YOU CAN'T PROPAGANDIZE YOUR WAY PAST PERSONAL ECONOMIC PAIN

Axios notes today that even many Republicans hate the Trump economy.

Voters increasingly disapprove of the way President Trump is handling the economy and believe his policies are raising prices, according to a new poll from CBS News/YouGov.

... The discontent is ... showing up in significant numbers among Republican voters, as the affordability crisis is affecting sentiment within Trump's own base.

... Trump's approval on the economy has fallen to 36%, down from 51% in March, per the poll.

A majority say his policies are raising food and grocery costs.

... Four in 10 Republicans say he portrays prices and inflation as better than they really are. This group was also more likely to say prices are going up.

Trump's poll numbers are bad, but his worst numbers are on the economy in general, and inflation in particular.

On the economy, why is Trump struggling to maintain the support of his base, which is still mostly with him on immigration (and other subjects, like crime)? The reason is simple: People judge the economy based on their own experiences of it. They don't feel they need news outlets or experts to tell them how to feel about it.

Which means that the propaganda tricks that Trump, his fellow Republicans, and the right-wing media use to keep them on board on other issues don't work as well.

It's fairly easy to make Americans -- especially right-wing Americans -- angry about undocumented immigrants: just play up every violent crime committed by an immigrant, claim that immigrants are disproportionately violent, and never mention the fact that most immigrants are here to work and actually contribute to the economy by providing labor and then spending their wages on goods and services sold by Americans. Most Americans don't have enough direct contact with these demonized immigrants, so they believe what Republican politicians and their favorite media sources tell them.

Most Americans don't know from personal experience whether crime is rising or falling (it's falling now), so they trust politicians and media outlets (not always right-wing outlets) that tell them crime is unusually scary nowadays.

It's easy to use propaganda to sell a war, as we learned in the early 2000s -- people didn't come to the question of Iraq with a knowledge base of their own, so they trusted what they were told.

And Americans don't necessarily understand economics in the abstract. They think it's bad for the government to have debt (even though, up to a point, it really isn't). They think federal budget outlays for certain programs (foreign aid, for instance) are much higher than they actually are.

But they know when they're hurting. They know when this is happening to them and don't need validation from experts:

Soaring electricity prices are triggering a wave of power shutoffs nationwide, leaving more Americans in the dark as unpaid bills pile up. Although there is no national count of electricity shutoffs, data from select utilities in 11 states show that disconnections have risen in at least eight of them since last year, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post and the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA). In some areas, such as New York City, the surge has been dramatic — with residential shutoffs in August up fivefold from a year ago, utility filings show.

In Pennsylvania ... power shutoffs have risen 21 percent this year, with more than 270,000 households losing electricity, according to state data through October. The average electricity bill in the state, meanwhile, has risen 13 percent from a year ago, as utilities upgrade electric grids to accommodate a burst of new data centers....

And while I know that many people believe that Americans don't understand their own economic situations and therefore were propagandized to believe in a mythical Biden "vibecession" -- Paul Krugman thinks we may be in a Trump "vibecession" now, or at least an economy that's not as bad as people think it is -- people actually know when they're struggling. Here's a story from December 2024, shortly after Democrats lost the presidential election:

Credit card defaults are at their highest level since 2010 as consumers feel increasingly stretched.

As the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (Dec. 29), card lenders wrote off $46 billion in seriously delinquent loans in the first nine months of this year, a 50% jump over 2023. That’s the highest level in 14 years, the report said, citing industry data compiled by BankRegData....

“High-income households are fine, but the bottom third of U.S. consumers are tapped out,” said Mark Zandi, the head of Moody’s Analytics. “Their savings rate right now is zero.”

... the share of consumers carrying at least some card debt is pervasive, at 74.5%, per PYMNTS Intelligence research. While that percentage is more or less static across income levels, it leaps to more than 90% for consumers living paycheck to paycheck and having trouble paying their bills.

... The research also showed that roughly 40% of struggling consumers reached their limits with some regularity.

They're paying off that debt at near-record-high interest rates. They were unwise to think that Trump could lower prices -- prices generally don't decrease unless there's a recession -- but they haven't received any other form of relief, and many prices are still rising. And they know it.

In 2024, Trump could persuade millions of voters that he'd been a pretty good president in his first term because he had the good fortune to coast on three of the best years of recovery following the 2008 crash. He said that that none of the disruptions of the 2020 pandemic year could be blamed on him, and millions of Americans, lacking expert knowledge of epidemiology or public health, took him at his word.

But he can't bullshit them now. They know their own economic struggles. Propaganda doesn't work when they're shutting off your electricity.