When does a president own the economy? After more than 330 days since taking office, Donald Trump’s answer appears to be: not yet.
To hear him tell it, the economy still belongs to Joe Biden — at least the parts of it Trump doesn’t like. Laced throughout Trump’s rhetoric is a contradictory assessment of the economy. He wants credit for positive economic indicators, like growth in wages and the stock market, while he deflects blame for less favorable ones, like rising unemployment and stubbornly high inflation.
The economy is both the “hottest” on Earth and in need of “fixing” from the “brink of ruin.” Affordability is both his “highest priority” and — to use a term he has repeatedly employed but stopped short of using in his prime-time address on Wednesday — a “hoax” Democrats exploit to tar him. (The word “Biden” appeared more frequently in that speech than the terms “affordability” or “economy” — despite the latter two consistently ranking as the most important priorities to the American public.)
But even as the president spent Wednesday night arguing that it was still effectively Biden’s economy, his administration’s top economic officials say it’s Trump’s.
“It’s a Trump economy now,” the president’s National Economic Council director, Kevin Hassett, said on Thursday morning.
To Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the Trump economy arrived over the summer. “GDP just surged to 3% and the Trump Economy has officially arrived,” Lutnick wrote on X in July. “Biden’s first quarter is behind us, and growth is already accelerating.”
The conflicting messages come as recent polling suggests that 57% of Americans blame Trump, not Biden, for the current state of the economy, undercutting Trump’s effort to shift blame to his predecessor.
Democratic lawmakers largely agree that Trump now owns the economy, though they argue that his policies — including tariffs and the extension of his 2017 tax cuts — could create even further headwinds.
“It’s been Trump’s economy,” said Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., who blamed the Trump-era tax cuts for holding back growth during the Biden administration.
“He may try to sidestep that responsibility, but we all know that it was his reckless tariffs that have driven the prices of goods in our supermarket,” New York Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat added.
Some Republican strategists said Trump was justified in outlining how Biden’s policies affected the economy, but they cautioned that the president risked appearing out of touch by trying to shirk responsibility for it.
“The reality of the situation is that the president is now sitting in the Oval Office, Republicans are in control of both chambers, and the perception is that they are in control of the economy right now,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist who served in Trump’s first administration. That position was echoed by Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and former Republican National Committee official, who told MS NOW’s Katy Tur on Thursday: “You can’t convince people that they don’t feel what they feel.” A Republican operative close to the White House balked at the notion that Trump was “shifting blame,” instead framing the president’s focus on Biden as an acknowledgement “that there’s more work to do and the mess that was created by the previous administration is still causing the pain.” Yet the operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly about Trump’s administration, conceded that the president would benefit from shifting his focus away from Biden and landing more squarely on the economic “pain” Americans say they’re experiencing. “Do I think the message could be tighter in the form of acknowledging the pain that the American people are feeling, and not overselling the health of the economy right now? Sure,” the operative said. “I will contend that we should not oversell the economy when a lot of Americans are not feeling it in December 2025.” Both Republican strategists also challenged critics of Trump’s continued focus on Biden almost one year into his presidency, noting that Trump is hardly the first president to blame his predecessor for ruinous policies. “I remember an elderly president talking about the mess that they inherited coming into office and trying to statistically justify and prove issues on the economy while the country continued to feel high prices and economic pain,” Bartlett said. “That, of course, is Joe Biden.”
Nnamdi Egwuonwu is a reporter for MS NOW. Recommended
