John Mac Ghlionn,
opinion contributor
THE HILL
Sat, December 20, 2025
President Trump has weathered scandals, impeachments, investigations, electoral defeats, and enough lawsuits to make a mid-size law firm weep. But this winter, he’s facing something he can’t bluff or bark away: prices. Real prices. Grocery-store prices. The kind that glare at you from the receipt like a personal insult.
And Americans are tired of being insulted.
His approval rating has fallen to depths not seen since Nixon started sweating through his suits. Even Republicans are beginning to admit something is off. Strategists are panicking. Voters are grimacing. Nothing feels stable anymore, except the cost of groceries, which is now apparently welded to the price of rare minerals.
The moment the floor gave way came on Dec. 7, when Trump turned on “Fox & Friends,” his long-time emotional support animal, and found Peter Schiff calmly pointing out that Americans can’t afford much of anything right now. Schiff didn’t yell or blast the president. He simply stated the obvious: prices are rising, wages aren’t and Trump’s tariffs are making everything worse.
Trump’s response was instant and volcanic. He accused Schiff of being a “Trump-hating loser,” demanded producers be investigated, and suggested some unnamed force was infiltrating the network.
But no matter how many enemies he invents, voters know when they’re being squeezed. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 26 percent of Americans think Trump is handling the cost of living well.
Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who has defended every Republican president since the Bronze Age, has finally waved the red flag. Ignoring affordability, he warned, isn’t a strategy but political self-harm. You can yell “Fake news!” at a reporter. You can’t yell it at a supermarket shelf. As Gingrich put it, any Republican who denies the problem “is not listening to the American people.” Prices feel real because people feel them, and in a free country, perception becomes reality fast. When your voters decide groceries are unaffordable, no spin or late-night rant can drag them back into believing otherwise.
And the sting of rising prices is now paired with something even harder to ignore: Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior. When he’s not comparing female reporters to farm animals, he’s on Truth Social unloading a stream of consciousness that reads like a diary no one asked to see. He’s always been a ranter, of course, but the recent eruption didn’t register as a mere tantrum. It operated on an entirely different level. Hundreds of posts an hour. AI images. Conspiracy theories running around like mice in a grain silo. He accused Michelle Obama of controlling President Biden’s autopen. He suggested Canada was meddling in American elections. He claimed Democrats faked affordability statistics. He warned of shadowy enemies and imaginary plots. It was a kaleidoscope of fury, paranoia and capital letters.
And he did it in December, the one month Americans beg for a break. They want lights. Carols. Hot chocolate. They want to forget their overdrafts and pretend the economy isn’t hanging by a thread. They want peace on earth, or at least silence from their president at 3 a.m.
But instead, they got a man firing off posts like an overcaffeinated teenager locked in a basement with three routers and a grudge.
Christmas didn’t stand a chance.
Families are already tiptoeing around budgets. Four in ten say they’re cutting back. Six in ten say gifts for others are on the chopping block. This year, stockings across America will be filled not with gadgets or toys but with the one gift every politician hands out for free: disappointment.
Tariffs have turned holiday shopping into a form of financial stunt work. Small businesses are being squeezed so hard they now measure success by whether they can make it through one more import cycle without crying.
Take a fragile economy. Add a president broadcasting his own mental turbulence to millions. Mix in a month that demands emotional stability more than any other. The result is simple: Trump stepped on Christmas, barefoot, and shattered it.
John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved
Sat, December 20, 2025
President Trump has weathered scandals, impeachments, investigations, electoral defeats, and enough lawsuits to make a mid-size law firm weep. But this winter, he’s facing something he can’t bluff or bark away: prices. Real prices. Grocery-store prices. The kind that glare at you from the receipt like a personal insult.
And Americans are tired of being insulted.
His approval rating has fallen to depths not seen since Nixon started sweating through his suits. Even Republicans are beginning to admit something is off. Strategists are panicking. Voters are grimacing. Nothing feels stable anymore, except the cost of groceries, which is now apparently welded to the price of rare minerals.
The moment the floor gave way came on Dec. 7, when Trump turned on “Fox & Friends,” his long-time emotional support animal, and found Peter Schiff calmly pointing out that Americans can’t afford much of anything right now. Schiff didn’t yell or blast the president. He simply stated the obvious: prices are rising, wages aren’t and Trump’s tariffs are making everything worse.
Trump’s response was instant and volcanic. He accused Schiff of being a “Trump-hating loser,” demanded producers be investigated, and suggested some unnamed force was infiltrating the network.
But no matter how many enemies he invents, voters know when they’re being squeezed. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 26 percent of Americans think Trump is handling the cost of living well.
Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who has defended every Republican president since the Bronze Age, has finally waved the red flag. Ignoring affordability, he warned, isn’t a strategy but political self-harm. You can yell “Fake news!” at a reporter. You can’t yell it at a supermarket shelf. As Gingrich put it, any Republican who denies the problem “is not listening to the American people.” Prices feel real because people feel them, and in a free country, perception becomes reality fast. When your voters decide groceries are unaffordable, no spin or late-night rant can drag them back into believing otherwise.
And the sting of rising prices is now paired with something even harder to ignore: Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior. When he’s not comparing female reporters to farm animals, he’s on Truth Social unloading a stream of consciousness that reads like a diary no one asked to see. He’s always been a ranter, of course, but the recent eruption didn’t register as a mere tantrum. It operated on an entirely different level. Hundreds of posts an hour. AI images. Conspiracy theories running around like mice in a grain silo. He accused Michelle Obama of controlling President Biden’s autopen. He suggested Canada was meddling in American elections. He claimed Democrats faked affordability statistics. He warned of shadowy enemies and imaginary plots. It was a kaleidoscope of fury, paranoia and capital letters.
And he did it in December, the one month Americans beg for a break. They want lights. Carols. Hot chocolate. They want to forget their overdrafts and pretend the economy isn’t hanging by a thread. They want peace on earth, or at least silence from their president at 3 a.m.
But instead, they got a man firing off posts like an overcaffeinated teenager locked in a basement with three routers and a grudge.
Christmas didn’t stand a chance.
Families are already tiptoeing around budgets. Four in ten say they’re cutting back. Six in ten say gifts for others are on the chopping block. This year, stockings across America will be filled not with gadgets or toys but with the one gift every politician hands out for free: disappointment.
Tariffs have turned holiday shopping into a form of financial stunt work. Small businesses are being squeezed so hard they now measure success by whether they can make it through one more import cycle without crying.
Take a fragile economy. Add a president broadcasting his own mental turbulence to millions. Mix in a month that demands emotional stability more than any other. The result is simple: Trump stepped on Christmas, barefoot, and shattered it.
John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved
Trump's 'refusal to face reality' on economic crisis shows his 'indifference': analysis
Ewan Gleadow
December 22, 2025
Ewan Gleadow
December 22, 2025
RAW STORY
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump holds an executive order about tariffs increase, flanked by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 13, 2025. REUTERS/File Photo
Donald Trump has failed to face up to the reality of the cost of living crisis according to a political commentator who highlighted this "indifference".
John Casey suggested the president had failed to mark up the everyday problems facing the country this Christmas in an opinion piece for The Daily Beast. Casey claimed that Trump had flat out lied about prices falling when, in fact, they were on the rise. Trump's administration was compared to that of Herbert Hoover's "moral failure" in failing to adapt to The Great Depression
Casey wrote, "Herbert Hoover embodied the moral failure of inaction. When the Great Depression devastated the nation, he refused to treat widespread suffering as a call for federal intervention."
"The catastrophic results included soaring unemployment, hunger, disease, and death. Americans experienced what it means when their government refused responsibility for pain."
"Trump’s governing style reflects this refusal to face reality, with consequences stemming from deadlines passed and protections lapsed, with the indifferent refrain that 'things won’t be that bad.'"
"He dismisses warnings from job reports to inflation data as mere messaging problems and the reliable fallback of fake news. Economic hardship is challenged as a Democratic hoax, even as ordinary Americans struggle. Gas prices are down even when they are up."
These economic woes are starting to put strain on the MAGA faithful, according to Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. Writing in his Substack newsletter, Krugman explained how Trump had inherited an economy that was in much better shape before he took office.
The Nobel Prize winner wrote, "Trump inherited when he took office was in much better shape than today’s economy, with lower unemployment combined with faster job growth, and inflation trending down."
"Trump’s radical policy changes – huge (illegal) tariffs, mass deportations, big tax cuts (for the rich), benefit cuts (for the poor and middle class), mass layoffs of federal workers, disinvesting in huge green energy projects and aid to farmers — have been clearly damaging to everything besides crypto and AI.
"It strains credulity – even for the Trump faithful – to claim that we are still in Joe Biden’s economy." Krugman went on to suggest Trump will try and "gaslight" Americans into believing the economy has been fixed.
He wrote, "Trump is going to make a prime-time address to the nation tonight. The details of his speech haven’t been announced, but it’s a good guess that he intends to gaslight Americans yet again, claiming that things are going well. They aren’t."
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump holds an executive order about tariffs increase, flanked by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 13, 2025. REUTERS/File Photo
Donald Trump has failed to face up to the reality of the cost of living crisis according to a political commentator who highlighted this "indifference".
John Casey suggested the president had failed to mark up the everyday problems facing the country this Christmas in an opinion piece for The Daily Beast. Casey claimed that Trump had flat out lied about prices falling when, in fact, they were on the rise. Trump's administration was compared to that of Herbert Hoover's "moral failure" in failing to adapt to The Great Depression
Casey wrote, "Herbert Hoover embodied the moral failure of inaction. When the Great Depression devastated the nation, he refused to treat widespread suffering as a call for federal intervention."
"The catastrophic results included soaring unemployment, hunger, disease, and death. Americans experienced what it means when their government refused responsibility for pain."
"Trump’s governing style reflects this refusal to face reality, with consequences stemming from deadlines passed and protections lapsed, with the indifferent refrain that 'things won’t be that bad.'"
"He dismisses warnings from job reports to inflation data as mere messaging problems and the reliable fallback of fake news. Economic hardship is challenged as a Democratic hoax, even as ordinary Americans struggle. Gas prices are down even when they are up."
These economic woes are starting to put strain on the MAGA faithful, according to Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. Writing in his Substack newsletter, Krugman explained how Trump had inherited an economy that was in much better shape before he took office.
The Nobel Prize winner wrote, "Trump inherited when he took office was in much better shape than today’s economy, with lower unemployment combined with faster job growth, and inflation trending down."
"Trump’s radical policy changes – huge (illegal) tariffs, mass deportations, big tax cuts (for the rich), benefit cuts (for the poor and middle class), mass layoffs of federal workers, disinvesting in huge green energy projects and aid to farmers — have been clearly damaging to everything besides crypto and AI.
"It strains credulity – even for the Trump faithful – to claim that we are still in Joe Biden’s economy." Krugman went on to suggest Trump will try and "gaslight" Americans into believing the economy has been fixed.
He wrote, "Trump is going to make a prime-time address to the nation tonight. The details of his speech haven’t been announced, but it’s a good guess that he intends to gaslight Americans yet again, claiming that things are going well. They aren’t."
No comments:
Post a Comment