America’s economic death spiral isn't about the math —it's all on Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures, as he heads back to the Oval Office, on the day of the 2026 White House Easter Egg Roll, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 6, 2026.

President Donald Trump has added $2 trillion to America's budget deficit in 2026, swelling the ballooning debt to $40 trillion. Even as economists continue to express alarm about the daunting math, a top economist argued on Wednesday that the deeper issue is in fact Trump himself.

People do not trust him because of things like him running up the deficit, and that impacts the economy.

"How they evaluate the job the government is doing on economic policy," Dr. Justin Wolfers, a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings and the Peterson Institute and a University of Michigan professor of economics and public policy, wrote on Wednesday regarding American voters. "You can see why this might matter: If policy is good, you might be optimistic about your economic future. If it’s bad, you’re likely more pessimistic."

Wolfers described a phenomenon which he dubbed "America’s confidence in our economic managers. To turn it into a single number, take the share of people who say the government is doing a poor job and subtract the share who say it’s doing a good job. When that number rises, it means Americans are handing down a harsher verdict."

He added, "In late 2024, the verdict stood at +14. That means 14 percentage points more Americans thought the government was doing a poor job than a good one. By May 2026, it had hit +66."

Wolfers observed "that’s the highest reading in the history of the question (by a lot). The previous record was +52 and it was set during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. At that point, Congress was flirting with the idea of not paying the nation’s bills. We’re now 14 points worse than we were then."

After sorting through volumes of data about Americans' perceptions of the economy, Wolfers pointed out that while "textbooks teach monetary policy and fiscal policy, which means taxes, spending, interest rates: the levers government pulls to shape economic life," analysts need to remember that "there’s another part of the story. That part is whether people think the folks pulling levers know what they’re doing."

He concluded, "So the next time someone points a camera at me and asks why Americans are so gloomy when the numbers look fine, here’s my answer. They’re not misreading the economy. They’re reading the people running it. And their verdict today is the harshest on record."

Speaking to AlterNet in September, Wolfers elaborated on how Trump's corruption is specifically hurting ordinary people economically.

"If Trump gets a billion dollars richer in a country with 340 million people, even if he took it directly out of the treasury, that's $3 per person," Wolfers told AlterNet. "That's not very much. That's simply the claim that one man's profits are small relative to an enormous economy. But still, actually, I think the problems are far deeper than that. So the basic idea of a market economy is that you and I compete with each other. If I can bring goods to market at a lower price than you, then people will buy them from me rather than you. If I can create higher-quality goods than you, people will buy from me rather than you. The problem with the Trump family corruption — and not all of it's the legal definition of corruption, by the way; some of it meets the standard English-language definition, if not a legal definition — is what you do is you change the nexus of competition."

He added, "If the best way for me to get ahead is to go to the White House bearing gifts, and then they pass a rule and they ban you from competing against me, then that means the basic dynamics of competition and markets delivering good outcomes for regular folks just gets broken. That in turn means that if I'm the CEO of a company, I spend less time trying to create products at lower prices, trying to outcompete, or less time creating new or better products. And I spend more time and energy at Mar-a-Lago trying to win over the favor of the president. That means bad products will win."

He described this as "crony capitalism."

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