Recent data from the University of Michigan shows consumer confidence in the economy has plummeted to its lowest level since 2022, as prices rise and stocks fall in response to Donald Trump’s unnecessary and rudderless trade war.
The stumbling stock market and all the understandable worries about it are not a liberal conspiracy theory. The Fox News universe has been trying to prepare Trump supporters for economic pain as a consequence of his policies. But rather than grapple with that reality, Team Trump is trying to confine the American public to a fantasyland of its own creation, baselessly blaming the tanking economy on former President Joe Biden.
And, in at least one instance, suggesting the low consumer confidence is actually a fabrication of people with an axe to grind. Kevin Hassett, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, faced some pushback on Fox News, of all places, after he downplayed host Martha MacCallum’s question about what evidence he could offer that consumer confidence was improving. Hassett said:
“The thing that I care most about is the hard data. The consumer confidence numbers can sometimes fluctuate around elections, for example, because of people whose party lost or are really in a bad mood and they say, ‘Oh, things are just terrible. You know, the guy I didn’t vote for is gonna destroy the economy.’ But then, when it doesn’t happen, people get around. So I don’t actually put a lot of faith in the consumer confidence numbers right around election time.
The proposition that Trump’s policies might hurt the economy isn’t liberal propaganda. Last year, Elon Musk literally predicted his and Trump’s economic policies would crash the economy. MacCallum interrupted Hassett’s deflection to note that “we’re pretty far past the November election” and again asked Hassett for any evidence to suggest consumer sentiment was actually good.
Hassett declined to provide any, then went on to say he doesn’t believe the University of Michigan survey because “there are a lot of Michigan people doing the survey that I don’t necessarily think were doing anything other than making a partisan survey.”
Watch the exchange here: If the conservative Wall Street Journal is willing to cite the same University of Michigan survey, it’s pretty laughable to try to spin the survey as “partisan” and untrustworthy. Hassett’s smokescreen — along with Trump’s recent social media outburst against the Journal’s reporting that Trump’s tariffs are destabilizing the economy — show how the administration is not coping well with the negative consequences (and growing unpopularity) of Trump’s haphazard and ham-fisted policymaking.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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