It’s the mark of an influential president that economists attempt to distill their various policies into a coherent school of thought.
Reaganomics meant trickle-down tax cuts and tight monetary policy; Clintonomics focused on fiscal discipline and free trade; and Obamanomics meant middle-class tax credits and expanded access to health care.
Then there’s President Donald Trump, whose policies don’t fit neatly into a straightforward explanation.
In his first term, Trump stuck to standard conservative fare of tax cuts and deregulation. Despite vowing to fight for America’s “forgotten men and women,” his $1.9 trillion tax cut package largely benefited top earners and multinational firms. His most dramatic innovation was reviving the use of tariffs and threatening trade wars, but he mostly backed down in favor of tinkering with a free trade deal with Canada and Mexico.
But if Trumponomics 1.0 was a slightly more bellicose version of trickle-down economics, it’s clear that his second term is a much different animal. One that’s broken free of its cage.
So far this year, Trump has enacted tariffs on nearly every country on the planet; started major trade wars with China, Canada and Mexico; and launched an enormous deportation campaign with still-unfolding consequences for industries such as farming, construction and hospitality. The Republican megabill that includes most of his domestic agenda would slash taxes for the wealthy and cut benefits for the poor, while massively increasing the national debt.
It’s a mess of contradictions.
What Trumponomics engineered so far is an economy divided by itself, with promises to accelerate expansion using new revenue sources like tariffs that directly hit that same growth. It’s a mess of contradictions.
Trump has a taste for lobbing attacks at Republicans who annoy him. But he’s also pursuing the most aggressive version of standard GOP economic policy in decades. He broke with Republican orthodoxy in 2016 by vowing to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But the Elon Musk-led DOGE effort sought to make it harder to access Social Security benefits, and his “big beautiful bill” would add new hurdles to Medicaid.
The central animating belief of Trumponomics is that working-class Americans are being cheated by other countries, immigrants and bureaucrats. To that end, his policies seek to punish other countries, kick out immigrants and fire federal workers. But they also do little to help those same working stiffs and, by cutting programs that do, leaving them worse off overall.
Trump and his allies have targeted the “administrative state,” arguing that the federal government has abused its power, but they’ve also sought a dramatic shift toward centralizing economic policy — among other powers — in the White House, testing the guardrails of American democracy and adding an unpredictable element to every decision.
That approach can be seen most directly in Trump’s Truth Social post Monday after the attack on Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend. “Everyone, keep oil prices down,” he wrote. “I’m watching!” This appeared to be directed at oil and gas companies and other oil-producing countries. The vague threat, though, didn’t have teeth. Regardless, it cast off Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the marketplace in favor of the strongman’s steely fist. Indeed, much of Trump’s economic policy seems to be based on fleeting whims. He claimed that his campaign proposal to end taxes on tips started with a conversation with a waitress. His other campaign proposals also seemed to be written on the back of a dinner napkin, Arthur Laffer-style: No tax on overtime! End inflation! Cap credit card interest rates! At one point, he pitched exempting police officers, firefighters and active-duty military members from federal income tax. Some of these ideas have a shot at getting embedded in law; others were never mentioned again. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers have compared Trump to a modern version of Juan Perón. Trumponomics has also prompted some to reach into foreign history books. Economists such as former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers have compared Trump to a modern version of Juan Perón, a strongman leader from 20th-century Argentina. He cited Perón’s appetite for tariffs, robust deficit-spending and efforts to consolidate control over Argentina’s central bank, and Trump has pursued identical goals with much gusto. He’s pressured the Federal Reserve so much that the Supreme Court went out of its way to argue the Fed could retain its historic independence in a decision that undermined other agencies. The term Trumponomics may be a misnomer, as it implies an enduring set of principles that other politicians could apply on their own. But Trump’s economic policies are centered on personal grievance, applied inconsistently and justified by wildly misleading rhetoric. In the end, Trumponomics is whatever Trump says it is until he changes his mind, which he inevitably does, and even then, its actions often don’t match its own stated goals. For that reason, it’s unlikely that turbocharged Trumponomics will last beyond Trump’s presidency. Subscribe to the Project 47 newsletter to receive weekly updates on and expert insight into the key issues and figures defining Trump’s second term.
Joseph Zeballos-Roig
Joseph Zeballos-Roig is a reporter who has covered economic policy and politics for Semafor, Business Insider and Quartz, among other publications. 
