When the stock market swooned last week following another round of trade war panic, the White House asked angry Americans to blame the spirit world. “We’re seeing a strong divergence between the animal spirits of the stock market and what we’re actually seeing unfold from businesses and business leaders,” one official told reporters on Monday.
There’s another, less metaphysical reason why the stock market is unstable and millions of Americans are souring on President Trump’s second administration. Whether he can admit it or not, Trump has lost control of a tariff standoff that was intended to be more marketing blitz than economic negotiation. Now steel and aluminum tariffs are set to double and Republicans are belatedly realizing there is no going back.
What comes next will be a disaster for the Republican Party, for the economy and for tens of millions of Americans who believed Trump’s tough talk on trade. As the White House swings from one reckless tariff to the next, those voters need to sort through the chaos and ask themselves a simple question: Is this the better future Trump promised you?
Most Americans are still coming to terms with the whiplash that marked Trump’s return to political power. Trump’s trade strife shifted the American economy from all-time highs to the brink of recession in less than a month. Consumers are maxing out credit cards just to pay sky-high grocery and fuel bills. In response, Republican politicians are canceling planned constituent meetings en masse and abandoning from the public forum entirely.
Even Trump seems thrown off by the alarming speed of his economic death spiral. Events have deteriorated so quickly that many national polls are still catching up, but they paint a clear picture of an American public rapidly losing patience with the GOP’s economic mismanagement. Only about one-third of voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, according to a recent Reuters poll. Another survey, this one from Emerson College Polling, found the president’s popularity tumbling for the third week in a row.
Trump’s strongman act is built on never appearing outwardly vulnerable, but his very public trade war missteps now leave him especially vulnerable on an issue that was once his strength.
But if Trump is vulnerable, so are the directionless Democrats, who don’t know how to capitalize on this gift-wrapped political opportunity. It’s a bizarre fact of our political life in 2025 that during a trade war where the poorest Americans are hurt the most, Democrats still can’t craft a message that convinces voters to throw the bums out.
Part of the problem is Democrats’ continuing discomfort with populism, a political movement viewed with suspicion by the party establishment ever since Trump successfully mastered it in 2016. Right now, Democratic lawmakers are trying to express populist economic outrage without using populist language, a path that feels forced and condescending to voters. Forward-thinking lawmakers like Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) are leading a push to bring a more centrist brand of populism back to the forefront of Democratic messaging.
“The number one thing people share is tremendous economic pressure,” Ryan told Vanity Fair last year. “In our race, we focused on affordability every single day and localized it, making it real and visceral. Elites are doing incredibly well, historically well, while everybody else is suffering—that is, to me, the big takeaway here.”
Ryan’s message — that elites in both parties have sold out the American people and only a vibrant middle class will restore the balance — sounds a lot like the promises Trump peddled on the campaign trail. But unlike Republicans, Ryan has kept his schedule of town-hall meetings, even when angry constituents pelted him with criticism about high consumer prices.
Ryan’s constituents view his tenacity as credibility. Democrats need a lot more credibility if they want to stage a 2026 midterm comeback.
It isn’t enough for Trump and his Republican goons to stumble into major policy failures — Democrats must also find effective messaging that shows voters that their so-called populist heroes are incompetent, billionaire-coddling frauds. Trump may be weakened at the moment, but without sustained Democratic attacks, voters will eventually forget the economic chaos of his first months. Democrats need to find their message and fast.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
