I think a lot of people forgot that before Covid hit, Trump was headed for a fairly routine reelection. Many people thought he was doing a solid job, especially on the economy. All American elections still come down to the James Carville truism, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Despite what the official metrics or stock market says, we’ve been in a “vibesession” due to inflation and elevated interest rates. Anecdotally, I'm still seeing stores run low/out of things far more frequently than pre pandemic times, which just adds to the feeling that all is not right with the world. America is actually in better economic shape than most other countries, but people are not feeling happy or optimistic, and the incumbent party is going to pay for it.
You are technically right, but anyone 35 and younger is currently experiencing the highest interest rates of their adult lives.
Whether higher rates are good or bad is irrelevant considering the economic churn that occurs when a system that's built up around one set of assumptions (cheap money and low return on fixed income) has to rebuild itself around a new reality.
15 years is a long time and reshaped the entire economy around basically free credit, so any change to that was going to be painful. And one of the real disconnects between economists and regular people is around the term inflation. Ordinary consumers actually care about affordability, not inflation. Raising interest rates to tame inflation does not improve affordability. In fact its goal is to further decrease affordability to reduce demand, which should then cause inflation to moderate. That works fine for economists and policymakers, but for ordinary people that’s more of a bite off your nose off to spite your face kind of solution.
No it wasn't obvious that Trump was headed to a routine reelection. In 2019, the sense was the economy was slowing down. If not for the tariffs on Chinese goods, the normal business cycle had it that a recession was coming in 2020.
Trump publicly pressured the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low so he could campaign on the economy.
Had he not intervened inflation probably wouldn't have been so high in the years to follow.
