Transcript: Trump’s Pollster Hits Him with Brutal News as Econ Worsens

Sargent: And health care, he’s going to preside over a rise in the uninsured rate rather than preside over a move toward universal health care, which would be progress. The polling memo from Trump’s pollster starkly warns this, “Republicans can expect a loss of support in these most competitive districts if the premium tax credit is not extended.” And Republicans are not going to extend those tax credits. So clearly this pollster is essentially saying the Trump economy is not being perceived as a positive thing. The big picture here is that on all fronts, Trump’s economic policies are slowly pushing things in the wrong direction for working people. On one front, as you mentioned earlier, the tariffs are really starting to bite and those price increases hit working- and middle-class consumers most directly. Those are likely to get worse over time. On another front, they just cut Medicaid by $1 trillion dollars and also cut ACA spending as we discussed, and that could result in 17 million people losing insurance. That, too, largely hurts the working poor. What’s the sum total of the impact on the working poor, on working-class people, on middle-class people who are somewhat precarious? All these policies are going to start really converging, aren’t they? What can we expect?

Edwards: I think it’s helpful to think in terms of blunt directions instead of any specific estimate. Tariffs will make prices for most goods and services go up rather than down. And down makes life better. Deporting workers and creating shortages in industries for either workers or the goods that they are used to produce, that also makes prices go up and not down. So down is better—and that’s not going to happen. Same thing with healthcare. If you have a health insurance system that is built on a very complex system of subsidies and expansions that you take $1 trillion dollars from, that’s going to make medical care either scarce, more expensive, harder to get access to or a combination of the three. And in this case, up is bad—so not going to be helpful.

Sargent: Well, CNN has a headline that’s pretty blunt. It says, “This could be the summer of economic hell.”

Edwards: I’m sure that writer didn’t get to write her headline, so I’m going to empathize with her that maybe that’s not what she meant.

Sargent: Well, Democrats are passing this around along with some other articles that are really pretty stark in describing what could be coming. I think the basic point in this CNN piece is some of the stuff you’ve been talking about, which is that the tariffs are gonna start biting later, that there’s a lag time between the imposition of the tariffs and the actual price increases that result. As you’ve pointed out, he’s constantly chickened out and backed off here and there. But now by all indications, on August 1, we’re going gangbusters ahead. Are we headed for something much worse?

Edwards: The current state of the U.S. economy is a slow slowing, which we’ve talked about before. If you were to take all of Trump’s economic policies and line them up and look at them not as he’s described them, not as he’s sold them, not as he’s announced them but [as] what they are actually doing, the number one ailment that the economy faces right now is uncertainty. We just don’t know what the interest rates will be in three months. We don’t know what tariffs will be in three months. And we don’t know what prices will be in three months, which makes it very hard for everyone to plan, whether they’re a consumer or a financial firm or a company that’s just trying to make it in the world.