Donald Trump's Empty Promises Are Catching Up to Him [View all]

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Politics
Donald Trump’s Empty Promises Are Catching Up to Him
The president vowed to bring down prices on “day one”—something everyone would like to see. What happened with that?
By Molly Jong-Fast
March 10, 2025

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But instead of bringing prices down on day one, or even month one, Trump is doing the exact opposite.He’s enacted a trade war and let Elon Musk take a chainsaw to the federal government, both of which have caused market uncertainty. Suddenly, the man who said he was going to make everything cheaper on day one can’t even rule out a recession on his watch, and has instead mused about a “period of transition.”

Trump has it in his head that the United States was somehow richer before income taxes, which is fueling his tariff obsession. A few days after being sworn in, he told reporters in the Oval Office: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept.” It makes sense that Trump, a real estate baron, would be nostalgic for the Gilded Age—after all, it was a time in American life marked by high concentration of wealth, vast income inequality, and widespread political corruption.

But the problem is that while Trump loves tariffs, no one else does. His back-and-forth on implementing them has spooked the markets, because the only thing the markets like less than tariffs is uncertainty.

Even after a week of poor market reactions to Trump’s will-he-won’t-he on tariff threats, he has continued to seesaw on the topic. On Sunday, during a friendly interview, Trump told Fox News that “the tariffs could go up as time goes by,” dismissed calls for more “predictability,” and refused to rule out a recession. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick further rationalized the volatility, telling NBC’s Meet the Press, “Will there be distortions? Of course. Foreign goods may get a little more expensive, but American goods are going to get cheaper.” Meanwhile, all markets want is stability, and this was probably not what they wanted to hear: US stocks saw a steep sell-off Monday morning.

It seems pretty clear that Trump is simply not laser-focused on the only promise anyone could legitimately view as his mandate: making things cheaper.

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trumps-empty-promises