The Gilded Mirage

It’s easy to see why Donald Trump thinks we are living through an economic “golden age.” Financially, the president has done exceedingly well for himself since his return to the White House. As most Americans are struggling more than ever to make ends meet, his personal net worth has increased by 70%, or roughly $3 billion, according to a Forbes magazine analysis. 

This windfall has mostly come from the various business ventures directly tied to his presidency. From his controversial crypto ventures, the president and his family reportedly raked in over $800 million during the first half of 2025, nearly half of which came from sales fees charged to trade the worthless “meme coin” that his team released shortly before his inauguration. (The coin itself currently trades at around $5, down from its January peak of $45). In addition to crypto, the president’s traditional businesses have also benefited from close ties to political leadership in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In the past year alone, the Trump Organization has announced several new licensing deals for major development projects in these notoriously corrupt monarchies. All told, the Trump Organization’s total income has soared from $51 million in the first half of 2024 to $864 million this year — a seventeen-fold increase.

It’s no wonder, then, that the president sees a booming economy where many others see a looming recession. For Trump and the billionaires who regularly visit him at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, 2025 has been a banner year. The ultrarich have done even better than the president. According to a recent report from Oxfam, the 10 richest U.S. billionaires alone have gained nearly $700 billion over the past year.  

Unfortunately for incumbent Republicans, most voters don’t measure the economy based on how well billionaires are doing. Nor do they share the president’s sunny optimism. 

According to exit polls, the biggest factor behind last month’s swing toward Democrats in state and local elections is a broad disapproval of how Trump and Republicans have managed the economy over the last year. In New Jersey’s and Virginia’s gubernatorial elections, voters who cited the economy as the most important issue favored Democrats by a resounding 65% to 35% margin — a near reversal of the GOP’s 2024 dominance on the issue. 

For those who don’t spend their days in gilded splendor, it’s easy to see why most voters remain so down on the economy. Despite the president’s Orwellian insistence that inflation has been “defeated” and prices are “way down,” he isn’t fooling many. According to a recent poll from the Washington Post/ABC News, about 7 in 10 Americans now say that grocery prices have increased over the past year, while 6 in 10 said the same about their utility bills. These perceptions are supported by the data, which shows that both food and energy costs have continued to climb in 2025. Indeed, the official inflation rate is higher today than it was when Trump was elected a year ago, with some of the biggest price increases linked directly to the administration’s trade policies. Though Trump continues to proclaim “mission accomplished” on inflation, roughly 6 in 10 Americans now blame him for rising prices. Barely a third of the public approves his handling of the economy. 

A cooling job market has also shaken public confidence. After a summer of layoffs where companies cut the highest number of jobs since the pandemic, major employers like Amazon, Target and UPS have continued to downsize their labor forces in the autumn months, leading to a recent four-year high in the unemployment rate. The U.S. economy has also shed tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, in part due to the uncertainty created by the administration’s impulsive and unstrategic trade policies. While Trump has pointed to the record-high stock market as further evidence of prosperity, the boom on Wall Street has yet to reach Main Street and has even led analysts to coin a new term for the current cycle — a “jobless boom.”

To the extent that Trump has acknowledged the ongoing affordability crisis since last month’s elections, he has mostly sought to pin the blame on his predecessor and argued that he inherited a broken economy that will take some time to repair. “You are so damn lucky that I won that election,” he recently told attendees at the McDonald’s Impact summit, stating that another Democratic administration would have been a “catastrophe” for the economy. “The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability — everybody knows it is far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden,” he added.  

The irony here is that Trump has it backwards. While the economy he inherited was far from perfect, its fundamentals were strong and prices were trending downward. By the time he entered office, the inflation that soared around the world after the pandemic due to supply chain disruptions and price gouging by big corporations (among a plethora of other factors) had largely been brought under control. Indeed, had Trump simply adopted Biden’s economic policies and claimed them as his own it is almost certain that inflation would be significantly lower today. This much was confirmed by a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which established a direct link between the Trump administration’s tariff policies and rising costs over the last six months. Without the Trump tariffs, researchers concluded, the inflation rate would be much closer to the Fed’s goal of 2% today instead of the 3% that it recently hit. 

Tariffs are regressive taxes that fall hardest on lower-income households and smaller businesses, and in this sense they reflect a larger pattern running through Trump’s economic program. The Republican tax cuts passed last summer, for example, are skewed upward and will ultimately reduce real incomes for those at the bottom, once the accompanying Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cuts take effect. The Trump administration’s aggressive deregulation follows the same logic, benefiting the wealthy at the expense of consumers and workers, as seen in the push to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the agency charged with protecting people from predatory companies and financial fraud. Over the last year, top Trump officials have shattered the agency and brought enforcement actions to a halt, already costing consumers and victims of fraud hundreds of millions of dollars. 

These policies explain why the economy feels like endless prosperity for the haves and permanent hardship for the have-nots. The truth is that Trump has delivered on the economy, just not to the people who supported him in the belief he would make life more affordable and fight for the country’s “forgotten” workers. Instead, he has delivered for the tech billionaires and oil magnates who helped fund his 2024 campaign with record sums (and who have continued to funnel millions to various Trump-aligned causes and organizations, including his $300 million ballroom). 

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Sen. Bernie Sanders remarked that the ongoing pessimism has to do with “a gut understanding” from most voters “that we’re living in a nation where ordinary people are struggling to put food on the table, pay rent, pay for health care, pay their electric bills, pay for their food … while people like [Elon] Musk and Larry Ellison and others are making billions every day.” This gets to the real root of the current malaise, which has more to do with the country’s slide into oligarchy than any specific policies. 

President Trump has arguably done the country a service by flaunting his corruption for all to see. In so doing, he has exposed the moral rot that permeates our ruling elite. He has also provided the Democrats with an opening. A year after Trump and the GOP swept into power by pinning rising costs on Democrats and vowing to “end inflation” on “Day 1,” the Republicans face their own economic reckoning. The question is whether Democrats will channel the current mood into an actual populist agenda of their own. If they are wise, they will frame next year’s midterms not only around affordability, but the larger crisis of the nation’s accelerating slide into oligarchy. On this, the party’s leading progressives offer the path forward.