WASHINGTON—On the campaign trail last year, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump bragged his right-wing policies would cut inflation and create jobs. There’ll be a new “Golden Age,” he promised. As he slammed his opponents for “the worst economy ever.”
Last week he told lawmakers and royalty in Britain that he had already solved the problem of inflation in America.
It is doubtful that anyone there really believed him because eight months into his second term, it is clear that the opposite of his claims is true. Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, is far from solved. And, as measured by the prices of staples like eggs, bread, milk, and even the traditionally cheapest cuts of meat, prices have rocketed upwards.
A carton of a dozen fresh eggs now costs as much as a buck an egg in some major metro areas.
Trump’s unpredictable and haphazard tariff policies on imported goods, including on Canadian-made components for U.S.-assembled cars, are also driving prices of those products, and therefore inflation rates generally, higher.
After all, a new car costs more than $20,000 now—and that was before Trump slammed tariffs on the steel and aluminum U.S. automakers import from Canada for manufacturing vehicles here. The auto dealers have been working through old—lower-priced—inventory, so far. When that runs out, the sky is the ceiling.
“Tariffs are a tax that a country imposes on itself,” Dean Baker, co-founder of the progressive Center for Economic Policy and Research, said in a recent article. Claims that it is foreign countries that pay the cost of tariffs are false.
A tariff “imposes costs in the same way that a tax on gas or beef imposes costs. Tariffs can also harm trading partners, but that doesn’t change the fact that the main victim is generally the country imposing tariffs.” It is the working-class people of the imposing country that are hurt the most. Trump claims that the tariffs are bringing in billions of dollars. That money is money taken from the pockets of U.S. working people.
Instead of creating jobs, Trump’s policy is killing them. Despite Trumpian claims and the dramatic firings of people like the government’s top non-partisan economist—job growth has slowed to a trickle, starting last fall, under his predecessor.
Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will actually destroy one of the fastest-growing job-creating sectors of the economy: So-called “green jobs,” as Trump and his GOP followers in Congress repealed virtually every incentive for them.
Emblematic of that crash: Trump’s Interior Department pulled the federal permits for an almost-complete electric wind farm in Long Island Sound. A thousand construction jobs vanished like smoke. So did hundreds more at windmill parts suppliers.
“We should be using everything within our power to reduce emissions and grow clean energy in ways that create and maintain good-paying jobs,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a Steelworkers-created coalition of unions and environmental groups.
“With this action”—Trump’s initial anti-green executive order on January 20–“Trump has pulled us from a path that not only secured clean air and water for future generations but also put millions of good jobs into the U.S. economy in clean manufacturing and the construction of clean energy projects. We are disappointed that Trump chose to launch his second term with an attack against working people and our environment.”
Why? The greed of Trump’s corporate backers in the fossil fuel industries of oil, natural gas, and especially coal.
The job situation is going to get worse in another sector, the federal government, soon. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 11,300 federal workers lost their jobs in August alone, and the federal workforce has shrunk by 74,300 people, to 2.33 million, in a year.
But that doesn’t count the estimated 175,000 who took Trump’s prior buyouts—which expire September 30—or were canned in previous months. Buyout takers are still, in terms of the numbers, on the federal payroll. They will be in September, too, but not afterwards.
Numbers have been revised
And BLS, in its latest, and more comprehensive, revision of prior job numbers, reported an overestimate, by 911,000 jobs, of private sector job creation through March.
Economists are noticing the slump. So are Trump’s political foes. Increasingly, so are voters—especially voters of color, who have been and will be Trump’s particular targets.
When the October jobless figures hit the economy full force, in early November, you’ll see the disproportionate impact on federal workers of Trump’s mass firings. Blacks and other workers of color, along with women, make up a higher share, relative to their overall share of the population, of those workers.
“Black workers serve as a ‘canary in the coal mines’ for the rest of the labor market,” Jessica Fulton of the leading Black think tank, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, told CNN. What they suffer first, everyone else suffers later.
Overall, unemployment is up by 0.2% since Trump succeeded Biden in the Oval Office on January 20, to 4.3%. Black unemployment is up by 1.3%. It was 6.2%. It’s now 7.5%, the worst figure since the depths of the coronavirus-caused economic crash—which Trump was responsible for.
“The economy lost jobs in June 2025, the first time…since the Covid-19 pandemic,” Fulton continued. “Plus a potential reason for the high unemployment rate for Black workers is due to the fact that Black workers are the first to be let go at the start of an economic downturn.”
The Census Bureau reported median Black household income fell 3.3%, to $56,020. The median is the point at which half of the group is above and half is below. The white median household income is $92,000 plus change.
The numbers are pretty stark. So are comments from people in the street.
“I don’t understand how you could be for the American people and have Americans lose their jobs when they have families, have bills,” 30-year-old salesperson Josh Garrett told the Associated Press.
“The cost of maintaining a home continues to climb 10%,” tweeted Ed Kalin, responding to an economic podcast of the Julia LaRoche show. “Property taxes, home insurance, service contracts for termite protection, lawn care, etc. all going up, up, up. A small repair on my washing machine cost $340. Do you honestly think these costs will come down? The 2% inflation number is fiction. Why isn’t anyone talking about this aspect of the problem?”
“The economy currently is not working for me and my family,” accountant Esther Wells in pro-Trump Delhi County, Ohio, told National Public Radio economics correspondent Paul Solman just after last year’s election.
“Some of the rhetoric that came out to Black people and minorities, like, this is your chance to vote for the first Black woman. And, to me, it was like, that is not my number one issue. How are you going to make things better for my family? It was about the affordability of food, of gas, of heating, energy.”
Everyone feeling the pain
But it’s not just Blacks who are hurt, as Fulton of the Joint Center pointed out. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., hit the same theme on September 9, after the release of the latest jobless report for August.
“The economy Donald Trump is sabotaging is in worse shape than we imagined,” Schumer said, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported the economy added 911,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March than firms originally reported. The newer and lower numbers are based on detailed state joblessness reports.
“His tariffs are raising prices,” Schumer continued. “His tariffs are making factories slow down. His ‘Big Ugly Bill’ is kicking 16 million people off healthcare. Unemployment is going up. Health insurance premiums are going up, and people are less optimistic about the future as they struggle to make ends meet.”
“When Donald Trump came in, he said he would start the Golden Age, he was criticizing Joe Biden. But he is doing worse and worse and worse every month.
“Since Donald Trump has taken office, as these numbers show, there are fewer jobs, there are higher prices, and there is less opportunity for the American people.”
Nina Mast, Emma Cohn, and David Cooper of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute predict the economy will get worse for John Jones and Jane Doe on the street, thanks to—among other reasons—Trump’s crazy tariffs.
“Trump administration actions—chaotic tariffs, mass deportations, attacks on federal employees–weakened the labor market, put upward pressure on prices, and threatened to undo recent progress of historically high wage growth and declining inequality,” they wrote in an early-September analysis.
And that’s without pointing out that, in a throwback to pre-1913, Trump wants tariffs to replace the income tax as the main revenue source for the federal government.
Trump’s big beautiful bill will only make a bad situation a lot worse for millions, the three predict. The measure, which the GOP passed on party-line votes in Congress, “will decimate access to health care and nutrition assistance for the poorest households while providing a massive tax cut for the wealthy.”
That “giveaway “will cause pain for millions of U.S. households. And Trump’s chaotic trade policies and mass deportation agenda will harm U.S.-born and immigrant workers alike. In fact, some of these harms are already being felt.
“The economy is clearly getting worse under Donald Trump’s stewardship. His policies are leaving the American people holding the bag, and they don’t like it,” Schumer concluded.
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