Grocery Pain, Rising Costs: Fox Poll Turns on Trump

Fox News poll shows Americans blame Trump for the economy According to new reporting from the Daily Beast, Fox News OWN polling delivered a brutal reality check for President Trump, and the message came from one of his social companions, Bret Baier, A visibly stiff. BAER reported that 76% of Americans now view the economy as negatively, even worse than the final months of Joe Biden's presidency. Fox's numbers show deep frustration over rising costs. 60% of Americans say their grocery bills have gone up a lot, and another quarter say they've risen a little. Yet Trump recently insisted groceries are down except for the beef, a claim contradicted by independent fact checks showing prices have climbed since he returned to office. Most striking is who voters blame. Fox found 62% of Americans, including 42% of Republicans, say Trump is responsible for today's economic pain. Only 32% blame the former President Biden. The White House dismissed the poll, saying Trump is cleaning up Joe Biden's economic disaster. Okay, what's the real message here? You can get away with blaming the other guy when you take office, and even for the first month or two, or even three, but when you're this close to going into your second year of running everything, you can't blame the other guy. Americans realize the tariff isn't a tariff. The tariff is tax. They see inflation up, they see the cost of living going up, they see the price of groceries going up. And now they're directing their blame at Trump. Let's dig a little deeper here. Again, I'm not here as some partisan for you. I'm going to be honest, accurate. Called it like I see it. So I'm going to say something to defend Trump. The reality is the economy is not that bad. When you look at history, historical rates of unemployment and inflation were pretty good. I mean, unemployment is less. No matter how you slice it, it's less than 5%, a little over 4%. That's considered what a lot of economists consider to be like structural unemployment. Hard to do better than that. Now, are some people underemployed? Sure. Are some people with college degrees hoping for a great job, working at Starbucks and driving Uber? Yeah, but that's a separate issue. There's always some inflation. Target rate by the fed is about 2%. And yeah, we are. We are higher than that. But the idea that the economy is awful isn't really true. Now, many predicted that with all the Trump tariff taxes that by this time the economy would be in massive recession. That hasn't happened. Now, lest you think I become a complete Trump Spokesperson, I want to give you the perspective a little bit broader. Let's go back a year ago. The economy was actually in very good shape in Biden's last term, but it didn't feel like it because, yes, there was still inflation. Now, what everyone always forgets is even the countries in Europe, other, other well known democracies, free capitalistic systems, free market systems, had massive inflation after Covid. It's all fine to stimulus bills and spending cause massive, massive inflation, but the reality is every major economy in the world suffered inflation because of COVID People stopped spending on a lot of things like going to restaurants and a lot of service, and started spending on having griddles sent to their house and more backyard furniture. So there was massive, massive demand for products to be shipped all over the world. And it's impossible to not have inflation when all of a sudden you see surging, surging demand for products when it's even harder to get it to people and shipped out. So that was the fundamental dynamic. Am I saying Biden did everything perfectly? No. But I will tell you, any honest economic accounting of 2021-2025 would say the United States had lower inflation than almost any other major economy in the world. And yet, certainly anytime Biden tried to point that out, he was shouted down, ridiculed and mocked. And ultimately, he and his successor were punished in the polls. Polls showed Americans voted overwhelmingly for the current administration as a way of repudiating the economic policies of the past administration. And you know what? That's. That's politics. If you could go back in time and you can't, you could make the case that arguably Biden could have said, let me throw 10 or 20 million Americans out of work, let me get UNEM, let me get unemployment at 10% and focus exclusively on keeping inflation low and therefore being more appealing to 90% of voters. Maybe that would have. Again, it's hard to really tell because inflationary situations were happening in every major economy in the world. So even that might not have worked. But in more typical times, quite often, any policy official, any government official has to decide, do I care almost exclusively about inflation? Do I care exclusively about employment? Or do I try to mix? Do I try to help in both situations? Because to simply say inflation is the only thing that matters, if your unemployment goes up to 10%, you got a lot of hungry, hungry, starving people, and you have a massive hole in the economy that can take, you know, sometimes 10 years to get out. Arguably, the 2008 Great Recession was a situation where we should have had more government spend to help with all the unemployment then, but we can't go back then. Let's look more at the details of this most recent poll. Again, 76% say the economy is negative. Let's not forget the number one thing that Donald Trump always had to his favor among voters was the sense of he's a businessman, he'll bring inflation down, he'll control costs. That was his number one thing. No one was voting for him because they idolized his orange pancake makeup or his bleach blonde hairdo. That's not why people voted for him, because they thought he's not a politician. He, he's a businessman and he'll bring costs down. So when inflation goes up and people no longer have faith in the economy, that's a huge, huge hit to his popularity, and which is one reason why we're seeing his favorability ratings go down so low. 60% of Americans say that grocery prices are up a lot. That's not why they voted for Trump and they are starting to sour on him. This is one contributing factor as to why Republicans ran so poorly in the 2025 elections. There's now a drag. People no longer assume this is the party that's going to be great for inflation because they're looking at their own wallets, they're looking at their bank account. As a politician, you can lie about a lot of things and get away with it. You can spin a lot of things and get away with it. You can create false narratives, telling stories. But it's very hard to convince someone who's looking at their bank account and it says there's a $10 overdraft and you got nothing in there, that they're wrong. It's very hard to convince them their eyes are wrong when they go to pay a bill with a credit card and the waiter or the person, I'm sorry, card was declined. Very hard to convince somebody you're a politician that they're wrong when they feel that pain. Interestingly, 42% of Republicans are now blaming Trump. All well and good to say. Democrats blame Trump, Independents blame Trump. You would expect now we're cutting in on Trump's base. 42% of Republicans in America are currently blaming Trump for high prices that has got hurt. Independents are overwhelmingly blaming Trump. They're not blaming Biden. Now. Biden has pretty much retreated from the national scene. You rarely hear of him. I wouldn't be surprised if his name IDs shrunk below 90% at this point. The shutdown worsened the public frustration because like it or not, presidents are sort of held accountable for keeping the government running. And it wasn't just the fact that the government was closed. Arguably you could say that the Democrats had an equal role in that, but it was. The perception that Trump had absolute zero interest in talking, negotiating and getting it open again has taken a hit in his polling. The White House insists that inflation is cooled. Not really. I will point out in Trump's favor all of the liberal economists who predicted early in the spring that these tariffs were going to cause massive inflation, and some of whom predicted, you know, double digit inflation now have, have been wrong so far. Now, they might ultimately be right in first quarter, 2026 or second quarter. But as of right now, we're not seeing, we're certainly not seeing double digit inflation now. Harder to tell what the actual, the stats are statistics given what Trump has done to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But even independent sources from Goldman Sachs, other major back banks, nobody's showing that inflation is anything close to double digits yet. But people were expecting inflation to go from 4 or 5% to 2%. And especially when Trump says, oh, I'm going to solve the problem day one. Well, we're not day one. This is not January 20th anymore. It's not January 21st, February or March. We're heading into the holidays. When you really look at the clock and how people work, we're heading really into the last five, six weeks of the year holidays. You're really going to get maybe a couple of weeks left of really high level productivity out of Washington or anyplace else and then boom, it's 2026 and Biden lost the White House in 2024. It's simply not going to work for the current president or any president to be talking about. It's the other guy's fault. When you're now into two calendar years difference.