My less nuanced opinion here from rural America is that there is a bit of Trump fatigue setting in, even among the die-hards. They aren't ready to embrace Democrats (I don't see that happening in my lifetime) but the Truth Social rants and the rambling public statements aren't landing like they used to. He's less of a messiah now and more background noise. That doesn't mean they've abandoned him, like Noah said, his border policy is still touted as a particularly strong accomplishment. However, he isn't seen as the end and be all of statesmanship, like he was in 2017/2018.
I see the MAGA movement waning a bit even here in the hinterlands. That doesn't mean it's over, but the more extreme edges are crumbling.
2. The inflation of 2020-2022 hasn't been reversed. It was always unreasonable to expect that it would be. Disinflation rather than deflation was the thing to hope for. But he encouraged unreasonable expectations for lower prices, and now people are mad that he's not delivering on that.
3. Bag job markets. While the unemployment uptick is modest, job openings are down, and people are staying employed by clinging to their jobs. The data isn't great for tracking this, but it seems to take more time and effort to get a job. We're not seeing an epic wave of mass layoffs, but there are enough to be ominous.
There was a Twitch streamer that Newsom interviewed on his podcast who said, rather pithily, "extremism is when no house". (This was mentioned in Newsom's recent interview on the Ezra Klein Show). I really think you cannot stress enough the role of the rise in the value of a downpayment as a multiple of years of the median / modal income for 20- to 30-somethings, in turning lots of young men into nihilistic Trump voters. We _must_ offer them an optimistic vision here -- not deporting all the immigrants and rolling back women's rights, but instead just _building enough homes that they're cheap again_. Including building a lot of manufactured housing, in unionized factories with good jobs.
What I found deeply frustrating in that Klein/Newsom interview is that when Ezra pushed him on housing affordability, Newsom's immediate instinct was to talk about how he raised the minimum wage. And I was just like, _dude_, do you not understand that throwing more money at the existing housing stock just raises prices? Could you go read Niskanen's "Cost Disease Socialism" report, please? If you want to turn off the conveyor belt of "extremism is when no house", you have to _build the f***ing house_.
Given the other constraints we face, that probably also means figuring out condo defect insurance reform. Going forwards, it's going to be a lot easier to give people "starter homes" in the form of a condo, rather than a standalone SFH.
I don’t know how even people who don’t read believe anything that Trump says about affordability. It’s a “Democrat hoax”, “you only need 2 pencils and 2 dolls”, “Biden did this”, “gas is $2 a gallon”, “groceries. That’s a quaint word. ‘groceries’”. The guy doesn’t even drive anything bigger than a golf cart, and probably has never stepped into a grocery store or bodega in his life.
Yes: it is prudent also I believe to be always looking for the disaggregations as the divergences between College Educated and Non-College on experienced inflation (past and current) given differing consumption baskets and equally higher sensitivity on Non-College to pricing pressures given less margin/sense-of-security are likely to once again be meaningful. National aggregates may deceive in part....
Of course equally not only people noticing Trump is not achieving promises (unachievable ones) but laos his own actions are feeding plus his reaction to criticism is as typical for him quite aggressively nasty - which probably will not have great results (not any more than Democrats own more polite but also tone-deaf 'Inflation-Bourgeousie-Splaining'
I think the real question Trump's detractors are trying to answer when they talk about the problems MAGA is facing is really about the state of Trump's authoritarian ambitions, rather than his presidency as a whole. The question isn't whether Trump will succeed at implementing bad policy X, but whether he'll be able to successfully consolidate authoritarian power and secure illiberal one-party rule.
I think a broad consensus in the anti-Trump movement is that the republic can survive a bad president with bad policies, but can't endure a full authoritarian consolidation. For the first half of this year, we felt at severe risk of the consolidation happening, and while that risk still feels present, it's diminished.
When people talk about the MAGA movement breaking down, what they're really talking about is the sense of inevitability falling away. The feeling of political gravity returning and other power centers in the government beginning to assert their own interests. A feeling that we're entering in an era where people and institutions might conceivably push back instead of bending the knee to the mad king. A presidency doesn't have to feel inevitable to succeed, but authoritarian movements struggle once they start to be openly challenged. Courage is contagious, and a few people resisting openly makes Trump's bullying management style much less effective. Once the silence breaks and people start to fight back, it's a turning point. Soon, everyone realizes that you always outnumbered the dictator's goons, that there's little he can actually do to you.
The MAGA populist movement doesn't feel so weak yet that it won't be able to do a lot of real damage to the country. But might be weak enough that it won't be able to easily consolidate authoritarian power without at least facing major resistance.
There are still paths to one-party authoritarian rule. We might see a thoroughly corrupted military and judicial takeover by 2026. We might see intense election rigging that no amount of voting can overcome. We might see another January-6th style of coup with full government and DoJ support. But all of these paths are more complicated and risky than the simplest approach, which was to sustain the appearance of popularity and power through sheer will and win legitimately on a platform of "Trump 2026, Trump 2028, Trump forever." For my part, I'm breathing a (perhaps premature) sigh of relief that this path now appears to be closed to the enemy.
Good analogy. What changes in the fact pattern would most add to conviction around a momentum shift? Big AI-related market correction? Bad jobs and inflation prints for November and December? Actual release of Epstein files? Resignations of 2-3 of the most inept Cabinet members? Underperformance in the next couple of special elections? Watch this space.
Supreme Court disallows emergency tariffs and Trump ignores the court? Invasion of Venezuela? CBP internal border checkpoints moved to major urban areas inside the allowed 100 mile border zone and force everyone to show RealID or passport? Not ever bringing back BLS jobs and inflation reports? Lots of bad stuff he may still have up his sleeves.
I actually feel the opposite. At the beginning of the term, he was doing lots of substantively bad things about destroying the entire foreign aid apparatus, killing tens of thousands of people that we had been saving, and destroying our alliances with tariffs. But in the past few months he’s been actually moving into authoritarian moves, unilaterally deploying the military to kill people in order to gain support, trying to change the electoral landscape to shore up his majorities, and trying to use litigation to imprison people he doesn’t like. He’s less popular now, but his actions seem more dangerous to the republic.
Trump is blowing up random drug-boats in the Carribean. While a gross misuse of military power it's not actual authoritarianism - not any more than Obama executive strikes in Yemen was. Dumb, stupid and immoral, but not authoritarianism.
Domestically where this counts: Trying to play authoritarian by sending national guard hither and thither has fallend generally flat on its face - arrests have failed - juries simply refusing indictments or convictions.
Rather than inflating Trump recognising and pointing to his feet of clay.
He's more dangerous to the republic where there is the sense of inevitability and there is popularity - there is plenty of good data on the fragility of real authoritarian regimes around such.
Drive unpopularity on pocket-book issues and you solve the Democracy threat in nearest term.
I agree with this, but the reason the boat strikes matter for authoritarianism is that it is a common strategy to gin up a war footing in order to pressure people to support the regime or be seen as traitorous to the nation.
They are screwing this up too though, by seemingly not even really trying to do propaganda to manufacture consent for a war. I'll be more worried if that changes and if the numbers supporting a war with Venezuela start ticking up. But I don't really think that is going to happen.
(I think Trump is honestly pretty fucked, politically, and that a successful authoritarian consolidation is pretty much off the table at this point. Which is great.)
Trying and failing equally as Drezner notes is something that undermines the key aspect of real authoritarians - much of what Trump does is blustering around like he was used to in his own family company, where even there he more Cosplayed executive than actually was effectively - the sense of inevitability.
Weakness and semi-comedic incompetence should be played up to further undercut.
But to me, the distinction is that I don't think the move into baldly authoritarian stuff is *working*.
It isn't popular, and the vibe is a lot more "Why are you doing all this weird stuff instead of the affordability stuff you said you were gonna do? Nobody asked for a war with Venezuela or random murders of people on boats or asking brown citizens in the interior for their papers... What are you doing? We just wanted the price of stuff to go down...".
He seems to be focusing more on things that a lot of us *worried* he might do, but less on things that people who voted for him *hoped* he would do.
The elections in November were a clarifying event. They showed that Trump and MAGA are NOT popular and the majority of the country does not support their agenda.
An authoritarian leader needs to have a decent level of popular support in the beginning and they also need a good economy. Trump has neither.
Exactly, why real authoritarians or those making real plays on power become laser focused on Goodies to at least key support segments of their popular support.
Trump is delivering really none of this - nor does he show the persipacity to realise.
In the end Trump is a Cosplayer. He's LARPing authoritarianism just the way he LARPed being a real CEO / executive on the Apprecentice (where in real practice his actual executive management record for actual operating companies was completely pathetic).
I really think he is just getting too old. Just like Biden's dotage prevented him from being a successful liberal president, Trump's is preventing him from being a successful authoritarian.
Daniel Drezner had a very useful (and international comparative informed) post on the clay feet of Trumpian authroitarian effort (and argument against the Democrat's / Lefties overdone doomerism discourse in re Trump power grab as actually giving more support than undermining): The Weakness and Incompetence of American Authoritarianism
As someone who's spent a good portion of professional life doing direct FDI into authoritarian geographies (and been around regime changes, en vivo) Drezner is spot-on.
American Lefties & Democrats are doing a great deal of Cosplaying 'resistance' to Authoritarianism which is sans doubt quite morally satisifying but it's Cosplaying more than really serious.
Not in any way to say the breaches in cultural barriers to authoritarianism is good or Trump is sans danger, but given both mega unpopuarlity in the sphere of economic pocket-book issues and his general incompetence, the leverage points to make inevitability look like a joke and further that prosperity / confort isn't coming - real authoritrian regimes buy-off, are ample levers to use
Drezner quoting Farrell which is now (end 2025) clearly highly applicable to Trump
"Authoritarian rulers devote a lot of time to preventing unrest from breaking out. Their best strategy for survival is to actually be popular. But that is hard to keep up. Acceptable substitutes include preventing people from discovering how unpopular the regime is, controlling media (to prevent coordination), and deploying the threat of physical violence to intimidate.
The problem with all of these strategies is that the ruler can do none of it on their own. Even the threat of violence, when looked at closely, requires some degree of willing coordination among the soldiers and policemen. That is why dictators are so careful about how they treat their armed forces. Authoritarians need to worry about the masses, but even more about their own coalitions.
More generally: struggles for power are struggles over the means of coordination. Who is capable of coordinating better, wins. And want-to-be authoritarians and mass publics face different coordination problems….
The authoritarian who wants to build a ruling coalition needs not only to make her success seem like a fait accompli. She also needs to persuade others that they will prosper rather than suffer from joining. The aspiring authoritarian needs to persuade allies that she (and they) will predate on outgroups, and that she will not predate on the allies themselves."
What has happened is that we were right. All of us who have been saying since 2015 that Trump is a threat to the Republic. That was and is true. Saying so was a necessary component of responding to that threat.
That the threat is beginning to look like it's largely been mitigated is great, but not evidence that there was never a threat, or that the people talking about it were wrong.
This seems to be a pretty common pattern in peoples' response to threats. I first saw it clearly with "the Y2K bug". The popular conception of that seems to be that it was a big joke that people overreacted to. But in reality what happened was that a very real problem was identified, a huge number of people worked hard to mitigate it, and that effort was very successful. Same thing with the "hole in the ozone".
A problem being solved is not evidence that the problem never existed.
“There are still paths to one-party authoritarian rule. We might see a thoroughly corrupted military and judicial takeover by 2026. We might see intense election rigging that no amount of voting can overcome.”
So as he gets less and less popular people are going to go more and more out on a limb for him? Did the generals seem impressed at Hegseth’s little lecture? This seems polyannaish. How many parties establish one party rule after THEY tank the economy?
I think you're right, and I certainly hope you are! But the uncomfortable truth is that no one (including Trump himself) knows how this attempt would go.
What actually happens if the president declares 2026 elections invalid due to "voter fraud", and orders the military to prevent any incoming house members from being seated? How do things actually play out if the president orders the national guard to arrest Democratic leaders the way he keeps threatening? The hope at that point is only that "someone" in that chain of command proves to be the next Mike Pence and refuses the order, but who specifically is it going to be? Mike Johnson? John Thune? One of the generals? A national guard soldier on the ground?
We don't really know who that person will be until it all happens, and neither does he. Standing up in that kind of situation can't be predicted in advance and it takes a lot of personal courage. How many people would have predicted that Mike Pence would be that guy before January 6th happened?
I do agree that Trump's unpopularity makes these kinds of authoritarian plays less likely to succeed, but that doesn't mean he can't succeed. Unlikely events happen all the time.
And more, Trump himself doesn't seem to be in a mental place where he's doing effective cost-benefit analysis or strategizing. He appears to be increasingly demented and living off a diet of internet sycophancy and AI slop. If nothing else, the situation remains volatile and uncertain as long as that's true. Though I think we're better off than we were a few months ago.
Noah missed the point about inflation. People were hard hit by the inflation of the Biden years and Trump promised to bring prices down. Even though the rate of inflation is not high by historical standards, the problem facing most American families is that prices remain high and they are getting higher. This is the most significant promise he made to voters and many believed that he could do it because he is such a brilliant businessman. He started calling affordability a hoax. This is one hoax too far.
Yes, a better definition of a hoax by far, is the notion that Trump gives or has ever given a rat's patootie about the working poor. There isn't a shred of evidence he ever has.
It's such a frustrating failure of media that Trump has been the most talked about person in the world for a decade now, and people still don't understand that he was always a shit businessman.
When polls consistently say people are pissed about the economy, insisting that “no actually they’re wrong the economy is fine…they’re all being crazy” is sort of ridiculous.
Noah is guilty of this. Near the 2024 election he insisted inflation wasn't that bad and Americans were being dumb and brainwashed into a "vibecession." Only after Kamala was trounced did he admit that inflation was actually bad and being mad about it wasn't so stupid after all.
It's not stupid for pundits to make this point, but it is stupid for politicians.
Also, I think the point was true prior to the election last year, and is way less true now.
The housing and job markets are genuinely in much more precarious positions at the end of 2025 than they were in the middle of 2024. Inflation is back to moving the wrong direction *despite* the employment situation beginning to look worrisome. Stagflation is looking like a much more realistic risk.
I kind of think that this is honestly what people were responding to even last year, that people "felt" like the economy was heading in this stagflationary direction, even though the current indicators at the time looked fine. In a sense, people were right, in the sense that they were predicting a worsening economy in 2025, and that is what has happened. But it's just more acute now, the looming economic weakness looks a lot closer now.
People voted for Trump to keep this from happening, and not only did he fail at that, he accelerated it. (Which was extremely predictable and predicted, but people who voted for Trump did not see it that way.)
Yeah I get the sense that Noah was writing a purposefully mild take. I think the conventional wisdom that the economy is looking poised for major weakness, and soon, seems more to the point than his muted take here would suggest.
Domestic economy - international items generally irrelevant to elections, barring events like 9/11 (voters don't care enough ceteris paribus).
Trump's self-damage on inflation and affordability and oppossite problem from Democrats (if Democrats get themselves paralysed by expertise-centric proceduralism, Trump II has the opposite problem, even when they've IDed a real issue that theoretically they may be right or partially right about, their bumbling and utter disregard to competence makes it high-likelihood of own-goals - this of course is a pattern deep in Trump Org - a totally incompetent business in terms of executing real operating businesses, although brilliant in a certain kind of marketing)...
ERGO - the best leverage point to win enough electoral sesults to block /impede Trump is exploiting that, in view of winning floating convertible voters.
Is the glass half full or half empty when it comes to the economy?
There are still ok numbers on the economy, and Kevin Hassett will give them to you when he is interviewed.
I am reminded of the gubernatorial campaign by a NYC resident in 2010. His slogan was “the rent is too damn high,” which was the name of his party. I think it perfectly expresses what people are feeling today. Prices are too damn high.
This feeling is about the cost of things; they are much higher than we remember. I can’t definitively say it, but when I retired at age 68, the amount of monthly income I was counting on to be comfortable by the end of 2023/24 was not enough. I found myself digging into savings to get to the end of the month.
We know things like car insurance rates went up over 30%, I cannot give the exact percentage but the cost of winterizing my sprinkler system feels like it rose with a 50% increase. Anything related to home and auto repairs feels much higher, and the price of a bag of groceries feels much higher. Veterinarian bills are higher, the cost of going to Home Depot is higher, I could go on, as there is no doubt that costs are higher.
We hit 3% inflation last month, which is what it was when Trump entered office. If it is three percent every year after a 19% increase, things are much higher than Americans remember.
The number of new hires is down significantly. My daughter has been unemployed since May.
As for Trump, I will just point out several things. It is hard for a President in modern America to poll above 50% in our hyper-partisan world. It is more likely that American voters will remain mainly grumpy because of Congress's incompetence. We don’t fix anything. Joe Biden decided to go progressive because some historians told him to do so.
We ended up with too much spending, inflation, an open border, crime spiked, and Uncle Joe was physically incapable of engaging due to the infirmity of age. Trump has closed the border to both legal and illegal immigration, but his ICE agents are ruining his image by NOT limiting his deportations to criminals. He is scooping up citizens, grandmothers, and grandfathers.
Tariffs are crushing businesses, especially small businesses. It was unnecessary; America has not been getting ripped off. It is populist hyperbole as is the rest of the garbage he spews.
His time is ending; he may be loved by MAGA, but that will only be a sliver of the country. He has worn out his welcome.
A mistake I think economists make is to look backward at the numbers and try to declare that affordability isn't that big a problem. To do so is to use the wrong data and poor definitions
Americans are looking forward and the future under Trump looks pretty crappy. Americans are worried about costs that are not captured in CPI including cars that now take 7 years to pay off because of higher interest rates or houses that are unaffordable either due to price or mortgage payment and see no way forward, add to that childcare, healthcare and retirement savings and remain as peeved as they have been since the Panic of 2008.
It can all be summed up as YOYO a helpful acronym for you're on your own. Trump's focus on bequeathing gifts to farmers, crypto, tech bros and all his other grifts only underscores have very much Americans are on their own.
That's entirely wrong. It is more than evident from track record that what other people think seriously bothers him, hates critcism and is in constant validation seeking mode.
A guy who did not care what the public (in some abstract sense) thinks would not have been engaging in weirdo games to get himself on Forbes Lists, even at one point faking being a different person to call up Forbes journalists.
These are not the actions of a thick skinned ego who gives no fucks, no.... This is deep Trump since the 80s.
Shallow, narsicist, vain, easily manipulated by praise, easily angered by any criticism but then if perceived to have power over him tries to seek change.
He is not really a billionnaire, but yes he probably hasn't really ever shopped in a supermarket.
That doesn't in itself make it impossible to understand people who do, but Trump is a narsicist and really gives no fucks nor has much awareness of anything but "praise for Trump"
that's not an economist mistake, that's a press mistake.
actual economists (of which I am) try to do forecasting on long-term basis on actual statistics.
the proper economic observation is that the Aggregates are hiding a lot of variation in economic pain points (a point Noah made in his post Trump - Nov24 posts) if one decomposes both regionally and one decomposes for income and job
This kind of data though is lagging - no magical data fairy generates it so collectiing reasonable samples etc is a slog, so one is always in lagging and behind
Party political partisans (D or R) however tend to do cheerleading...
BIS has a paper also on differential impacts of inflation on income categories.
Generally higher incomes have more buffer, are less exposed to direct immeidate pricing pressure in their consumption basket and this causes much more actual as well as perceived finanical stress [perceived is not to poo-poo!!])
Macro-economic aggregates are useful things. But not one sized all tools.
I see coffee and beef prices up, as well as imported beer and whisky, but in my area Safeway regularly has russet potatoes on sale for $0.99 for a 5 pound bag. Maybe that’s due to less sales to restaurants as people don’t eat out as much or overproduction. I also see that agricultural production is way up this year, with wheat, corn and soybeans up by over 10% and Argentina just had a record wheat crop also, while as expected wheat production in Ukraine and Russia is down.
I remember over the summer food prices going up and gas prices going down at the same time. So if inflation is only happening in some areas, but where it is we're really hurting, the overall inflation numbers wouldn't reflect that.
The economic numbers may look fine from an economist’s perspective. People feel that they are being manipulated, rents are being extracted. The economy no longer functions really on innovation and more on artificial scarcity. Innovations are to extract more, not to help us gain more. And nothing is helping with the social isolation that makes us increasingly deranged. Many of the talking heads have great social lives, as that is part of their jobs, so it may be hard to see how for normal people who relied on local community and family to stay grounded and meaningful are now lost and angry and mistrustful. Just all to say, Trump used to “represent” those people who were “left behind,” but now it’s hard for him to avoid being associated with the rent seeking powers, as he just seems to have checked out and uses the Presidency to extract rents from companies and countries.
At a purely subjective level I personally read Trump's forced crocodile grinning, as communicating he'd rather be somewhere else - this doesn't help someone trying to pitch confidence in their leadership. And, excuse my vulgarity, but I, and I think other people, have increasingly concluded he's a "nasty, selfish, ignorant asshole". To generate trust and belief, people want a leader they could "have a beer with", or at least a leader who isn't ugly and sneering.
It's worth remembering, Trump has never had to rely on leadership skills in any of his previous life, his businesses/grifts were always run by him and close family members.
Trump doesn’t even drink (which I guess debunks the link between alcohol and early dementia), and he is so ignorant and obnoxious they would have to give away some extremely good beer for me to even want to be in the same room with the bastard.
It’s interesting how similar Trump’s reaction to inflation and affordability is to Biden’s.
Repeating over and over that the economy is strong and that inflation is improving. I remember Biden traveling around the country to events meant to showcase an improving economy. Reportedly Trump’s advisors are planning on having him do the same thing. That strategy didn’t work for Biden and I doubt it will work for Trump. Especially given Trump’s tendency to go off script and begin ranting and lashing out.
"...Trump’s tendency to go off script and begin ranting and lashing out."
Yes, I'm not sure how polls can measure "personal ugliness", but I believe at some "fast thinking" response level, it disturbs people more than is captured in the data.
I think you dismiss the Latino shift. Last poll I saw was -39 from -2 for Latino voters. That’s huge. Latin men are a natural conservatives bloc (as Reagan once noted) and many voted for Trump, but they didn’t realize they were voting to be second class citizens where they would have to carry their papers all the time (and that might not be enough to avoid trouble). I think you’ve underestimated the impact of ICE on the electorate.
One of the two parties just needs to be conservative chill business and law enforcement focused. Neither party seems capable of delivering this right now. I think it's the biggest opportunity for Democrats right now, but it's looking unlikely. Seems like a post-MAGA Republican re-re-alignment is still the most likely place for this coalition to land. With some of the MAGA populists horse-shoeing onto the left, and others going back to be disaffected non-voters.
I'm not sure if this is an optimistic or bleak take.
Hi Noah, I'm a fan, I appreciate your research BEFORE you give an opinion. I am not an economist and would not argue with you on that basis. I did think, about half way in, that this article was satire: you list every bad thing that Trump et al have done - any sane person would say "He (trump) is cooked!" The one item I think you may have overlooked, and I don't think there is a way to put a number on this, is the Dems sharpening their questioning and actions - witnesseth the Noam hearing, she actually bolted early, couldn't take the heat at all. So even without a super majority (I agree with you there) I think the Dems are going to fight much harder with better legal weapons and as Republicans start to fear their constituents more than Trump, the Dems will have more and more policy wins.
What will be the effect on the economy from billions of dollars removed with tariffs and billions of dollars removed for health insurance? The rich who are the recipients of this largesse will squirrel most of it away in foreign banks or hoard their gold.
well - the 'rich' are not receipients of tariff largesse (actually no one is, as the economic dead-weight loss from this inefficeint form of taxation offsets the actual tax receipts to Treasury) nor removal of health insurance subsidies (which come from taxes...).
The tax cuts of course are largesse, that is going into the capital markets - neither gold hoarding nor "foreign banks" - US Capital Markets (stocks, bonds, private debt and capital etc) are wonderful machines, there's zero need for 60s style Swiss banks.
Tariffs were justification to pay for the funding for the BBB. So indirectly the rich benefitted from the tariffs mostly paid by less well off consumers. Foreign banks was intended to be a catch-all phrase to include things like hedge fund money in the Caymans etc.
My less nuanced opinion here from rural America is that there is a bit of Trump fatigue setting in, even among the die-hards. They aren't ready to embrace Democrats (I don't see that happening in my lifetime) but the Truth Social rants and the rambling public statements aren't landing like they used to. He's less of a messiah now and more background noise. That doesn't mean they've abandoned him, like Noah said, his border policy is still touted as a particularly strong accomplishment. However, he isn't seen as the end and be all of statesmanship, like he was in 2017/2018.
I see the MAGA movement waning a bit even here in the hinterlands. That doesn't mean it's over, but the more extreme edges are crumbling.
Where in the hinterlands? I wonder if this might be contained to one region of the country.
Northwest lower peninsula of Michigan. An odd corner of the country, but there are a lot of those.
Three big reasons why "affordability" is such a pain point.
1. Housing. If you want to BUY a house, that has gotten steadily less affordable for decades, but especially since the pandemic.
https://lawliberty.org/a-henry-ford-for-housing/
2. The inflation of 2020-2022 hasn't been reversed. It was always unreasonable to expect that it would be. Disinflation rather than deflation was the thing to hope for. But he encouraged unreasonable expectations for lower prices, and now people are mad that he's not delivering on that.
3. Bag job markets. While the unemployment uptick is modest, job openings are down, and people are staying employed by clinging to their jobs. The data isn't great for tracking this, but it seems to take more time and effort to get a job. We're not seeing an epic wave of mass layoffs, but there are enough to be ominous.
There was a Twitch streamer that Newsom interviewed on his podcast who said, rather pithily, "extremism is when no house". (This was mentioned in Newsom's recent interview on the Ezra Klein Show). I really think you cannot stress enough the role of the rise in the value of a downpayment as a multiple of years of the median / modal income for 20- to 30-somethings, in turning lots of young men into nihilistic Trump voters. We _must_ offer them an optimistic vision here -- not deporting all the immigrants and rolling back women's rights, but instead just _building enough homes that they're cheap again_. Including building a lot of manufactured housing, in unionized factories with good jobs.
What I found deeply frustrating in that Klein/Newsom interview is that when Ezra pushed him on housing affordability, Newsom's immediate instinct was to talk about how he raised the minimum wage. And I was just like, _dude_, do you not understand that throwing more money at the existing housing stock just raises prices? Could you go read Niskanen's "Cost Disease Socialism" report, please? If you want to turn off the conveyor belt of "extremism is when no house", you have to _build the f***ing house_.
Given the other constraints we face, that probably also means figuring out condo defect insurance reform. Going forwards, it's going to be a lot easier to give people "starter homes" in the form of a condo, rather than a standalone SFH.
https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/the-financial-impacts-of-construction-defect-liability-on-housing-development-in-california/
per Atrioc
I don’t know how even people who don’t read believe anything that Trump says about affordability. It’s a “Democrat hoax”, “you only need 2 pencils and 2 dolls”, “Biden did this”, “gas is $2 a gallon”, “groceries. That’s a quaint word. ‘groceries’”. The guy doesn’t even drive anything bigger than a golf cart, and probably has never stepped into a grocery store or bodega in his life.
Trump’s our only Lamborghini Diablo owning president.
Yes: it is prudent also I believe to be always looking for the disaggregations as the divergences between College Educated and Non-College on experienced inflation (past and current) given differing consumption baskets and equally higher sensitivity on Non-College to pricing pressures given less margin/sense-of-security are likely to once again be meaningful. National aggregates may deceive in part....
Of course equally not only people noticing Trump is not achieving promises (unachievable ones) but laos his own actions are feeding plus his reaction to criticism is as typical for him quite aggressively nasty - which probably will not have great results (not any more than Democrats own more polite but also tone-deaf 'Inflation-Bourgeousie-Splaining'
I think the real question Trump's detractors are trying to answer when they talk about the problems MAGA is facing is really about the state of Trump's authoritarian ambitions, rather than his presidency as a whole. The question isn't whether Trump will succeed at implementing bad policy X, but whether he'll be able to successfully consolidate authoritarian power and secure illiberal one-party rule.
I think a broad consensus in the anti-Trump movement is that the republic can survive a bad president with bad policies, but can't endure a full authoritarian consolidation. For the first half of this year, we felt at severe risk of the consolidation happening, and while that risk still feels present, it's diminished.
When people talk about the MAGA movement breaking down, what they're really talking about is the sense of inevitability falling away. The feeling of political gravity returning and other power centers in the government beginning to assert their own interests. A feeling that we're entering in an era where people and institutions might conceivably push back instead of bending the knee to the mad king. A presidency doesn't have to feel inevitable to succeed, but authoritarian movements struggle once they start to be openly challenged. Courage is contagious, and a few people resisting openly makes Trump's bullying management style much less effective. Once the silence breaks and people start to fight back, it's a turning point. Soon, everyone realizes that you always outnumbered the dictator's goons, that there's little he can actually do to you.
The MAGA populist movement doesn't feel so weak yet that it won't be able to do a lot of real damage to the country. But might be weak enough that it won't be able to easily consolidate authoritarian power without at least facing major resistance.
There are still paths to one-party authoritarian rule. We might see a thoroughly corrupted military and judicial takeover by 2026. We might see intense election rigging that no amount of voting can overcome. We might see another January-6th style of coup with full government and DoJ support. But all of these paths are more complicated and risky than the simplest approach, which was to sustain the appearance of popularity and power through sheer will and win legitimately on a platform of "Trump 2026, Trump 2028, Trump forever." For my part, I'm breathing a (perhaps premature) sigh of relief that this path now appears to be closed to the enemy.
Maybe where we're at is analogous to Gettysburg or Stalingrad. The war is a long way from being over, but the momentum has shifted.
Good analogy. What changes in the fact pattern would most add to conviction around a momentum shift? Big AI-related market correction? Bad jobs and inflation prints for November and December? Actual release of Epstein files? Resignations of 2-3 of the most inept Cabinet members? Underperformance in the next couple of special elections? Watch this space.
Supreme Court disallows emergency tariffs and Trump ignores the court? Invasion of Venezuela? CBP internal border checkpoints moved to major urban areas inside the allowed 100 mile border zone and force everyone to show RealID or passport? Not ever bringing back BLS jobs and inflation reports? Lots of bad stuff he may still have up his sleeves.
I actually feel the opposite. At the beginning of the term, he was doing lots of substantively bad things about destroying the entire foreign aid apparatus, killing tens of thousands of people that we had been saving, and destroying our alliances with tariffs. But in the past few months he’s been actually moving into authoritarian moves, unilaterally deploying the military to kill people in order to gain support, trying to change the electoral landscape to shore up his majorities, and trying to use litigation to imprison people he doesn’t like. He’s less popular now, but his actions seem more dangerous to the republic.
Trump is blowing up random drug-boats in the Carribean. While a gross misuse of military power it's not actual authoritarianism - not any more than Obama executive strikes in Yemen was. Dumb, stupid and immoral, but not authoritarianism.
Domestically where this counts: Trying to play authoritarian by sending national guard hither and thither has fallend generally flat on its face - arrests have failed - juries simply refusing indictments or convictions.
Rather than inflating Trump recognising and pointing to his feet of clay.
He's more dangerous to the republic where there is the sense of inevitability and there is popularity - there is plenty of good data on the fragility of real authoritarian regimes around such.
Drive unpopularity on pocket-book issues and you solve the Democracy threat in nearest term.
I agree with this, but the reason the boat strikes matter for authoritarianism is that it is a common strategy to gin up a war footing in order to pressure people to support the regime or be seen as traitorous to the nation.
They are screwing this up too though, by seemingly not even really trying to do propaganda to manufacture consent for a war. I'll be more worried if that changes and if the numbers supporting a war with Venezuela start ticking up. But I don't really think that is going to happen.
(I think Trump is honestly pretty fucked, politically, and that a successful authoritarian consolidation is pretty much off the table at this point. Which is great.)
But trying and failing are a sign of the strength of the Republic and he's failed of late.
Trying and failing equally as Drezner notes is something that undermines the key aspect of real authoritarians - much of what Trump does is blustering around like he was used to in his own family company, where even there he more Cosplayed executive than actually was effectively - the sense of inevitability.
Weakness and semi-comedic incompetence should be played up to further undercut.
I agree with both of you!
But to me, the distinction is that I don't think the move into baldly authoritarian stuff is *working*.
It isn't popular, and the vibe is a lot more "Why are you doing all this weird stuff instead of the affordability stuff you said you were gonna do? Nobody asked for a war with Venezuela or random murders of people on boats or asking brown citizens in the interior for their papers... What are you doing? We just wanted the price of stuff to go down...".
He seems to be focusing more on things that a lot of us *worried* he might do, but less on things that people who voted for him *hoped* he would do.
The elections in November were a clarifying event. They showed that Trump and MAGA are NOT popular and the majority of the country does not support their agenda.
An authoritarian leader needs to have a decent level of popular support in the beginning and they also need a good economy. Trump has neither.
Exactly, why real authoritarians or those making real plays on power become laser focused on Goodies to at least key support segments of their popular support.
Trump is delivering really none of this - nor does he show the persipacity to realise.
In the end Trump is a Cosplayer. He's LARPing authoritarianism just the way he LARPed being a real CEO / executive on the Apprecentice (where in real practice his actual executive management record for actual operating companies was completely pathetic).
He's a Marketing machine.
I really think he is just getting too old. Just like Biden's dotage prevented him from being a successful liberal president, Trump's is preventing him from being a successful authoritarian.
Daniel Drezner had a very useful (and international comparative informed) post on the clay feet of Trumpian authroitarian effort (and argument against the Democrat's / Lefties overdone doomerism discourse in re Trump power grab as actually giving more support than undermining): The Weakness and Incompetence of American Authoritarianism
And why it needs to be continually highlighted: https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-weakness-and-incompetence-of
As someone who's spent a good portion of professional life doing direct FDI into authoritarian geographies (and been around regime changes, en vivo) Drezner is spot-on.
American Lefties & Democrats are doing a great deal of Cosplaying 'resistance' to Authoritarianism which is sans doubt quite morally satisifying but it's Cosplaying more than really serious.
Not in any way to say the breaches in cultural barriers to authoritarianism is good or Trump is sans danger, but given both mega unpopuarlity in the sphere of economic pocket-book issues and his general incompetence, the leverage points to make inevitability look like a joke and further that prosperity / confort isn't coming - real authoritrian regimes buy-off, are ample levers to use
Drezner quoting Farrell which is now (end 2025) clearly highly applicable to Trump
"Authoritarian rulers devote a lot of time to preventing unrest from breaking out. Their best strategy for survival is to actually be popular. But that is hard to keep up. Acceptable substitutes include preventing people from discovering how unpopular the regime is, controlling media (to prevent coordination), and deploying the threat of physical violence to intimidate.
The problem with all of these strategies is that the ruler can do none of it on their own. Even the threat of violence, when looked at closely, requires some degree of willing coordination among the soldiers and policemen. That is why dictators are so careful about how they treat their armed forces. Authoritarians need to worry about the masses, but even more about their own coalitions.
More generally: struggles for power are struggles over the means of coordination. Who is capable of coordinating better, wins. And want-to-be authoritarians and mass publics face different coordination problems….
The authoritarian who wants to build a ruling coalition needs not only to make her success seem like a fait accompli. She also needs to persuade others that they will prosper rather than suffer from joining. The aspiring authoritarian needs to persuade allies that she (and they) will predate on outgroups, and that she will not predate on the allies themselves."
I disagree with the part about the "doomerism".
What has happened is that we were right. All of us who have been saying since 2015 that Trump is a threat to the Republic. That was and is true. Saying so was a necessary component of responding to that threat.
That the threat is beginning to look like it's largely been mitigated is great, but not evidence that there was never a threat, or that the people talking about it were wrong.
This seems to be a pretty common pattern in peoples' response to threats. I first saw it clearly with "the Y2K bug". The popular conception of that seems to be that it was a big joke that people overreacted to. But in reality what happened was that a very real problem was identified, a huge number of people worked hard to mitigate it, and that effort was very successful. Same thing with the "hole in the ozone".
A problem being solved is not evidence that the problem never existed.
“There are still paths to one-party authoritarian rule. We might see a thoroughly corrupted military and judicial takeover by 2026. We might see intense election rigging that no amount of voting can overcome.”
So as he gets less and less popular people are going to go more and more out on a limb for him? Did the generals seem impressed at Hegseth’s little lecture? This seems polyannaish. How many parties establish one party rule after THEY tank the economy?
I think you're right, and I certainly hope you are! But the uncomfortable truth is that no one (including Trump himself) knows how this attempt would go.
What actually happens if the president declares 2026 elections invalid due to "voter fraud", and orders the military to prevent any incoming house members from being seated? How do things actually play out if the president orders the national guard to arrest Democratic leaders the way he keeps threatening? The hope at that point is only that "someone" in that chain of command proves to be the next Mike Pence and refuses the order, but who specifically is it going to be? Mike Johnson? John Thune? One of the generals? A national guard soldier on the ground?
We don't really know who that person will be until it all happens, and neither does he. Standing up in that kind of situation can't be predicted in advance and it takes a lot of personal courage. How many people would have predicted that Mike Pence would be that guy before January 6th happened?
I do agree that Trump's unpopularity makes these kinds of authoritarian plays less likely to succeed, but that doesn't mean he can't succeed. Unlikely events happen all the time.
And more, Trump himself doesn't seem to be in a mental place where he's doing effective cost-benefit analysis or strategizing. He appears to be increasingly demented and living off a diet of internet sycophancy and AI slop. If nothing else, the situation remains volatile and uncertain as long as that's true. Though I think we're better off than we were a few months ago.
I hope you are right about the gradual, if not complete, erosion of support for the Trump regime. This is a bad dream from which we may not awaken.
Noah missed the point about inflation. People were hard hit by the inflation of the Biden years and Trump promised to bring prices down. Even though the rate of inflation is not high by historical standards, the problem facing most American families is that prices remain high and they are getting higher. This is the most significant promise he made to voters and many believed that he could do it because he is such a brilliant businessman. He started calling affordability a hoax. This is one hoax too far.
Yes, a better definition of a hoax by far, is the notion that Trump gives or has ever given a rat's patootie about the working poor. There isn't a shred of evidence he ever has.
It's such a frustrating failure of media that Trump has been the most talked about person in the world for a decade now, and people still don't understand that he was always a shit businessman.
When polls consistently say people are pissed about the economy, insisting that “no actually they’re wrong the economy is fine…they’re all being crazy” is sort of ridiculous.
Noah is guilty of this. Near the 2024 election he insisted inflation wasn't that bad and Americans were being dumb and brainwashed into a "vibecession." Only after Kamala was trounced did he admit that inflation was actually bad and being mad about it wasn't so stupid after all.
It's not stupid for pundits to make this point, but it is stupid for politicians.
Also, I think the point was true prior to the election last year, and is way less true now.
The housing and job markets are genuinely in much more precarious positions at the end of 2025 than they were in the middle of 2024. Inflation is back to moving the wrong direction *despite* the employment situation beginning to look worrisome. Stagflation is looking like a much more realistic risk.
I kind of think that this is honestly what people were responding to even last year, that people "felt" like the economy was heading in this stagflationary direction, even though the current indicators at the time looked fine. In a sense, people were right, in the sense that they were predicting a worsening economy in 2025, and that is what has happened. But it's just more acute now, the looming economic weakness looks a lot closer now.
People voted for Trump to keep this from happening, and not only did he fail at that, he accelerated it. (Which was extremely predictable and predicted, but people who voted for Trump did not see it that way.)
>The labor market is still fairly strong, but deteriorating mildly, with rising layoffs.
I'll quibble with this piece. If you look at non farm job openings growth, or job quits, the job market seems quite weak.
And as Powell said there are no longer any official job numbers from BLS.
Yeah I get the sense that Noah was writing a purposefully mild take. I think the conventional wisdom that the economy is looking poised for major weakness, and soon, seems more to the point than his muted take here would suggest.
Domestic economy - international items generally irrelevant to elections, barring events like 9/11 (voters don't care enough ceteris paribus).
Trump's self-damage on inflation and affordability and oppossite problem from Democrats (if Democrats get themselves paralysed by expertise-centric proceduralism, Trump II has the opposite problem, even when they've IDed a real issue that theoretically they may be right or partially right about, their bumbling and utter disregard to competence makes it high-likelihood of own-goals - this of course is a pattern deep in Trump Org - a totally incompetent business in terms of executing real operating businesses, although brilliant in a certain kind of marketing)...
ERGO - the best leverage point to win enough electoral sesults to block /impede Trump is exploiting that, in view of winning floating convertible voters.
Is the glass half full or half empty when it comes to the economy?
There are still ok numbers on the economy, and Kevin Hassett will give them to you when he is interviewed.
I am reminded of the gubernatorial campaign by a NYC resident in 2010. His slogan was “the rent is too damn high,” which was the name of his party. I think it perfectly expresses what people are feeling today. Prices are too damn high.
This feeling is about the cost of things; they are much higher than we remember. I can’t definitively say it, but when I retired at age 68, the amount of monthly income I was counting on to be comfortable by the end of 2023/24 was not enough. I found myself digging into savings to get to the end of the month.
We know things like car insurance rates went up over 30%, I cannot give the exact percentage but the cost of winterizing my sprinkler system feels like it rose with a 50% increase. Anything related to home and auto repairs feels much higher, and the price of a bag of groceries feels much higher. Veterinarian bills are higher, the cost of going to Home Depot is higher, I could go on, as there is no doubt that costs are higher.
We hit 3% inflation last month, which is what it was when Trump entered office. If it is three percent every year after a 19% increase, things are much higher than Americans remember.
The number of new hires is down significantly. My daughter has been unemployed since May.
As for Trump, I will just point out several things. It is hard for a President in modern America to poll above 50% in our hyper-partisan world. It is more likely that American voters will remain mainly grumpy because of Congress's incompetence. We don’t fix anything. Joe Biden decided to go progressive because some historians told him to do so.
We ended up with too much spending, inflation, an open border, crime spiked, and Uncle Joe was physically incapable of engaging due to the infirmity of age. Trump has closed the border to both legal and illegal immigration, but his ICE agents are ruining his image by NOT limiting his deportations to criminals. He is scooping up citizens, grandmothers, and grandfathers.
Tariffs are crushing businesses, especially small businesses. It was unnecessary; America has not been getting ripped off. It is populist hyperbole as is the rest of the garbage he spews.
His time is ending; he may be loved by MAGA, but that will only be a sliver of the country. He has worn out his welcome.
A mistake I think economists make is to look backward at the numbers and try to declare that affordability isn't that big a problem. To do so is to use the wrong data and poor definitions
Americans are looking forward and the future under Trump looks pretty crappy. Americans are worried about costs that are not captured in CPI including cars that now take 7 years to pay off because of higher interest rates or houses that are unaffordable either due to price or mortgage payment and see no way forward, add to that childcare, healthcare and retirement savings and remain as peeved as they have been since the Panic of 2008.
It can all be summed up as YOYO a helpful acronym for you're on your own. Trump's focus on bequeathing gifts to farmers, crypto, tech bros and all his other grifts only underscores have very much Americans are on their own.
Well, if we want to understand Trump’s mindset, let’s start with the fact that he is a billionaire and has never shopped for groceries in his life.
Or gasoline, which he still claims is under $2.
You don’t think he fills the Beast by himself?
What would happen if we stopped analyzing Trump's mindset and just pressured him constantly with his failures and contempt for Americans.
I doubt criticism from Americans bother him. His ego is very large
That's entirely wrong. It is more than evident from track record that what other people think seriously bothers him, hates critcism and is in constant validation seeking mode.
A guy who did not care what the public (in some abstract sense) thinks would not have been engaging in weirdo games to get himself on Forbes Lists, even at one point faking being a different person to call up Forbes journalists.
These are not the actions of a thick skinned ego who gives no fucks, no.... This is deep Trump since the 80s.
Shallow, narsicist, vain, easily manipulated by praise, easily angered by any criticism but then if perceived to have power over him tries to seek change.
He is not really a billionnaire, but yes he probably hasn't really ever shopped in a supermarket.
That doesn't in itself make it impossible to understand people who do, but Trump is a narsicist and really gives no fucks nor has much awareness of anything but "praise for Trump"
that's not an economist mistake, that's a press mistake.
actual economists (of which I am) try to do forecasting on long-term basis on actual statistics.
the proper economic observation is that the Aggregates are hiding a lot of variation in economic pain points (a point Noah made in his post Trump - Nov24 posts) if one decomposes both regionally and one decomposes for income and job
This kind of data though is lagging - no magical data fairy generates it so collectiing reasonable samples etc is a slog, so one is always in lagging and behind
(e.g. St Louis Fed arty: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/jan/look-inflation-recent-years-lens-macroeconomic-model - there's another better one but I can't find it - anyway Fed economists do look at this.
Party political partisans (D or R) however tend to do cheerleading...
BIS has a paper also on differential impacts of inflation on income categories.
Generally higher incomes have more buffer, are less exposed to direct immeidate pricing pressure in their consumption basket and this causes much more actual as well as perceived finanical stress [perceived is not to poo-poo!!])
Macro-economic aggregates are useful things. But not one sized all tools.
Groceries. Up 30% since the pandemic. We see this every single time we buy potatoes and sour cream. Isn’t that enough to sour us all?
I see coffee and beef prices up, as well as imported beer and whisky, but in my area Safeway regularly has russet potatoes on sale for $0.99 for a 5 pound bag. Maybe that’s due to less sales to restaurants as people don’t eat out as much or overproduction. I also see that agricultural production is way up this year, with wheat, corn and soybeans up by over 10% and Argentina just had a record wheat crop also, while as expected wheat production in Ukraine and Russia is down.
I remember over the summer food prices going up and gas prices going down at the same time. So if inflation is only happening in some areas, but where it is we're really hurting, the overall inflation numbers wouldn't reflect that.
Gas prices are going down because there’s a massive over-supply and no wars to bring prices up.
The economic numbers may look fine from an economist’s perspective. People feel that they are being manipulated, rents are being extracted. The economy no longer functions really on innovation and more on artificial scarcity. Innovations are to extract more, not to help us gain more. And nothing is helping with the social isolation that makes us increasingly deranged. Many of the talking heads have great social lives, as that is part of their jobs, so it may be hard to see how for normal people who relied on local community and family to stay grounded and meaningful are now lost and angry and mistrustful. Just all to say, Trump used to “represent” those people who were “left behind,” but now it’s hard for him to avoid being associated with the rent seeking powers, as he just seems to have checked out and uses the Presidency to extract rents from companies and countries.
At a purely subjective level I personally read Trump's forced crocodile grinning, as communicating he'd rather be somewhere else - this doesn't help someone trying to pitch confidence in their leadership. And, excuse my vulgarity, but I, and I think other people, have increasingly concluded he's a "nasty, selfish, ignorant asshole". To generate trust and belief, people want a leader they could "have a beer with", or at least a leader who isn't ugly and sneering.
It's worth remembering, Trump has never had to rely on leadership skills in any of his previous life, his businesses/grifts were always run by him and close family members.
Trump doesn’t even drink (which I guess debunks the link between alcohol and early dementia), and he is so ignorant and obnoxious they would have to give away some extremely good beer for me to even want to be in the same room with the bastard.
It’s interesting how similar Trump’s reaction to inflation and affordability is to Biden’s.
Repeating over and over that the economy is strong and that inflation is improving. I remember Biden traveling around the country to events meant to showcase an improving economy. Reportedly Trump’s advisors are planning on having him do the same thing. That strategy didn’t work for Biden and I doubt it will work for Trump. Especially given Trump’s tendency to go off script and begin ranting and lashing out.
"...Trump’s tendency to go off script and begin ranting and lashing out."
Yes, I'm not sure how polls can measure "personal ugliness", but I believe at some "fast thinking" response level, it disturbs people more than is captured in the data.
I think you dismiss the Latino shift. Last poll I saw was -39 from -2 for Latino voters. That’s huge. Latin men are a natural conservatives bloc (as Reagan once noted) and many voted for Trump, but they didn’t realize they were voting to be second class citizens where they would have to carry their papers all the time (and that might not be enough to avoid trouble). I think you’ve underestimated the impact of ICE on the electorate.
One of the two parties just needs to be conservative chill business and law enforcement focused. Neither party seems capable of delivering this right now. I think it's the biggest opportunity for Democrats right now, but it's looking unlikely. Seems like a post-MAGA Republican re-re-alignment is still the most likely place for this coalition to land. With some of the MAGA populists horse-shoeing onto the left, and others going back to be disaffected non-voters.
I'm not sure if this is an optimistic or bleak take.
Hi Noah, I'm a fan, I appreciate your research BEFORE you give an opinion. I am not an economist and would not argue with you on that basis. I did think, about half way in, that this article was satire: you list every bad thing that Trump et al have done - any sane person would say "He (trump) is cooked!" The one item I think you may have overlooked, and I don't think there is a way to put a number on this, is the Dems sharpening their questioning and actions - witnesseth the Noam hearing, she actually bolted early, couldn't take the heat at all. So even without a super majority (I agree with you there) I think the Dems are going to fight much harder with better legal weapons and as Republicans start to fear their constituents more than Trump, the Dems will have more and more policy wins.
Marking success as leaving Kristi Noem bamboozled is a very low bar.
What will be the effect on the economy from billions of dollars removed with tariffs and billions of dollars removed for health insurance? The rich who are the recipients of this largesse will squirrel most of it away in foreign banks or hoard their gold.
well - the 'rich' are not receipients of tariff largesse (actually no one is, as the economic dead-weight loss from this inefficeint form of taxation offsets the actual tax receipts to Treasury) nor removal of health insurance subsidies (which come from taxes...).
The tax cuts of course are largesse, that is going into the capital markets - neither gold hoarding nor "foreign banks" - US Capital Markets (stocks, bonds, private debt and capital etc) are wonderful machines, there's zero need for 60s style Swiss banks.
Tariffs were justification to pay for the funding for the BBB. So indirectly the rich benefitted from the tariffs mostly paid by less well off consumers. Foreign banks was intended to be a catch-all phrase to include things like hedge fund money in the Caymans etc.