President Donald Trump is so desperate for fresh ideas on the economy he’s now turning to the people he’s repeatedly blamed for the nation’s dismal fiscal performance.
MAGA insiders told Politico’s Playbook newsletter Friday that the White House is weighing discussions with the Democratic Party as a way of melding “what might be termed traditional Republican approaches and traditional Democratic approaches.”
“While these proposals are more populist in orientation, it doesn’t mean just taking off the shelf a Democratic proposal and refashioning it,” one official said. “It is trying to figure out the ways in which the free market and Trump-ist populism can be advanced using different paradigms.”
Economists remain divided on whether Trumponomics can be advanced at all.
The president has repeatedly leveraged and threatened astronomical tariffs against trading partners as part of an “America First” policy he says will establish a “level playing field” for the U.S. in international markets.
But financial experts have pointed out those same markets have overwhelmingly favored the U.S. for the better part of a century and warned that trade tariffs almost always end up affecting domestic prices, since businesses move to shift the additional costs onto consumers over time.
At 2.7 percent, inflation remains persistently high, with the increased cost of bare essentials like utilities, energy, and groceries reported to be hitting lower- and middle-income families hardest.
While headline unemployment rates may not have spiked dramatically, job growth has slowed significantly across multiple sectors.
Significant government layoffs, with hundreds of thousands of positions axed amid MAGA’s cost-cutting frenzy last year, have further reduced household income for former federal staffers while dampening consumer demand in local economies dependent on government employment.
A record-breaking government shutdown in October and November of last year is also estimated to have cost the economy tens of billions of dollars, placing a considerable dent in both consumer and business confidence across the country.
A fresh Wall Street Journal poll this week found that voters are more likely by 15 percentage points to rate the overall economy as weak rather than strong.
Just over 50 percent of voters said things have worsened over the past year, compared to 35 who believe the situation has improved.
The White House seems conscious of those numbers ahead of this year’s crucial midterm elections. But any reaching out across the aisle only serves to undermine the narrative Trump has consistently pushed about the nation’s economic woes.
Just this week, the MAGA leader told the World Economic Forum in Davos that “under the Biden administration, America was plagued by the nightmare of stagflation,” and that Democratic economic policies had proven “a recipe for misery, failure and decline.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
