Krugman on the vibecession:
I noted last week that the Biden era vibecession — people feeling bad about an economy that looked good by standard measures — has persisted under Trump. In fact, public perceptions of the economy appear to be plumbing new depths.
Honestly, I’m surprised. One factor in poor economic sentiment under Biden was partisanship. People’s reported perception of the economy is strongly affected by whether their preferred party is in power:
This is true for both parties, but historically Republicans have tended to cheer harder and boo louder than Democrats. So other things equal we would have expected average sentiment to improve under Trump II.
Now, things aren’t equal. Objectively, the economy is worse in important ways than it was a year ago. Still, the extent of the plunge in perceptions is remarkable.
It may be that Trump is — bear with me here — actually paying a price for telling Americans not to believe their own eyes. As I’ve written recently, it’s important not to engage in false equivalence. Biden and company told Americans that their incomes were outpacing inflation, which was true but not what people wanted to hear. Trump keeps insisting that grocery prices are way down, which is simply a lie. And people may be noticing.
The absolute absurdity of the Trump team’s efforts to explain away bad economic news may also be taking a toll. Remember when Scott Bessent was supposed to be the adult in the room? Now he’s blaming migrants taking diseased cattle with them for high beef prices.
I think all of that is part of it. But those of you who’ve been reading me for a while know that I was saying the following throughout the last year of the Biden term:
I also wonder whether Trump’s other problems — from Epstein to the deep unpopularity of ICE’s actions — are bleeding over to economic sentiment. Political consultants like to imagine that the public makes clear distinctions between issues: “kitchen table” versus democracy versus corruption.
In reality public opinion is much more of a gestalt in which bad or good feelings on different issues merge.
I think it’s unresolved pandemic trauma. This country never reckoned with the death of more than a million people and just went on as if it never happened. Maybe that even explains Trump’s otherwise inexplicable victory in some way — people wanted to go back to the time before it happened and erase everything after. But it didn’t work. They ended up being reminded of everything horrible about the pandemic over which Trump presided, the chaos, the incompetence, the corruption and the narcissism.
People blame food prices or immigrants or “woke” for the deep feelings of insecurity and fear that were unleashed in that period and they are subconsciously reminded of it when they see the orange miscreant on their television screens. It was as if the nation somehow thought that rubbing salt into its psychic wound would heal it and all it did was keep the pain fresh every single day.