A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Fair or not, Americans tend to hold a president responsible for the economy. Many people held President Biden responsible for inflation, and one of those people was Donald Trump. Now Trump is president. The stock market has been sliding, and consumer confidence is fading, and that has prompted a change in the president's rhetoric. NPR's Asma Khalid has been listening.
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: President Trump ran on a promise.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will cut taxes, end inflation, slash your prices. We're going to get those prices down.
KHALID: But now he's singing a slightly different tune.
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TRUMP: As you know, we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.
KHALID: The president and his administration say the economic mood in the country is a carryover from the Biden era. Take a listen to Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, this week on Bloomberg Television.
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HOWARD LUTNICK: Biden left him a pile of poop, OK? He left him a lousy economy that he's trying to fix. You're looking at data that's Biden data.
KHALID: And voters may be willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt for now. That's how Jim Hobart interprets the situation. He's a Republican pollster with the firm Public Opinion Strategies. And he points out one of the major reasons Trump won the November election is because voters trusted him more on the economy.
JIM HOBART: Voters are going to have at least some patience with him because they were so frustrated with the job that they thought Joe Biden was doing on the economy. And so they are going to give him a little bit of runway, so to speak.
KHALID: But the question is how much time. The economy and inflation remain top concerns for Americans, and yet Trump has spent much of his time these first few weeks focused on other priorities - the federal workforce, the border and tariffs. Last month, consumer confidence fell sharply, the biggest drop in three years. The other day, I asked the president why we saw this steep decline and if there's anything he could do about it. He sidestepped the question.
TRUMP: The confidence in business, confidence in the country has reached an all-time high. We have never reached levels like we are right now.
KHALID: That's not true. And many Democrats feel like Trump is trying to dodge responsibility for the economic angst his tariffs are producing. A president can affect the optimism or pessimism people feel about the economy. Michael Strain is an economist with the American Enterprise Institute, and he says all this tariff talk is making people feel gloomy.
MICHAEL STRAIN: I think President Trump is hurting confidence because of concern people have that his trade policy is going to make the stuff they buy more expensive.
KHALID: He said that tariff uncertainty is also bad for businesses.
STRAIN: If they don't know how much they're going to have to pay for imported goods, then it's really hard for them to plan.
KHALID: Even to some Trump supporters who believe the president inherited an economic mess from Biden, the tariffs are causing some concern.
STEPHEN MOORE: I think it's a mistake for the president to so aggressively push tariffs at this moment in time.
KHALID: That's Stephen Moore. He worked as a senior economic adviser to Trump in his first term and in his recent reelection campaign.
MOORE: One of the reasons that Trump won the election, people were frustrated by the prices of everything from gasoline to their grocery bills. And so what I've advised President Trump is you've got to get this tax bill done, because if you don't, we're going to have the biggest tax increase ever in the history of the United States at the end of the year, and that would really hurt the economy.
KHALID: What he's talking about there are that key parts of the 2017 tax cuts are set to expire at the end of the year. Moore says people need a stimulus like tax cuts in this struggling economy. They need to see signs that Trump is trying to bring prices down. And so in his view, once Trump signs the tax bill, then he can focus on other issues, like tariffs.
Asma Khalid, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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