Trump’s 'Golden Age' Is Nothing More Than Fool’s Gold

A closer look at the data reveals the painful truth about Trump's economy

Image Credit: x.com/WhiteHouse

On January 20, in his second inaugural address, Donald Trump proclaimed that the “golden age of America begins right now.” To hear Trump tell it, his economic policies are ushering in a new wave of prosperity for America.

To drive home the point, The White House posted a bizarre AI video last month featuring money raining down from the sky, with bald eagles flying, declaring,

You just stepped into Day 179 of the Trump Golden Age

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A post shared by @whitehouse

But did we though?

As Ezra Klein remarked during a debate this past May on the topic of whether we are in fact in America’s golden age, “[I]f America was entering a new golden age, you'd expect to see it…maybe the American people would be thrilled.” Instead, as Klein laid out:

“Gallup finds 58% of Americans think this is a bad time to find a job. Inflation expectations are up, not down. Our credit rating is getting downgraded. Investors are demanding a higher premium to buy 30-year treasuries.”

And while it’s true Trump has been able to tout a rising stock market of late, 3 percent GDP growth in the second quarter, and $150 billion in tariff revenue to the U.S. treasury on his watch, a closer look at even these so-called bright spots reveals more fool’s gold than “golden age” for our nation.

Given the events this past week, one might add to Klein’s conditional, if we are truly in a new golden age, why did Trump feel the need to fire Bureau of Labor and Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer at the first sign of a downward jobs report?

McEntarfer’s firing was quite the tell from Trump, a move borne out of profound insecurity about the true strength of the economy. This is an insecurity that, upon closer inspection, is well founded, not just judging by the opinions of experts who study this data, but of the American people who are starting to feel it.

Inflation

Trump famously promised to bring down the cost of groceries “on day one.” Then after his “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on April 2, as if in anticipation of the inevitable inflation his tariffs would usher in, Trump claimed,

"Groceries went through the roof and I campaigned on that. I talked about the word ‘groceries’ for a lot, and energy costs now are down. Groceries are down.”

Of course, they weren’t. Even People Magazine wasn’t impressed:

At present, there is no evidence supporting his statement that grocery prices are improving. The USDA's Food Price Outlook, updated on March 25, reports that grocery costs are expected to rise slightly faster than the average rate of growth this year.

New tariffs on international goods are only expected to exacerbate inflation by passing the burden of the new taxes onto American consumers.

And despite premature celebrations in Trump World that the tariffs did not have the immediate inflationary impact most experts expected, that honeymoon appears to be over.

On July 30, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell issued a warning:

“Increased tariffs are pushing up prices in some categories of goods. Near-term measures of inflation expectations have moved up on balance over the course of this year on news about tariffs as reflected in both market based and survey based measures."

In June, the inflation rate rose to 2.7%, with the core inflation rate (excluding energy and food) at 2.9%. And we’re already seeing the impact on store shelves.

For example, just look at beef prices:

According to the Consumer Price Index released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the average price of ground beef rose to $6.12 per pound in June, up nearly 12% from a year ago. Steak prices also surged, with the average price of uncooked beef steaks reaching $11.49 per pound, up 8% from the previous year.

This marks the first time since the BLS has been tracking retail beef prices in the 1980s that ground beef prices have topped $6 per pound.

And according to BLS, it’s not just beef that’s soaring, it’s eggs, coffee, and chicken as well, up significantly in June year over year. Per Axios:

It’s also hitting household items, from Walmart…

CNBC tracked the prices of about 50 products sold in Walmart and found that prices rose as high as 51% following the company’s announcement that it would raise prices following President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

…to Procter & Gamble, which last week announced price increases in the mid-single digits across 25% of its products beginning this month.

Give you one guess as to the cause.

Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble offered an annual earnings outlook that was below analysts' projections and said it would raise prices on about a quarter of its products in the U.S. in part due to higher costs from President Donald Trump's tariffs.

And increasingly, Americans are feeling it. A new AP/NORC poll found that 86% of Americans feel either major or minor anxiety about grocery prices. And the cost of housing isn’t too far behind.

Per The AP’s analysis:

About half of all Americans say the cost of groceries is a “major” source of stress in their life right now, while 33% say it’s a “minor” source of stress, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Only 14% say it’s not a source of stress, underscoring the pervasive anxiety most Americans continue to feel about the cost of everyday essentials.

But unlike with inflation during the Biden years, today’s price pressures are causing both American consumers and businesses to begin to pull back on their spending.

Jobs & GDP

In an extremely worrying sign for the economy, this creeping post-tariff Trump inflation is beginning to impact spending behavior. And it’s not just from consumers.

As an analysis from The Minnesota Star Tribune puts it,

Today, consumers are not just saying they’re worried about the economy — they’re acting like it. From slowing auto sales to declines in leisure air travel, consumer spending barely budged in June, rising just 0.3% after staying flat in May.

American consumers are pulling back on spending as the effects of tariffs — like the slowing job market and rising inflation — begin to show. It’s a shift from a few years ago, when higher inflation sparked consumer concern but a strong labor market, government stimulus and pent-up pandemic demand kept people spending.

So, that strong labor market under Biden? It’s no more. In fact, while Trump’s firing of BLS Commissioner McEntarfer monopolized the headlines, it’s worth zeroing in on how shockingly low job growth was in the past three months.

Not only did the U.S. add just 73,000 jobs in July, the BLS revised May and June downward by a total of 258,000. And, well…

The U.S. only added 19,000 jobs in May compared to an initial report of 144,000, and only 14,000 in June after an initial report of 147,000, according to the BLS. Those two paltry totals, plus a July jobs gain of 73,000, means the U.S. added just 106,000 jobs over the past three months.

Or, put another way:

As Noah Berlatsky of Public Notice observes, digging into the unemployment numbers provides even more of a flashing red warning light.

The overall unemployment rate last month ticked up to 4.2 percent, but more worrying is the increase in Black unemployment to 7.2 percent. That’s the highest rate since December 2021, when the economy was still struggling to emerge from the covid pandemic. Black workers are often the last hired and the first fired. As a result Black unemployment rates often shoot up first when a serious economic downturn is on the horizon.

Does that mean a recession could be on the way—the very thing Republicans claimed we were already in under Biden and then poof, suddenly disappeared on January 20th?

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s certainly thinks so. Not only does Zandi believe the U.S. economy is on “the precipice of a recession…”

But the reasons for the recession threat are clear: not just Trump’s tariffs, but also his radical deportation agenda.

But wait, didn’t Donald Trump shout about the second quarter GDP growth, rebounding to 3%?

Yes, he did, and he was technically correct. Per Yahoo Finance:

US economic growth rebounded in the second quarter after contracting for the first time in three years to start 2025.

Gross domestic product grew at an annualized pace of 3% in the second quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis's advance estimate. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected a 2.6% increase.

So, that’s good, right? Welp, not so fast...

The reading comes after a large surge in imports ahead of President Trump's tariff whipsaw caused GDP to contract by 0.5% in the first quarter. The BEA noted that the second quarter bounce-back reflected a decrease in imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP.

EY chief economist Gregory Daco noted that the quarterly swings in imports created a "economic mirage" that masked some underlying cooling in the economy.

In other words, as economist Tom Steyer puts it:

Oof.

But Wait, What About All That Tariff Revenue?

Last month, it was reported that the Trump administration had taken in a monthly record of $28 billion in tariff revenue in July, for a total of $150 billion in 2025 so far.

But don’t be fooled. The tariff haul is simply the transfer of wealth from working Americans to richer ones, a regressive tax that is adding to American consumers’ hardship.

Noah Berlatsky breaks it down:

While Trump claims that his senseless tariff fetish will somehow lead to awesome trade deals, the truth is that he’s simply imposing massive arbitrary taxes on consumer goods. Taxing goods raises prices. The nonpartisan Yale Budget Lab has concluded that the effective tariff rate under Trump is around 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934. That means that households will be paying an extra $2,400 each in taxes to the government on purchases.

Tariffs are a regressive tax — they are hardest to absorb for lower income households, since the taxes are a higher percentage of their income. Even worse, lower income households tend to be especially dependent on imported goods, which are often cheaper than domestic products. Ernie Tedeschi, director of the Yale Budget Lab, told NPR that Trump’s tariffs seem “almost tailor made” to harm lower income workers the most.

And in the end, this tariff regime could blow up in Trump’s face if the courts find he did not have the authority to unilaterally impose such across-the-board tariffs. He might actually have to refund all that tariff revenue:

President Donald Trump boasts that his tariffs have raked in billions. There’s a chance his government will have to pay a lot of it back.

Several companies and states have challenged Trump’s use of an emergency law to impose some of his duties on individual countries, in a legal dispute that is likely to work its way up to the Supreme Court. As part of the case, companies have demanded the federal government pay them back for the tariff fees they’ve already paid out.

Trump’s tariff policy may already be backfiring on him though. Month after month, Trump complains that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell won’t lower rates. And month after month, Powell has explained that the reason he’s keeping rates steady is due to the inflationary projections from Trump’s tariffs. Trump doesn’t seem to get that it is his own policy that is keeping rates high.

And it’s not like Trump’s economic policies are exactly endearing him to the American people.

Just look at G. Elliott Morris’s latest chart of Trump’s average approval rating. It’s hard to ignore the trend since he launched (or failed to launch…) his “Liberation Day” tariffs at the beginning of April.

And take a look at which issues are driving this dissatisfaction. The economy. The economy. The economy.

As Ben Rhodes made clear at May’s Munk debate on whether we are in a new “golden age of America under Trump:

“A golden age would make people hopeful for the future, would address the challenges of the future. Would make investments and do things today that are going to make life better for people's children and their children. That is not what is happening at all.”

At all.

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