At last week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Vice President Vance painted a bleak picture of American life before the second Trump administration:
“Two years ago, we have to remember, our nation, ladies and gentlemen, was tired. We were tired of seeing our factories close. We were tired of our neighbors dying of drug overdoses. We were tired of not being able to afford anything. We were tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free rein over our great country,” Vance said. “And we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.”
Who is responsible for this terrible state of affairs? The opposition party and immigrants, apparently. Vance went on to say, “The Democrat legacy of the last few years was that they bankrupted our country and left us poor. They left our country weaker. They left our border wide open and our communities less safe.”
But this account represents a preposterous inversion. Almost every problem Vance lists, the Trump administration has made worse.
The administration’s environmental policies have made American water and air dirtier. Its health-care, tariff, and tax policies have worsened inflation and increased the financial burden on most American households, even as incomes have grown. And its public-health policies have led to outbreaks of contagious disease.
The Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump has revoked regulations on air pollution—including those on particulate matter that can cause heart and lung disease—after being intensely lobbied by the fossil-fuel industry. It has repealed limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water, which are linked to cancer and other health problems. The Trump Justice Department scrapped a settlement compelling Alabama to provide adequate sanitation systems to residents living with raw sewage, describing it as “DEI.” After the residents of Jackson, Mississippi, learned they had been drinking lead-tainted tap water, a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that Americans don’t have a constitutional right to clean drinking water.
Although Trump won the 2024 election largely because of Biden-era inflation, he has done everything in his power to make inflation worse. Trump’s arguably illegal and certainly ill-advised war in Iran has led to the closure of strategic shipping waterways, which has provoked a rise in energy prices, which is in turn raising the prices of other goods. Trump’s tariffs worsened inflation by raising the price of imports, and wages seem to be falling behind inflation. To make matters worse, health-care costs are rising rapidly, in part because of the Trump administration’s repeal of Affordable Care Act subsidies in its One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Crime is down. But that’s not because of the Trump administration’s mass-deportation program, whose brutal and indiscriminate tactics have weakened the economy rather than strengthened it. The reality is that immigrants are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, and crime has been falling steadily since the pandemic-induced spike in 2020 and 2021. Absent significant changes to the space-time continuum, Trump cannot claim credit for a decline in crime that began before Trump even took office, especially with an FBI director who devotes bureau resources to respond to people mocking him on X.
Vance called out two women, one of whom was born in Somalia, who defrauded Medicaid of $46 million. But the Trump administration has been happy to pardon fraudsters such as Lawrence Duran, who was sentenced to 50 years in prison for defrauding Medicare of more than $200 million, or Robert Harshbarger Jr., the husband of Republican Representative Diana Harshbarger, who had pleaded guilty to health-care fraud. Last February, Elizabeth Oyer, a former U.S. pardon attorney, toldThe New York Times that Trump’s pardons had “essentially wiped away about $1 billion in penalties and restitution secured by federal prosecutors in fraud cases.” But the number may be even larger; Democrats on the judiciary committee estimated in August that the number is closer to $2 billion.
Safety isn’t just about crime, and in this respect, the Trump administration has tried its best to make the federal government worse at protecting Americans from foreseeable problems. Cuts to public agencies have coincided with outbreaks of infectious and foodborne diseases, to the point that the administration is trying to manipulate numbers to hide measles deaths. I don’t know about you, but I felt safer when I could eat lettuce without thinking about whether it would make me sick. Or berries. Or beef.
In fairness, however, not everyone is getting poorer—the top 1 and 0.1 percent of American households have seen their income grow considerably, thanks to the OBBBA’s slashing of taxes on the wealthy; the bottom 50 percent, not so much. This is a trend that began long before Trump—and has been sustained in part by the Democrats’ unwillingness to reverse Republicans’ tax cuts. To the extent that anyone should be happy with the Trump administration’s policies, though, many of its extremely wealthy backers are getting all they paid for and then some.
As for everyone else? The country is almost certainly dirtier, poorer, less prosperous, and in some ways less safe than in 2024. But that’s not because of Democrats or immigrants. It’s because of the people currently running the place. They’re really hoping you’ll blame someone else.
The post Who Made America Poorer and Dirtier? appeared first on The Atlantic.
