The Trump team’s puzzling ‘all is well’ message on the economy

Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNNFri, April 17, 2026 at 4:59 PM UTC

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President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up to members of the media after walking off of Air Force One at Miami International Airport, on April 11. - Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

After spending the early part of the Iran war trying to sell Americans on an economic message of short-term pain for long-term gain, President Donald Trump and his team have increasingly reverted to their previous posture: that of Kevin Bacon in “Animal House.”

Remain calm, they’re effectively saying. All is well.

It was a puzzling and dicey political message before the war; it’s even more puzzling and dicey now.

They used a version of this message in the fall. Even as affordability concerns increasingly lingered as a problem for Trump, he set about arguing that prices were actually down — and substantially so — even though they weren’t.

Today, the message is more: Despite what voters are hearing (or seeing at any local gas station), things are actually quite good. And besides, the situation could’ve been way worse.

“To be honest, we are doing so well,” Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo in an interview that aired Wednesday, citing a resilient stock market.

When Bartiromo pushed back a little, Trump argued that $92-per-barrel oil wasn’t so bad when you consider some were talking about $200 per barrel.

“And you know what?” Trump added. “I’m very happy.”

Trump expanded on this rather optimistic line on Thursday, both outside the White House and during a campaign event in Las Vegas focused on tax cuts.

He said the inflation rate was “a very low number, and it’s still low.” This despite it spiking to its highest level in two years last month — and it’s expected to keep rising as the war’s effects linger. He referred to “our great economy.”

When asked about $4-per-gallon gas, he mentioned the stock market and said: “Everything’s doing really well.”

He again said that gas prices were “not very high” compared to “what they were supposed to be.” (Energy Secretary Chris Wright told NBC News just a month ago that there was “a very good chance” gas would be under $3 per gallon by the summer.)

Trump also called inflation “fake,” because it was due to rising fuel and energy prices.

“We had the best economy in the history of our country my first term,” Trump added. “And we’re blowing it out now — we’re blowing it away now.”

Others seem to be on the same page.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a briefing this week urged people to “look at how gas prices decreased over the past year since this president was in office.” Even that isn’t exactly an impressive stat: Gas was about $3.11 per gallon when Trump was inaugurated, according to data from Gas Buddy; it had declined by little more than 10 cents when the war launched.

And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC this week that Trump was able to launch the war because the “economy was in such good shape.” He also said at a briefing with Leavitt that the economy remains “very strong.”

And in a Tax Day interview with the National News Desk, Bessent offered some particularly eyebrow-raising comments.

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He wagered that Americans are actually more sanguine about the economy than they let on.

“The consumer, while they may be sounding grim, is actually quite buoyant,” he said, citing spending behavior.

When the reporter submitted that Bessent was saying people didn’t feel good but were actually acting confidently, he indicated it wasn’t even that. He wagered that people actually do feel good about the economy, even if they don’t say that.

“Well, look in their heart of hearts, they feel good,” Bessent said. “I’m not sure what they’re telling the survey people.”

Bessent isn’t totally freelancing here.

There is an argument to be made that the economic fundamentals aren’t nearly as grim as Americans seem to believe, as CNN’s David Goldman wrote shortly before the war began in February. Consumer spending has remained pretty robust in the post-Covid era.

The fact that the stock market keeps rising — and has now recovered its losses from early in the war — seems to speak to that.

But the Biden administration made similar arguments after the inflation rate came down, which didn’t work out so well for them in 2024, as former President Joe Biden’s approval numbers on the economy tanked.

So to the extent Bessent’s argument is now a guiding principle, it’s a really risky one. Because Americans are telling those “survey people” some really “grim” things.

Recently, the much-watched University of Michigan consumer sentiment index hit a new record low in data that spans decades — back to just after World War II.

It’s now lower not only than it was during the post-Covid inflation spike, but also during the Great Recession in the late 2000s and during various other times of economic hardship in the latter half of the 20th Century.

And polling echoes that pessimism.

The most recent CNN poll from late March, for instance, showed just 23% of Americans labeled the economy as at least “somewhat good.” That number was lower only twice during Biden’s tenure, for a brief period in 2022.

The poll also showed:

62% expected the economy to remain poor over the next year — the worst such finding in nearly three decades of CNN polling.

More than 6 in 10 people labeled rising gas prices at least a “moderate hardship”

More than 6 in 10 said they’d changed their spending habits in one way or another.

And perhaps more to the point, Americans said 65%-25% that Trump had worsened economic conditions rather than made them better.

That minus-40-point gap isn’t just worse than it ever was for Biden; it’s also significantly worse than it was in January, when Trump was only minus-23.

The war has clearly made the economy more of a liability for Trump. Maybe that starts to go away if the war does.

But trying to convince voters that the economy is actually good, despite the significant evidence to the contrary and their very ingrained negative feelings about it, doesn’t seem like a great strategy.

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Source: “AOL Money”