The New Yorker:

After insisting for months that his tariffs weren’t raising prices, the President has virtually admitted the opposite by moving to scrap the duties on beef, coffee, and other foodstuffs.

By John Cassidy

As the U.S. economy heads into the holiday spending season, Donald Trump is continuing to insist that all is sunny. “We are doing phenomenally well. This is the greatest economy we’ve ever had,” he told Laura Ingraham, of Fox News, early last week. When Ingraham raised voter concerns about affordability that featured heavily in recent elections in New Jersey, New York, and Virginia, Trump dismissed them as “a con job by the Democrats.” Before flying to his Mar-a-Lago retreat for the weekend, he repeated the “con job” phrase on social media. More tellingly, however, he also signed an executive order eliminating tariffs on imported beef, coffee, and bananas, all of which have risen sharply in price since he imposed his blanket tariffs earlier this year. The change in policy applies to dozens of other foodstuffs, too.

Despite Trump’s bluster, he clearly understands the political danger he’s in, which is reflected in recent opinion polls. In the latest survey from YouGov/The Economist, “inflation/prices” is still voters’ biggest concern, followed by “jobs and the economy.” The same survey shows that just three per cent of respondents think the economy is in “excellent” shape, while forty per cent think it’s “poor.” (Of the rest, twenty-two per cent think it’s “good,” and thirty-two per cent responded “fair.”) Even before his U-turn on food tariffs, Trump had been scrambling to roll out his own affordability proposals. He’s talked about creating fifty-year mortgages, depositing federal money directly into personal health savings accounts, and handing out a two-thousand-dollar tariff “dividend,” using the money raised from his levies on imported goods.

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