visas to “bring in talent” we don’t have, as he puts it.
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He could also improve the labour supply by humanely and efficiently redeploying ICE agents who are meeting their 3,000-per-day deportation quotas by rounding up illegal entrants at workplaces, where gang members are not likely to be found.
Trump swung from opposing to supporting the release of the 20,000-page Epstein files when enough Republicans defied the president to create a congressional majority for it, grumbling about “Weak Democrats … soft and foolish”.
A sting in the tail: he simultaneously ordered an investigation of Democrats and any institutions that had relations with Epstein. Caught up will be banks that scrambled for the business of a man who habitually transferred millions from one account to another.
To the concession on affordability — Trump’s admission that his tariffs hurt consumers — and to his inability to squelch any Epstein revelations, add an inability to persuade the Senate to kill the filibuster, and you have the inevitable Washington gossip that he is no longer undisputed master in his own gilded house.
This was gossip with enough salience to impel Trump to remind us: “Don’t forget MAGA was my idea. MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else. And MAGA wants to see our country thrive.”
Which brings us to an oddity. The government shutdown has delayed an up-to-date report on the labour market, but we now know that the economy added a surprising 119,000 jobs in September, the largest payroll gain since April.
The economy continues to grow, perhaps at an annual rate of 4 per cent. Leading retailer Walmart has raised its forecast of future sales and profits, despite signs of strain among its lower-income customers.
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But gloom trumps those signs that the economy is thriving. The University of Michigan’s new survey of consumer sentiment reports a drop in November to near-record lows, with views on personal finances the lowest since 2009 and the probability of personal job loss the highest since 2020. The Michigan pollsters pointed out earlier: “This month’s decline in sentiment was widespread throughout the population, seen across age, income, and political affiliation.”
And 77 per cent of those surveyed by The Wall Street Journal-Chicago University last week recorded themselves as “pessimistic about the future of the economy”.
No surprise. Rising prices have wiped out wage gains, bringing inflation-adjusted median household income to about where it was after the Covid plunge and the weak recovery. That matters a lot more to voters than Trump’s foreign policy triumphs in countries about which most Americans know very little and care less. In deepest Magaland, it remains “America First”.
Other than the stale September number, job market news is not good. The 4.4 per cent unemployment rate is now the highest since October 2021. Layoffs are on the rise, affecting wearers of both white and blue collars, while notices of impending layoffs surged in October. Recent graduates are hanging around their parents’ homes, sending off résumés.
And lurking in the headlines is AI, a possible lose-lose situation in the job market in which most Americans find themselves: job wipe-outs if it succeeds, and trillions of investment wiped out if it fails, followed by a plunge in frothy share prices and a job-destroying recession.
Even Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has conceded “there are sectors of the economy that are in recession”, with worse to come from Federal Reserve anti-growth policies, adds Kevin Warsh, a possible successor to Jerome Powell as the head of the Fed.
Bessent promises that the good times will roll early in 2026, after the effects of the tax cuts and deregulatory features of the Big Beautiful Bill make themselves felt. And the trillions of new investments pledged by our trading partners begin to arrive.
Whether the second-quarter 2026 arrival of Bessent’s predicted happy days will leave sufficient time before the November mid-terms to replace, dare I say it, the current malaise with a feel-better feeling remains uncertain.
Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser