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The president’s brief honeymoon with the public appears to be over already for American consumers, according to the latest polls.
See-sawing tariff threats, a jittery stock market and turmoil on Capitol Hill are suddenly causing Americans on both sides of the fence to feel “considerably more pessimistic about the economy” than they were when Donald Trump moved into the White House, The Wall Street Journal noted Friday.
Consumer sentiment dropped close to 5 percent in the University of Michigan’s preliminary February survey to its lowest reading since July 2024 when Trump was raging about the U.S. economy.
“The decrease was pervasive, with Republicans, Independents, and Democrats all posting sentiment declines from January, along with consumers across age and wealth groups,” Joanne Hsu, who supervises the survey, said in a statement.
At the same time consumers’ expectations of inflation in 2025 jumped from 3.3 percent in January to 4.3 percent. That’s the second month in a row of increased expectation of inflation, and the highest in more than a year.
“It’s very rare to see a full percentage point jump in inflation expectations,” Hsu noted, who pointed out that it’s only the fifth time in 14 years with such a large one-month increase.
The Morning Consult also found a souring mood in its index of consumer confidence, which dropped between January 25 and February 3, driven primarily by concern over the country’s economic future.
Among investors, meanwhile, expectations that stock prices will fall over the next six months rose to 42.9 percent, the highest level since November 2023, in the latest survey by the American Association of Individual Investors,
Consumer confidence initially surged after Trump’s presidential victory, especially among Republicans, and stayed high through the inauguration.
But while Trump campaigned on promises to improve the economy and reduce inflation, he was quickly warning that Americans would have to withstand some “pain” in the wake of his tariffs. Though his tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods are on hold, China’s are still in effect, the cost of which will largely be passed on by U.S. importers like Target to their American consumers.
Trump has often falsely claimed that the tariffs are paid directly by foreign nations to the U.S., not by the American companies that purchase foreign goods. He comically claimed during his first term in office that China was writing tariff checks directly to the U.S. Treasury.
American consumers are finally beginning to understand that tariffs will hit them, according to polls. Republicans believe they’ll get stuck with 40 percent of the hikes, while Democrats believe they’ll end up footing the bill for 68 percent of the boost, according to a survey commissioned by academic economists from mid-December to early January.
