The Trump administration on Tuesday lashed out at Amazon, after a report that the e-commerce giant would begin telling its customers how much President Donald Trump’s tariffs are raising the prices they pay. Amazon soon clarified that such a proposal was under consideration for part of its business, but not its main website — and that nothing has been implemented.
The potential impact of such a move is self-evident. Many people purchase lots of things from Amazon, and they’d suddenly get a regular reminder of precisely how much Trump’s tariffs are costing them personally. Whether it or others actually take this step remains to be seen, and the Trump administration clearly wants to head that off. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
But when it comes to how much Trump owns the potential economic pain ahead, that ship has apparently sailed.
A major unhelpful political side effect of Trump’s trade war is that it makes whatever happens next easy to connect to a specific policy and a specific man. Trump implemented these economy-rocking tariffs unilaterally, after all. If things go south, it will be very difficult to argue that this is Joe Biden’s or anyone else’s fault — despite the administration’s attempts to pre-blame the former president.
And new polling shows Americans are already strongly tying the current economy to Trump — in ways they rarely have in recent history.
In an NPR-PBS-Marist College poll released Tuesday, 60 percent of Americans said the current economic conditions are mostly a result of Trump’s policies, while 39 percent said he “inherited” the conditions.
Even a year into Trump’s first term, in January 2018, Marist showed that just 40 percent of Americans believed the economic conditions were mostly a result of his policies. That figure is now 20 points higher — and just three months into Trump’s second term.
Even more strikingly, people spent Barack Obama’s entire presidency saying the economic conditions he faced were mostly inherited. Across more than a dozen Marist polls, the percentage who connected the state of the economy mostly to his policies never went higher than the mid-40s. And that includes 2015, nearly seven years into his presidency.
At this point in Obama’s presidency, just 14 percent said the economic conditions were mostly a result of his policies, while 80 percent said they were mostly what he inherited.
That’s not a totally fair comparison, given that Obama inherited a recession in his early days. But Americans’ distancing the economy from his policies even late into his presidency is a huge contrast to what we’re seeing with Trump.
They never said the economy was mostly about Obama’s policies, and they didn’t say that early in Trump’s first term; already 60 percent now say that about Trump.
This isn’t the first poll to suggest voters have quickly tied the economy to Trump, for better or worse.
In a CBS News-YouGov poll this month, Americans said 54-21 that Trump’s policies were more responsible for the state of the economy than Biden’s. An Economist-YouGov poll showed a similar split at 50-32.
It’s important to emphasize that these polls aren’t the same as saying people “blame” Trump more for economic pain. And, indeed, a New York Times-Siena College poll released this week paints a more nuanced picture on that front. It asked whether Biden or Trump had created the “biggest challenges facing the U.S. economy,” and it found an even 32-32 split. (The rest either blamed neither, both or didn’t answer the question.)
But even the fact that it’s pretty even so early in Trump’s second term says a lot. Inflation during Biden’s term was a big story that probably cost Democrats the 2024 election. That inflation has lingered. But people seem to be turning the page and tying things to Trump.
The data suggest the Pottery Barn rule is very much in effect for Trump and whatever happens with the economy: You break it, you buy it.
