Trump Aide Claims Americans ‘Spending More Money on Everything’ Shows They’re ‘Optimistic’ About Economy

Multiple consumer surveys have shown that Americans have never been more pessimistic

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

For the second time in a month, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett on Tuesday claimed that Americans spending more money on gasoline and other goods is a sign of strength for the US economy—rather than evidence of the Trump administration’s inflationary policy decisions.

During an interview with Fox Business, Hassett tried to counter recent data showing US consumer sentiment hitting all-time lows during Donald Trump’s second term.

“The thing that I’ve seen when I look at credit card data,” Hassett said, “is that while people have been spending more money at gas stations, they’ve been spending more money on everything else, which means that they’re still very, very optimistic about the state of the economy, and they should be.”

In fact, multiple consumer surveys have shown that Americans have never been more pessimistic about the state of the economy.

Last week, the University of Michigan’s latest Surveys of Consumers showed consumer sentiment hitting the lowest level ever, driven primarily by concerns about the cost of living.

Gallup last week published new data showing that Americans’ economic confidence has fallen to its lowest level since October 2022, with just 16% of Americans rating the economy as excellent or good, and nearly half describing it as poor.

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo asked Hassett about these surveys, and he said they should be dismissed because they only show negative sentiment from Democrats and independents, who combined make up the majority of US voters.

“They call it ‘consumer sentiment’ but I don’t think those words mean what they think they mean anymore,” Hassett said. “We find that basically the consumer sentiment indicator at the University of Michigan, it’s just a political survey. And in fact, what the correlation between what Democrats say and what independents say... it’s almost exactly perfectly correlated.”

In fact, consumer sentiment surveys taken during President Joe Biden’s administration showed that independents joined with Republican voters to rate the economy significantly more poorly than Democratic voters, indicating that independents’ views of the economy are not in lockstep with Democrats’.

Polling averages calculated by elections analyst Nate Silver currently show Trump’s approval rating on his handling to the economy to be just 34%, with disapproval standing at 63%.

The numbers are even worse when it comes to the president’s handling of inflation, where an average of 28% of Americans approve and 69% disapprove.