President Donald Trump is just incredibly lucky. He kept rolling the dice on the economy and somehow the doom-sayers keep losing. All the experts said his tariffs would drastically increase inflation; instead it went down. Democrats projected at the end of 2024 that "Mass Deportations Would Deliver a Catastrophic Blow to the U.S. Economy." It has not.
This luck just has to stop at some point. Such is the weird attitude of Politico's economics correspondent, Victoria Guida. She thinks that the economic success of the Trump administration is based just on the sheer luck of making the correct gambles as reflected in the title of her Thursday story, "Trump Keeps Gambling With the Economy — And Getting Away With It."
President Donald Trump has spent his second term turning risky economic gambles into a way of life.
He has implemented sweeping global tariffs that have dramatically increased the cost of doing business across the world. He has sharply decreased the number of people immigrating to the U.S. He has pushed for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates under any circumstance, even though inflation has not entirely cooled.
Guida seems a bit glum over all that economic "luck" that has come Trump's way. However, she does hold out some hope for that supposed luck to run out in the form of possible higher gas prices.
And now, he’s launched an attack on Iran, a scenario that has long been the clearest and most direct threat to one of Trump’s favored political barometers: gas prices.
The U.S. now finds itself in another acute economic risk situation — an assault that Trump has said could last four weeks or more. The conflict has led to a jump in oil prices, though not quite to worst-case levels, and markets have been jittery about the prospect of more expensive energy and higher U.S. federal debt, stemming from the cost of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran.
Add it to the catalog of ways Trump is living dangerously — and, so far, mostly getting away with it.
Guida sure sounds bitter with that comment about "getting away with it." Perhaps he is "getting away with it" in the form of gas prices increasing but not as high as expected due to the Iran situation because of the "lucky" raid on January 3 in Venezuela which is leading to a lot of that oil entering the USA.
But what about Biden's luck? When average gas prices were hovering around $4.00 for regular unleaded fuel around August 10, 2022, Guida co-authored a headline that the opposite of her new anti-Trump kvetching: “Gas is suddenly cheaper. That could help Biden.” Guida and her co-author Sam Sutton highlighted how the result would assist the “Lower gas prices” economic messaging angle for the Biden administration, despite the fact that overall consumer price inflation was skyrocketing 8.5 percent year-over-year at the time. Guida wrote two months after gas prices rose to an average of higher than $5 a gallon.
More frustration from Guida over how the dire economic forecasts have not panned out as expected:
In so many ways, that is the story of Trump’s economic stewardship up to this point. His disruptive policies have left some dents, including serious damage to his approval rating, but by the biggest readings of its health, the U.S. economy — measured by overall growth, the job market, the stock market, even inflation — largely keeps absorbing what he throws at it.
Of course, the extraordinary amount of business spending associated with the buildout of artificial intelligence has also been a significant factor keeping the economy plowing ahead at a solid pace.
But mostly, the U.S. economy is just a consumer-driven powerhouse that seems hard to crush.
Disappointed much?
The president himself is part of the reason for the resilience: GOP tax cuts are expected to provide a huge power-up to economic expansion this year by boosting refunds for individuals and offering immediate deductions for businesses making certain investments. And the administration’s deregulatory efforts have repeatedly driven stocks to new highs, which has helped increase the wealth of households invested in the market.
You...you mean cutting taxes provides for economic expansion? Naw! It just gotta be the President's dumb luck again.
The rest of Guida's story continues with this theme of lucky Trump making the right economic bets mixed with the barely suppressed hope from this partisan hack that the Iran attack situation could drive gas prices higher to the extent it could harm the economy and reverse Trump's run of supposed luck.
