Employees attend an event with U.S. Vice President JD Vance at Pointe Precision in Plover, Wisconsin, U.S., February 26, 2026. Matt RourkePool via REUTERS
Puck Chief Political economist John Heilemann tells MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace that he is spying the signs of President Donald Trump’s sour economy in grocery lines even as Trump and his family continue to use the White House to enrich themselves.
“It's not just that we're that the president has so many side hustles. … But it's that he has these side hustles and he's doing them out in the open at a time when people [are hurting,]” said Heilemann. “When I go around up here in my upstate purple part of New York, I go around to drugstores and supermarkets, and all of a sudden, I'm seeing people using coupons in a way that I haven't seen in a really long time. … [C]oupons never went away. But now it's like, I see it's like every time I'm in a line for anything, literally today at the supermarket, everybody in line is digging through their pockets for coupons because they're so stretched financially.”
And these aren’t senior citizens, said Heilemann. These are “yuppies in their 30s and 40s, who I don't think I've ever, ever used a coupon before in their lives” now struggling to make ends meet because of how expensive everything is and how bad the economy is and how tenuous their employment is.
“And they look up and see the self-enrichment, the self-dealing, the crypto grifts, the meme coins, the predictions markets that Don Jr. sits on the board of that people are clearly doing insider trading on,” said Heilemann. “And then the east room is the cherry on the sundae. It's not just that they think he's out of touch. They think he's spitting in their face.”
And it’s Trump’s clear contempt for voters that is particularly unfixable, said Heilemann. “That's when you start to be in the terminal slide that you can never get out of. When people start to think you're taking their trust and kicking them in the private bits.”
Wallace produced a “90-second” list of Trump’s perceived “self-dealing” for himself and his family, which also included a new airport deal with Palm Beach airport,” in addition to “self-dealing tournaments to his golf courses, and the drone company that his son on the board of that just got a Pentagon contract.”
“The grotesque money grab from the American taxpayer, at a time when people … are trying to stretch their dollar as far as it can possibly go, is politically criminal,” said Wallace.