Trump Lost the Voters’ Trust on the Economy Before the War

I will let Michael have the last word on his own characterization of his own position. But I will add a few further comments and a lot of polling data on what’s missing from his discussion of mine. He makes an argument that strikes me as skating perilously close to saying that it doesn’t matter what Trump’s economic policies are to his political fate, voters will dislike the policies equally. Lest I be accused of misreading that, here is the whole passage, emphasis mine:

I do not think one needs to be Sherlock Holmes to search for an explanation of why 2026 is so much worse than 2018, and there’s a lot hiding in that “even when people loved the economy in his first term” qualifier. We don’t have to look only at overall approval ratings or at opinions on particular policies. I prefer to look at the RealClearPolitics poll averages, which I’ve been using for over 20 years now, rather than cherry-pick particular polls. Look at the RCP poll averages of public approval of Trump’s handling of the economy, a topic on which we happen to have a large dataset of public polling covering the past decade. In his first term, Trump left office with a positive rating of 50.2 percent approval against 46.6 percent disapproval of his management of the economy — this after nearly a full year in which the government had throttled the economy, and at a time when January 6 had cast the worst possible odor over everything Trump-related.

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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I will let Michael have the last word on his own characterization of his own position. But I will add a few further comments and a lot of polling data on what’s missing from his discussion of mine. He makes an argument that strikes me as skating perilously close to saying that it doesn’t matter what Trump’s economic policies are to his political fate, voters will dislike the policies equally. Lest I be accused of misreading that, here is the whole passage, emphasis mine:

I do not think one needs to be Sherlock Holmes to search for an explanation of why 2026 is so much worse than 2018, and there’s a lot hiding in that “even when people loved the economy in his first term” qualifier. We don’t have to look only at overall approval ratings or at opinions on particular policies. I prefer to look at the RealClearPolitics poll averages, which I’ve been using for over 20 years now, rather than cherry-pick particular polls. Look at the RCP poll averages of public approval of Trump’s handling of the economy, a topic on which we happen to have a large dataset of public polling covering the past decade. In his first term, Trump left office with a positive rating of 50.2 percent approval against 46.6 percent disapproval of his management of the economy — this after nearly a full year in which the government had throttled the economy, and at a time when January 6 had cast the worst possible odor over everything Trump-related.