Distractions Be Darned, Trump Economy Still Stinks, Getting Stinkier

The Trump fascists have a done a good job this week of using their Venezuelan invasion and Minneapolis murder to push the economy, the Epstein files, and their other failures out of the headlines.

So let’s take a moment to remind everyone that the Trump economy stinks. Trump’s tariffs and other unpredictability have flattened the job market:

The November Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed job openings fell to a more-than-one-year low in November. Layoffs also fell, signaling a continuation of the low fire, low-hire situation.

Whatever the numbers say, here’s something that could matter as much, at least to the consumer economy: How worried folks are about holding onto their jobs and income.

All through the latter part of 2025, the job market was losing steam, said Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank.

“Job growth hit an air pocket and has really been in low gear since April of this past year,” he said.

And Adams said the working public has noticed: “People are more worried about job security, they’re less upbeat about the prospects of being able to find a new job. And that is weighing on how they’re thinking about their own personal finances.”

This is evident in the University of Michigan’s consumer surveys, said director Joanne Hsu.

“One of the big, overarching patterns of 2025 was a broad deterioration in views and expectations for labor markets — a pretty substantial increase in people expecting unemployment to get worse in the future,” she said.

…Bottom line on the job market heading into 2026, said economist Cory Stahle at Indeed: It’s sclerotic and frozen.

“Employers holding onto their workers, not bringing new workers on board. Workers are feeling less confident in their ability to jump jobs, find new jobs. People seem to be just kind of sitting still right now,” he said [Mitchell Hartman, “Worker Confidence Is Sliding, Despite Added Jobs,” Marketplace, 2026.01.07].

The Trump economy is hammering black workers particularly hard:

Among demographic groups, the worst deterioration in the job market has been for Black workers, said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.

“[In November] the Black unemployment rate rose to 8.3%, up from 7.5% in September,” she said.

It’s up nearly 2% from one year ago.  The overall unemployment rate is only up 0.4% [Hartman, 2026.01.07].

In less than a year, Trump has erased the gains black workers made in closing the unemployment gap throughout his first term and during the pandemic recovery under Biden. And yes, that reversal is Trump’s fault:

But the rates had begun to converge, before blowing out again in recent months. One key reason: shrinking federal employment. DOGE-affected workers fell off payrolls in October.

“The federal government has always been a place where Black people have been able to find employment — quality jobs, benefits, things like that,” says Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [Courtenay Brown, “Black Employment Milestone Evaporates,” Axios, 2025.12.19].

Even the white guys at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think the Trump economy is in trouble:

There is an old Wall Street joke about a man jumping off the Empire State building. When asked at the fortieth floor how he was doing, he replied: “So far, so good”.

We have to wonder whether something similar might be said of President Trump and the US economy. Trump boasts how much better than expected the US economy is doing right now. He does so by pointing to its more than 3 percent rate of growth last year and a booming stock market. However, he omits to mention that this growth is being fueled by factors that might contain the seeds for a hard economic landing before November’s midterm elections. Specifically, he fails to mention that the economy is being propped up by an unsustainable budget policy and that around half of US economic growth is being accounted for by an Artificial Intelligence boom. Many are describing that boom as a bubble reminiscent of the 2001 dot.com bubble [Desmond Lachman, “A Hard Landing Ahead for the US Economy,” American Enterprise Institute, 2026.01.06].

And you know what dictators do when a failing economy threatens their power:

The regime is preparing the population—and its own security apparatus—for escalation by redefining protest as treason and hardship as siege.

This is the authoritarian playbook in its purest form. When bread disappears, regimes manufacture enemies. When legitimacy erodes, they weaponize nationalism. The language of “Big Satan” and “Little Satan” is not meant for Washington or Jerusalem; it is aimed inward, at a population increasingly unconvinced that the clerical elite can govern competently, let alone justly [Jose Lev Alvarez Gomez, “War as Distraction: Tehran Eyes Israel,” The Times of Israel, 2026.01.09].

Oh, oops—that’s commentary about Iran, not the United States. But it sure sounds familiar….