Inflation Is Creeping Up— Trump's Polling Is Creeping Down
Trump’s NLRB acting general counsel, William Cowen, put out a poisonous, worker-unfriendly memo erasing all the gains unions had made during Biden’s term— and it will now be tougher for unions to gain official recognition, while the ban on non-compete agreements has been shit-canned and monetary damages available to the victims of unfair labor and workplace practices has been limited. None of this should surprise anyone… least of all people who pay attention to Bernie:
Yesterday, in fact, Jason Lange reported that Trump’s approval rating is already starting to tick down, driven by his poor handling of economic policies. Reuters Ipsos poll showed just 44% of respondents approve of the job Señor T is doing as president, down 3 points from their late January poll, taken before he had gotten busy destroying the economy. “The share of Americans who disapprove of his presidency,” wrote Lange, “has risen more substantially, to 51% in the latest poll, compared with 41% right after he took office… [T]he share of Americans who think the economy is on the wrong track rose to 53% in the latest poll from 43% in the January 24-26 poll. Public approval of Trump's economic stewardship fell to 39% from 43% in the prior poll… In the latest poll, only 32% of respondents approved of Trump's performance on inflation, a potential early sign of disappointment in the Republican's performance on a core economic issue after several years of rising prices weakened Biden ahead of last year's presidential election. A recent report from the U.S. Labor Department showed consumer prices rose by the most in nearly 1-1/2 years in January, with Americans facing higher costs for a range of goods and services. Other economic data has shown U.S. households expect inflation to pick up following Trump's February 1 announcements for steep tariffs on imports from China, Mexico and Canada… Fifty-four percent of respondents in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll said they opposed new tariffs on imported goods from other countries, while 41% were in favor of them.”
During the Donnie and Elon show Tuesday on Fox, hosted by MAGA ass-licker Sean Hannity, Trump tap-danced, without "YMCA" playing, to persuade his supporters that the inflation his agenda is causing have “nothing to do” with him. His spin: “Inflation is back. No, think of it. Inflation’s back. And they said ‘oh Trump’ and I had nothing to do with that. These people have run the country. They spent money like nobody has ever spent. They were they were given $9 trillion to throw out the window. 9 trillion… [Referring to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act Señor T babbled] “The greatest scam in the history of the country. One of them. We have a lot of them, I guess. But one of them. Dollar-wise, probably.”
The Scammer-in-Chief’s agenda from the first administration set the stage for the inflation crisis that Biden had to clean up. Trump’s $1.9 trillion tax cut for the rich ballooned the deficit without generating real economic growth, while his trade war with China jacked up prices for consumers. Then came COVID— Trump’s incompetence in handling the pandemic collapsed supply chains, sent unemployment skyrocketing, and left the economy in shambles. Inflation was inevitable after such reckless mismanagement. Biden inherited a mess but handled inflation competently, despite Republican sabotage. The American Rescue Plan prevented a deep recession, and his infrastructure investments rebuilt supply chains and boosted domestic manufacturing. He let the Fed do its job, even when rate hikes were politically painful, and his Inflation Reduction Act slashed some prescription drug and energy costs while cutting the deficit— the exact opposite of Trump’s economic recklessness. Under Biden, inflation steadily declined from 9.1% in 2022 to around 3% by 2024, proving that serious, competent leadership matters.
Now Trump is back, and inflation is already creeping up as markets anticipate his return to economic chaos. He’s vowing rapidly shifting across-the-board and targeted tariffs which would instantly drive up prices on everything from cars to groceries. He’d demanding the Republican-controlled Congress deliver another round of tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, which will explode the deficit and overheat the economy again. And he’s openly threatening to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell and install a lackey who will print money to keep Wall Street happy— a surefire recipe for runaway inflation. Trump can run to Fox all he wants to deny it but the pattern is perfectly clear: Trump broke the economy, Biden fixed it, and now Trump is set to break it again. If voters don’t want another inflation crisis, they know what to do— in Virginia this year and across the country in the 2026 midterms.
Just 40% of Democratic voters approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 49% disapprove. If they got to know more about Schumer, Jeffries and Aguilar, they numbers would be much, much worse. On Tuesday, Dave Zirin asked a question that the Americans who will be asked to vote for them in Virginia and in the midterms, are also wondering Why Democrats Won’t Throw A Real Punch. Careerist congressional leadership is a good place to start. The liberal left is blowing up because Democrats in Congress “are not raising nearly enough hell as Apartheid’s Chestburster, Elon Musk, vivisects the government from the inside… The phrase going around is, ‘The Democrats have brought a lectern to a social media war.’ Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight. As The Nation has reported, when Democratic politicians have shown up to protests, people aren’t cheering their presence. They are howling at them to do more.”
He wrote that “we need to lose the theory that these Dems are ‘spineless’ and just don’t understand how to wage political war. We know they can be vicious because we’ve seen them execute that kind of operation against the left since Ralph Nader caught them sleeping in 2000. We have seen them do it maliciously during Senator Bernie Sanders’s two primary runs. We saw Black and brown women stamped as ‘Bernie Bros’ with enough, yes, ruthless, repetition to make it stick. We’ve seen President Barack Obama with all his rhetorical powers hector young Black men, but not aim his electric cadence at Musk and his Palo Alto brownshirts. It’s not that they cannot—they will not. When it was Sanders or an individual who demanded even a modest change in policy on Gaza, they brought out the knives. When it’s Musk and his apartheid army of incels, they wield sporks. Yet, as we keep seeing, spork fighting is demoralizing. The question then is why, amid this tornado of anger, are Democratic institutions so soft? He put forth half a dozen problems and 6 potential remedies:
1. They’d rather have peace with the billionaire tech bros— see Jeffries’s recent Silicon Valley visit to “mend fences”— than wage a struggle to get their money out of politics, have campaign finance reform, and, for the love of God, tax their obscene and unearned wealth.
2. A wing of the Democratic Party [New Dems and Blue Dogs] actually supports the substance if not style of what Musk is doing, accepting the argument of bureaucratic excess and the need to stop “waste.” Several put themselves forward to join the entirely made up, extra-constitutional operation known as DOGE. It’s not that this “waste” doesn’t exist— looking at you, defense budget— but in politics timing is everything. Legitimizing the need for DOGE at that moment provided Musk with the runway to destroy lives— he thinks workers are the “waste”— and wreck the best parts of this country: like the parks, the medical research, or the ability to fly on a plane with the certainty of landing safely.
3. The legacy of Clintonian triangulation and the corporate-centered rightward pull of the New Democrats means their top campaign consultants for a generation have been insulated, isolated, and utterly incapable of being left populists or the “brawlers for the working class” that AOC says they need to be. I remember the Rev. Al Sharpton crushing right-wing hecklers at a Democratic primary debate when they went after fellow candidates Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman. Since Sharpton was the only person on stage with real movement experience, he actually knew how to assert his will and inspire a crowd to join him in shutting them down. Too many Democrats are weak under the bright lights. Again, not everyone melts, but as an institution, this party is melting.
4. The legacy of Obama was that a coalition based upon “demographic destiny” would win elections in perpetuity as long as they were not Republicans. This not only bred inertia; it meant that in 2016, they were caught unaware by how much this country was becoming unglued. Yes, a “whitelash” was a big part of Trump’s Electoral College win, but that doesn’t explain everything. According to the highly respected University of Virginia Center for politics, 15 percent of Trump voters had pulled the lever for Obama. When Hillary Clinton lost, the party explained it by saying, “She won the popular vote, and there was Russian election interference” (both true!). But the party’s institutional response should have been: “Holy shit. What did we do wrong that caused us to lose to this fascist ass-clown caked in orange concealer?” Maybe if Democratic leaders pretended Elon Musk was a 22-year-old Palestinian from Dearborn, Michigan, they’d show more fight.
5. Israel. Israel. Israel. In 2025, marching lockstep behind Israel means defending ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and billions in weapon sales so they continue unhampered. It’s also taking the opposite position of what their potential voters, particularly young voters, want to see. To watch Trump yank Netanyahu to the ceasefire table was so enraging because Biden could have done that any time. Instead of disciplining Netanyahu, Democrats armed him. They did this even at the price of not being able to do a rally on a college campus in an election season out of fear of being heckled and, due to the aforementioned isolation, they have no stomach for hecklers. When a Columbia University encampment for Gaza, led by Jews and Muslims, called for peace, Democratic darling Representative Jared Moskowitz compared the organizers to the Nazis of Charlottesville—instead of, say, comparing the actual Nazis around Trump to Nazis. This is morally bankrupt, and voters know it.
6. Democrats are allergic to raising people’s expectations, and as a result, they cannot solve problems. Instead of codifying Roe legislatively after the Supreme Court killed it, they raised money off its death. Biden could have opened clinics on federal land— and before one says Trump would have just closed them, that’s politics: creating viral images of Trump shuttering abortion clinics. And before one says they didn’t have the votes to codify Roe, think about how Trump’s thugs crack down on any Republican with even a stray musing that, for example, the drunk rapist with the Pat Riley hair and plausibly deniable white-power tattoos shouldn’t be in charge of the military. The contrast is shattering. President Biden let Senator Joe Manchin, a corrupt and charisma-free coal baron from a small, unwinnable state, become the most powerful person in the world. Real “brawlers for the working class” find a way to browbeat Manchin into voting accordingly.
Zirin concluded that “Democratic Party leaders are not built for this moment. New DNC chief Ken Martin is no Marek Edelman. But for the Democrats that get the stakes and the ones who want to fight, they need to realize that their audience is vast and the time for niceties, like abiding genocide-enthusiast John Fetterman’s efforts to become the new Manchin instead of openly planning to primary him, is over.” I’d like to add that we’re keeping a running total of real resistance fighters in Congress… in case you’re inclined to help any of the brawlers for teh working class.
Some of the Russian interference is linked to corporate triangulation via social media companies that made it possible. Corporate triangulation is linked to Israel via the jack boot both have on the throat of democracy - Money. And having deep-pocket donors to call on probably makes people a bit complacent. Money is not political speech, it's political heroin. It makes you think everything is fine while it's killing you. We've got to reduce the impact of money on democracy.
Jeffries & Schumer view the 1940 French General Staff as role models. They might as well display a poster of Marshall Petain on the wall at DNC HQ.