The GOP Is Now the Panic Party

"Everything is Horrible!!"

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Feeling civic-minded, I tried to listen to all of Donald Trump’s press conference yesterday at Bedminster. Tried, and failed. I managed to get through his stemwinder of an opening statement. Then there were a few softball questions that my dead grandmother would have knocked out of the park. It was around the time when Trump claimed that Chris Wallace wasn’t really Mike Wallace’s kid that I gave up.

Two things struck me about Trump’s overall performance. The first was the titanic tsunami of bullshit he produced in stream-of-consciousness form for more than an hour. Just repeated, constant bullshit about how great the country was under Trump, how horrible the country is like under Biden, how he won the 2020 election with a wider margin than in 2016, that sort of thing.

The second striking thing was Trump’s effort to make Americans panic about the current and future state of the country under Biden and then Harris. He explicitly stated that “we’re a failing nation.” and that Harris would bring “horrific inflation, massive crime, and the death of the American dream.”

Now Trump was making a prediction, so technically one cannot say he’s definitively wrong right now. But given that economists believe his policies are far more inflationary than anything proposed by Harris, it seems unlikely he is correct.

What is far more interesting, however, is Trump’s increasingly ham-handed efforts to get Americans to panic about trends that are moving in positive directions. As I wrote earlier this week:

Republicans do not want Trump to talk about policy so much as they want him to talk about issues. They would like Trump to rant and rave about crime, inflation, and illegal immigration. He doesn’t need to proffer solutions to any of these problems — especially since, as the links suggest, all three are trending in the desired direction already. But the more that Trump can talk about them, the more primed Americans might be to Trump’s general “the world is going to hell and we should be mad about it!” vibe.

It’s worth reiterating at this point just how much those issues are trending against panic. MSNBC’s James Downie noted this a few days ago:

Crime rates fell in 2021 — and 2022 and 2023. Most recently, Justice Department data shows a 15% drop in violent crime in the first three months of 2024. According to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the murder rate in nearly 70 large U.S. cities is down more than 8% since Trump left office. GOP attempts to run on reducing crime were always going to be complicated after their presidential nominee was convicted of 34 felony counts. But the data should make it impossible….

Last month, the Border Patrol made 56,000 apprehensions, the lowest since the fall of 2020. “Shelters on the southern U.S. border and in some major cities that were inundated with migrants a year ago say they are seeing sharp declines in migrants seeking refuge,” reported NBC News on Friday, “some reporting drops as high as 60% in just the past few months.”

As for inflation, well, Trump is in real trouble here. While inflation topped out over nine percent in 2022, it has regressed to under three percent again, as the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip explained:

In July, consumer prices were up 2.9% from a year earlier, the lowest inflation rate since early 2021, and down sharply from 9.1% in mid-2022. 

Markets have largely concluded that inflation is simply no longer an issue. Inflation-linked bonds project inflation in the coming year to be 2.2%, down from 2.6% just a month ago, according to Barclays.

To be sure, inflation is still an issue with voters; polls show they think it’s getting worse. Trump pays no penalty for exaggerating prices because his claims resonate with how people feel. Moreover, one reason inflation looks less threatening is that unemployment recently rose, which, if it continues, is bad news for Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee.

But the retreat in inflation and softer jobs data have had one immediate, tangible benefit, both to consumers and Harris: lower interest rates. The Federal Reserve is almost certain to cut rates in September, and in anticipation, other borrowing rates have dropped. Mortgage rates have hit a 15-month low, so buying a house might be getting cheaper, though not by much. 

In addition to the actual news on inflation improving, Harris is suffering less from public anger than Biden.

Indeed, Biden’s withdrawal may have been one of those junctures that allowed a swath of voters to realize that maybe things were actually getting better. Harris is the obvious beneficiary of this vibe shift. Paul Krugman made this point in the New York Times:

Increasingly it seems the reason the good news wasn’t getting through to voters was the messenger. Very good things have happened on Biden’s watch, many of them attributable to his startlingly bold policies. He will surely receive a much deserved hero’s welcome at next week’s Democratic National Convention, and future historians will, I believe, rate his presidency extremely highly. But for various reasons — his age, the fact that inflation surged in 2021 and ’22 and maybe just his personal style — voters weren’t willing to give him credit for his achievements.

Now that Harris is the Democratic nominee, however, the vibes have shifted.

A Financial Times poll showing that voters prefer Harris on the economy may be an outlier, but there are other polls showing that Trump’s once sizable (and utterly undeserved) advantage on that issue has been greatly eroded. And a new Associated Press/NORC poll shows the candidates tied on who could better handle crime, and Harris leads by wide margins on abortion and health care….

Harris is running as the candidate of optimism and hope, declaring that we have triumphed over adversity — which we have. The truth is that there was ample reason to feel good about America a month or two ago, but voters weren’t willing to believe it as long as Biden was running. With Harris as the Democrats’ standard-bearer, Biden’s achievements may finally pay off politically.

This has left the Trump campaign in a state of panic — not just about the state of the horse race, but about trying to hype any negative economic indicator as a sign that folks need to panic about the economy.

This came through most obviously during the financial market wobble that occurred a week ago last Monday. Experts looked at it and shrugged, urging Americans to not panic and hold onto their stock portfolios.

Trump… took a different tack. As TNR’s Paige Oamek wrote:

As markets plunged, Trump began insistently posting on Truth Social, deeming the poor market performance a “KAMALA CRASH!” or “KAMALA KRASH.”

“STOCK MARKETS CRASHING. I TOLD YOU SO!!!” wrote the former president and convicted felon. “KAMALA DOESN’T HAVE A CLUE. BIDEN IS SOUND ASLEEP. ALL CAUSED BY INEPT U.S. LEADERSHIP!””

My, what a lot of ALL CAPS Trump is using there! Can you sense the attempt to make you panic?!

Of course, it turned out that Trump’s panic was misplaced. The S&P 500 is now higher it was prior to that Monday hiccup; the Dow Jones Industrial Average is still above 40,000. This quick market rebound was probably due to reduced inflationary pressures combined with persistent growth in aggregate demand. In other words, there was no stock market crash, and Trump panicked.

As I have said elsewhere, the political penalty for saying things are going great just before a crisis is way higher than predicting things will go south when no crisis occurs. Eventually, however, voters become inured to constant warnings that the sky is falling.¹

As summer turns into fall, and the number of days until the election start to wane, Trump and the Republicans will be trying to gin up more panic if the poll numbers continue to trend away from them. One wonders if Trump is starting to hit diminishing returns from his panicked attempts to instill panic in American voters. And over the long run, I’m not sure the GOP will want the Panic Party moniker. But they are stuck with that label for the rest of 2024.

1. This was one possible reason that Biden’s campaign was languishing as well. Declaring Trump to be an existential threat to democracy might be true, but it’s an unfortunately difficult case to make when he is not in power.