By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Now for a provocation: No one has done more to vindicate
Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell than Donald Trump, and the sooner people
understand that the quicker we’ll get back to something like normalcy.
Hold that thought.
One of the more frequent talking points of Democrats,
pundits (including yours truly), and even some anti-war MAGA type
critics of Trump is that the president has “taken his eye off the ball” when it comes to the economy
and affordability.
Since I’ve used that formulation myself, I should defend
it before I get to my denunciation of it. As a political matter, voters judge
presidents as much by what they talk about as anything else. Trump won the 2024
election for a lot of reasons, but a very good case can be made that the
decisive voters in the seven swing states that gave him the win cast their
ballots for Trump out of an understandable nostalgia for the pre-COVID economy
of the first Trump term and an equally understandable dyspeptic view of the
economy under Joe Biden. That first “Trump economy” was indeed very, very,
good. The “Biden economy” wasn’t (I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute).
Inflation and other Biden-and-COVID-induced economic wreckage prompted lots of
working-class voters—many of whom probably voted for Barack Obama in 2012,
Trump in 2016, and Biden in 2020—to vote for Trump again in 2024.
Then, when Trump got into office, he focused—either
rhetorically or substantively—on all manner of things that many of those
decisive voters didn’t necessarily support or prioritize. We don’t need to
review the last year in granular detail, but surely a significant number of
Trump’s Hispanic (or non-Hispanic!) voters didn’t think we’d see the specific
mass deportation efforts that have so badly dented Trump’s approval on
immigration. Some voters probably believed Trump when he said he didn’t have
anything to do with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, only to be
surprised by the performative vandalism of DOGE in practice. His biggest fans
were undoubtedly stoked for all of the retribution against his personal enemies
but, again, those majority-making swing voters probably didn’t expect it to
take up so much presidential bandwidth. It seems reasonable to assume that many
of them didn’t see the destruction of the East Wing, the renaming of the
Kennedy Center, the deployment of National Guard troops, the Greenland
bullying, or the riot of economic illiteracy of “Liberation Day” and say, “Yes,
this is what I voted for!”
So, at the level of political perception, I think it’s
perfectly fine to talk about the president “taking his eye off the ball” with
regard to the economy.The point I want to get to is that there’s a fallacy at
the heart of the idea that if the president does concentrate on the
economy, the economy will actually roar. This is a very longstanding gripe of
mine. For instance, in 2002, I wrote:
Then there’s the inconvenient
fiction that the president of the United States “runs” a $10 trillion economy.
All of the metaphors and verbs used by the press leave you with the impression
that the president sits in some giant cockpit, fidgeting with flashing lights
and humming doodads as he “drives” the economy. Meanwhile, the White House
itself, somehow, “creates” jobs. “The White House created 200,000 jobs in the
last quarter…” Is there a Play-Doh job factory next to the White House bowling
alley? And — gird your loins! — if the president is “asleep at the switch,” the
economy could “derail” and “plunge into a ditch.” Of course, others see the
president as some sort of farmer who can “grow the economy,” so long as he
“focuses like a laser” on doing just that.
When you think about it, such
language betrays an almost medieval understanding of economics. If the king
doth prosper, so doth the land. It reminds me of John Boorman’s Excalibur.
Once King Arthur is restored by the Grail, so too is all of England. Does any
serious person believe that if a president “pays more attention” to the
economy, it will necessarily do better than it will if he “ignores” the
economy? Well, actually a lot of serious people seriously believe that. … Jimmy
Carter was a micro-detail guy, and few people would say he ended the debate on
how to manage the economy (let alone the White House tennis-court schedule,
another detail he focused like a laser on).
FDR was probably the most famous example of a president
keeping his eye on the economy. Over four terms, he didn’t fix it. We had to
wait for the “externalities” of the post-World War II era to really get the
economy roaring.
Since FDR, every president has leaned, to one extent or
another, into the idea that they “run” the economy and “create” jobs—so long as
things are going well. And both parties, and much of the media, signal-boost
these claims.
At the margins, I think this is defensible for three
reasons. First, it’s endemic to politics. Second, it’s endemic to politics
because lots of people think it’s to some extent true. Third, economic policy
does matter, and because of reasons 1 and 2, it gets personalized around the
president (particularly in an era of congressional impotence).
Nobody has internalized this idea more than Trump, who
has literally
described the economy as a department store that he runs.
Which brings me to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
To the extent that economic policy can be directly
credited for the pre-COVID economy in Trump’s first term, they deserve the
lion’s share of the credit. Look, I get it, all presidents take credit for the
legislation they supported and signed. So if you want to give Trump that
conventional form of credit, fine.
But the simple, historical fact is that Trump signed on
to legislative packages forged by Ryan and McConnell and relied on basic
normie, “establishment,” conservative policies and ideas.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut the top corporate tax
rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, while also lowering individual rates and
moving toward full expensing. This was basically the kind of supply-side,
pro-investment tax agenda congressional Republicans and right-of-center think
tanks had been pushing long before Trump won. It most immediately drew on
Ryan’s 2016 “A Better Way” blueprint.
I should note that Ryan included a Border Adjustment Tax
in that plan—taxing imports but exempting exports, to incentivize domestic
manufacturing. I didn’t like it, but it was crafted in large part as a more
elegant and less harmful way to satisfy Trump’s hunger for his Tariff
Everybody! approach. It also failed to make it into the 2017 Tax Cuts and
Jobs Act.
I bring that up because it illustrates how little of
Trumponomics made it into the major economic policies of the first Trump term.
Yes, there were some tariffs (which Biden mostly kept), but their significance,
never mind success, is highly debatable. He did renegotiate and rename NAFTA
into the USMCA, but those changes were mostly cosmetic. He wanted the headline,
not the substance.
The point is, if you want to credit “Washington” for the
good economy of the first Trump term, you need to allow for the fact that it
wasn’t Trump’s unique genius and economic mastery that were responsible. It was
a conventional, mainstream, tax and regulatory agenda favored by the supposedly
RINO, cuck, “establishment,” zombie Reaganites. Steve Bannon never got his new
New Deal.
Now, the broader story pushed by Trump and his supporters
is that Ryan, McConnell, and the other normie Republicans in Congress and the
White House worked against Trump and Trumpism, not just on economics, but on
everything. They wouldn’t “let Trump be Trump.”
Consider Mike Pence. A stalwart defender of Trump for
four years, Pence did his best to be loyal to Trump while also pushing sound policies as best he could behind the scenes. But when he wouldn’t “let Trump be
Trump” on January 6, he was denounced as a coward and traitor.
Trump and his inner circle of loyalists were determined
not to repeat such mistakes in his second term. J.D. Vance was selected because
he assured the Trump boys and Tucker Carlson that he would be no Mike Pence.
He’d be a Renfield to Trump’s Dracula. Out went the Trump restrainers, in came
the pliant yes men and women, charged with one overriding command, “Let the
baby have his bottle”—on tariffs, retribution, NATO, myriad vanity projects
such as Trump Accounts, the Trump Card, the Trump Institute of Peace, the Trump
Kennedy Center, etc.—and of, of course, “taking the oil” in Venezuela and (if
Operation Epic Fury had worked the way he planned) Iran.
I don’t want to rehash my “news”letter
from last week, but I’ll say it again: The Iran war isn’t a “betrayal” of
“Trumpism.” It’s exactly the kind of thing you get when you organize an
administration and GOP congressional majority around the “principle” that you
can’t say no to the boss. “In Trump we Trust” is not a policy agenda, it’s a
cult of personality.
If the theory is that presidents in general, or Trump in
particular, run the economy, then you have to ask why is this economy so
inferior to the Trump I economy. Now, I want to be clear: I think Democrats
wildly exaggerate how bad the economy is. At least until the Iran war, it was
going pretty well. But prices were still too high. Housing remains a real
problem. Job growth wasn’t stellar, but unemployment was okay. In Trump’s first
year, the economy grew 2.1 percent, down from 2.8 percent in Biden’s last year.
Affordability, for all its base-stealing as a slogan, was a legitimate issue.
But the economy wasn’t “roaring like never before.” Few Americans felt like we were
in a new “Golden Age.”
As Richard Reinsch explained
this week, the Liberation Day agenda—despite all of the TACOing and
revisions—has not delivered what Trump said it would, in terms of jobs (we shed 100,000
manufacturing in 2025), revenues (billions not trillions, mostly paid by
Americans), or restructuring the economy.
Of course, no one—even his closest admirers—will deny
that Trump considers himself a great salesman or that all presidents try to
talk up the economy. But you have to accept that all of his talk about how the
economy is going unprecedentedly well falls somewhere between obvious lies to
wild exaggeration. And when he says affordability is a “hoax” you have to
decide whether he understands it’s not and is lying or whether he actually
believes it, which means his mastery over the economy isn’t what his superfans
claim. Again, if it was, he would have willed into existence the same economy,
or a better one, that we had pre-COVID.
And if you still cling to the idea that Washington can
deliver that kind of economy simply by pulling the right levers, you have to
ask why they did it in Trump’s first term, but not his second. My answer to
that, at least in part, is that a lot of smart, patriotic, and unfairly
demonized Republicans didn’t let Trump be Trump.
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