Trump’s “Mission Accomplished” moment gives Democrats an opening

Most presidencies have at least one iconic moment that makes the history books. It may not be fair or legitimately representative, but it’s usually an image that people remember if they recall nothing else, like Ronald Reagan in Berlin — “Mr.Gorbachev, tear down this wall” — or Bill Clinton falsely claiming “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” One of the most indelible images in recent memory was George W. Bush’s misguided aircraft carrier stunt in which he donned a flight suit and landed on the ship in a fighter jet during the early days of the Iraq War in 2003 to give a speech before a banner that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” The war would go for another eight years.

That image of Bush has become a meme — a symbol of presidential hubris that any leader with a drop of sense would seek to avoid at all costs. But Donald Trump apparently didn’t get the message. 

Hubris is Trump’s middle name. He is so defined by ego and narcissism that he declared the affordability crisis to be over; the president has apparently fixed America’s economy once and for all. In an interview for the Super Bowl, Trump told NBC News, “The one thing that they don’t say anymore is ‘affordability,’ because I fixed the problem that they created. I’m very proud of it.” 

Trump is a reflexive braggart and a hype artist, so his claims of success where none exists are so common as to be unremarkable. But this time, he may have stepped on Bush’s landmine. Even former president Joe Biden, who was punished for his inability to fully tame inflation while maintaining his insistence on touting impressive jobs numbers, didn’t go that far. And Trump’s dismal approval ratings show that most Americans are anything but convinced. 

“Affordability” is a concept that really reflects how people feel about the cost of living and their ability to get ahead. Polls phrase the questions differently, often in ways that obscure more than they reveal. But generally large numbers of people still feel that prices are going up, and that they are unable to buy the things they need or desire. 

A recent YouGov poll found that 53% of Americans said the economy is getting worse. Twenty-one percent believed it is getting better, while 19% said it was about the same. Most believe, though, that their own personal finances will get better or remain the same, so this is a generalized feeling about the economy-at-large. Still, the poll found that “79% say the price of food has gone up a lot (54%) or a little (24%), while only 9% say it’s gone down.” A whopping 72% reported that housing costs have “gone up a lot,” versus 47% who said a little and only 6% who responded that rent or mortgages have declined. 

These are things that average people deal with all day long. But Trump, living in his gilt mansions in New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida, believes that the rise of the stock market — which experts say is due to the artificial intelligence bubble and not great economic fundamentals — is the avatar of a soaring economy. He continues to believe that the manufacturing boom that only exists in his imagination will convince people they aren’t seeing what they say they’re in fact seeing. 

Economist Paul Krugman knows a little bit more about how the economy actually works than Donald Trump, and he recently quoted another economist, Paul Samuelson, who famously joked that the market had predicted nine of the last five recessions. In other words, the stock market is an unreliable indicator of the country’s economic health. Beyond that fact, the American market is not doing nearly as well as the rest of the world’s market; our economy is anemic by comparison. As Krugman noted, “Inflation remains stubbornly elevated. Despite one good month, employment growth has shriveled. And it keeps getting more difficult to find a job.”

Having people such as Attorney General Pam Bondi declare that Americans should be celebrating the stock market instead of worrying about the massive pedophilia scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein that has enveloped some of the world’s decadent elites — including Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — is tone deaf on virtually every level. Not only aren’t people in a celebratory mood about the markets, they are downright sour on the future. That affects consumer spending, business start-ups — everything. 

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Back in December, the White House announced that Trump was planning to hit the road to sell his economic accomplishments, with the thinking apparently being that if people can just see the president saying it in front of enthusiastic rally goers, the country will go along. His first foray into Pennsylvania was, as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye noted, a dud. In between his usual forays into windmills and racism, the president lied repeatedly about the economy claiming, for instance, that he had obtained $18 trillion in investments when the reality, as reported by Politifact, is that the number was closer to $9 trillion, and most of the projects were “aspirational, multi-year goals that may not come to fruition.”

Trump claimed inflation was way down from when he took office. In reality, it’s right about the same: elevated. (The number declined a bit in January, mainly due to lower gas prices, while other energy costs went up substantially.) Health care premiums are through the roof, and the president’s TrumpRx website certainly isn’t going to solve that problem. The administration has also made false claims about the Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts in hopes they will appease the masses into believing that their ship has finally come in.

Interestingly, beyond a couple of small-scale events, there hasn’t been much talk of sending him out on the road again. Perhaps the White House is realizing the limited utility of bringing more attention to the fact that the president is either lying about people’s lived reality or is completely out of touch. Either way, his poll numbers have been cratering for the last two months. 

Ahead of the midterms, Democrats are gearing up for a fight on the economy. Trump made big promises during the presidential campaign that, despite his claims to the contrary, have not come to pass — and he’s actually made things worse. Democrats hope to hang Trump’s failures around his neck, and it’s likely the GOP will fare even worse than Kamala Harris did in 2024, largely due to his unfulfilled economic promises.

But there’s more to it than just that. The president’s insistence that the economy is great despite the public’s feeling otherwise is contributing to a general sense that the country is hurtling out of control on Trump and the GOP’s watch. That sense, combined with his horrific mass deportation policy and violence in the streets, his weird obsessions with unnecessary White House renovations and the Nobel Peace Prize, military incursions and threats of imperial seizures of sovereign territory, and public health being dismantled, signals to the American people that we are in a period of overwhelming chaos. 

Republican pollster Whit Ayres recently observed in POLITICO that “there’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration and it seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term.” It’s all of a piece — and if Democrats can find a way to synthesize this into a message that voters need to give them a congressional majority in November, the country will begin to at least some sense of relief. Between a bad economy and the escalating violence, people are simply yearning for a break from Trump’s chaos.