President Donald Trump may be keen to blame his slumping economy on the man who was president roughly a year ago, but that’s not the way his allies appear to see it.
Trump was quick to blame former President Joe Biden for rising unemployment and high inflation at his Wednesday night White House address on Wednesday, but MS NOW reports his own administration’s top economic officials say otherwise.
“It’s a Trump economy now,” the president’s National Economic Council director, Kevin Hassett, said Thursday morning.
“The conflicting messages come as recent polling suggests that 57 percent of Americans blame Trump, not Biden, for the current state of the economy, undercutting Trump’s effort to shift blame to his predecessor,” MS NOW reports, adding that some Republican strategists caution that the president risked appearing out of touch by trying to shirk responsibility for it.
“The reality of the situation is that the president is now sitting in the Oval Office, Republicans are in control of both chambers and the perception is that they are in control of the economy right now,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist who served in Trump’s first administration.
Republican strategist and former Republican National Committee official Doug Heye agreed, telling MS NOW anchors: “You can’t convince people that they don’t feel what they feel.”
An anonymous Republican operative close to the White House conceded to MS NOW that the president would benefit from shifting his focus away from Biden and addressing voters’ economic pain.
“Do I think the message could be tighter in the form of acknowledging the pain that the American people are feeling, and not overselling the health of the economy right now? Sure,” said the operative. “I will contend that we should not oversell the economy when a lot of Americans are not feeling it in December 2025.”
Read the full MS NOW report at this link.