Americans sour on Trump's handling of the economy, poll finds

WASHINGTON: Americans elected President Donald Trump in hopes that he would fight inflation and boost the U.S. economy, but as he approaches his 100th day in office they are giving the Republican poor marks for his handling of both, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows.

Trump has kicked off his term with an aggressive economic agenda, sparking trade wars as he slaps tariffs on major U.S. trading partners, trying to pressure the Federal Reserve to bend to his will and setting off the worst selloff in U.S. financial markets since the early months of the COVID pandemic five years ago.

Just 37% of respondents to the six-day poll that concluded on Monday approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, down from 42% in the hours after his January 20 inauguration, when he promised to supercharge the economy and bring about a “Golden Age of America.” The reading is well below than at any point in his first term, when it ranged from the mid-40’s to mid-50’s.

“You have a president who promised a golden age,” said James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “But everything that’s supposed to be up is down, everything that’s supposed to be down is up.”

Pethokoukis said the economic warning signs put pressure on Trump to reverse course on tariffs, but that even if Trump caved the economy might not quickly bounce back amid the chaos.

In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted just after Trump’s inauguration, some 55% of respondents said either inflation or the broader economy should be Trump’s main focus in his first 100 days in office, which run through April 30. Twenty-three percent picked immigration.

Three months later, three-quarters of the respondents in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll said they worried a recession was coming. Fifty-six percent of respondents, including one in four Republicans, said Trump’s moves to shake up the economy are “too erratic.”

MARKET WORRIES

Two thirds of respondents were concerned about the stock market, where share prices have fallen sharply in recent weeks amid investor worries over Trump’s plans to hike tariffs on imported goods and his intimation he could fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, the nation’s top official tasked with controlling inflation.

The benchmark S&P 500 stock index is about 14% below its previous high reached on February 19. Consumer prices rose 2.5% in the year through February, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

Fifty-two percent of respondents said they agreed with a statement that “Trump’s actions could make it harder for me to live comfortably when I retire,” outnumbering the 31% who disagreed with the statement.

Trump on Monday warned that the economy could slow if the Federal Reserve doesn’t lower interest rates, saying the nation was on a path where “there can be almost no inflation.” But Powell, like Wall Street economists, has said that Trump’s moves to raise tariffs – including a new 145% tax rate on most Chinese imports – could push inflation higher at least in the short term, and possibly for longer.

Banking giant JP Morgan expects a recession this year, largely due to Trump’s tariff policy which has led other countries to put heavy levies on U.S. exports.

To be sure, a large swath of America still backs Trump, many fervently.

His overall approval rating – at 42% – remains higher than his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden enjoyed for much his term, and has been buoyed by a somewhat larger share of Americans – 45% – who back Trump’s hardline actions on immigration.

The president’s party also remains firmly behind him, with 81% of self-identified Republicans approving of Trump’s economic stewardship, compared to 5% of Democrats and 28% of people outside the two parties.

Many Americans are sympathetic to his view that the U.S. has gotten a raw deal in global affairs generally, including in trade and in defense. Forty-eight percent of respondents agreed with a statement that “most other countries, including America’s traditional allies, take advantage of the U.S.” Thirty-four percent disagreed.

But even one in three Republicans said their cost of living was on the wrong track, according to the poll, which surveyed 4,306 U.S. adults nationwide between April 16 and April 21. The poll had a margin of error of about 2 percentage points.

Three-quarters of respondents, including two-thirds of Republicans, said they were concerned about the reliability of the Social Security system, which has been a focus of a Trump administration push to shrink the federal government that has been led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

To be sure, many dire warning signs on the economy have been from surveys of businesses or from leading economists, while measures of the labor market remain healthier, with the jobless rate in March only ticking slightly higher to 4.2%.

“There’s a big risk for Trump that it’s only going to get worse from here,” said Scott Lincicome, a trade and economics expert at the CATO institute, a libertarian think tank.
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