President Donald Trump has an unshakeable faith that the economy will take off next year thanks to the “big beautiful” budget bill he signed over the summer.
The president and his advisers are pinning their 2026 hopes on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s assurances that Americans struggling under the weight of the cost-of-living crisis will get enough relief during tax season to alleviate economic anxieties, Axios reported.
Working Americans could see up to $2,000 in tax returns, and new write-offs will be available for some tip earners, Social Security recipients, overtime workers, and parents, according to Bessent.
“The sky-is-falling crowd is just wrong,” one Trump adviser told Axios, while another insisted the economy is “going to take off like a rocket ship.”
Trump shares that stubbornly optimistic outlook, which is why he’s refused to acknowledge an “affordability crisis,” according to Axios, instead calling Americans’ economic anxieties a “hoax” and a “con job.”
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published over the weekend, the president blamed voters for not yet understanding that he had “created the greatest economy in history.”
“It may take people a while to figure all these things out,” he said.
At a rally in Pennsylvania last week, Trump insisted that “prices are coming down tremendously,” even as many Americans report cutting back on holiday gift purchases this year.
On Sunday, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett provided some additional insight into why Trump is so bullish on the economy. He said the president only focuses on things “we have already made progress on,” Hassett told CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation.
Those include gasoline prices, prescription drugs, and, specifically, the price of eggs.
Meanwhile, growth in GDP has fallen by half since Trump took office, payroll growth has plummeted to historically low levels, and inflation has refused to budge, as the president’s tariff policies have driven up prices on some consumer goods.
Healthcare premiums for about 22 million Americans are also set to skyrocket next year after the latest GOP spending bill failed to extend health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, with the average recipient seeing their premiums double.
A new AP-NORC poll released last week found that Trump’s approval rating on the economy was just 31 percent, with his overall approval rating hovering at just 36 percent.
Other surveys conducted over the past few weeks found that almost half of Americans believed the cost-of-living crisis was the worst they’d ever seen, with 46 percent of voters blaming the president and his policies for failing to deliver on Trump’s promise to bring down prices.
Those numbers don’t bode well for next year’s midterm elections, when pollsters say dozens of House seats will be in play if Republicans fail to turn things around on the economy.
Some of the president’s advisers are frustrated, though, that Trump isn’t getting more credit for keeping inflation to “just” 3 percent and for keeping the unemployment rate below 4.5 percent, according to Axios.
Never mind the fact that Trump campaigned on a promise to lower inflation, and that at 4.4 percent, unemployment has reached its highest point since October 2021.
The president’s advisers also told Axios that Trump is not opposed to talking about “affordability”—he just doesn’t want to use that word.
“Next year, when the economy is taking off, we’re going to say we told you so,” one adviser said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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