Don't lose sight of the pain Trump is passing on to American consumers

Many people have stopped paying attention to the harms. They shouldn't. It's coming for their pocketbooks, and maybe worse.

By Jeff Nesbit

President Donald Trump’s administration has taken so many controversial, mind-numbing twists and turns in Trump’s first few months in office, it can be difficult to keep track of the important threats, harms, and impacts of those actions. So, let’s try to zero in on some of the more important or revealing ones.

First, and crucially for more than half of the American people who live paycheck to paycheck, is the devastating impact of Trump’s tariff wars on the actual cost of things. Trump has argued for years that companies will not add to the price of consumer goods in the middle of a trade war.

But that’s just not true.

Tariffs are, even now, raising prices for everyone: on retail goods at stores like Walmart; on steel that goes into building cars; on lumber used to build houses; and on electronics that you buy to listen to music and podcasts and watch Fox News.

How much will Trump’s trade wars cost an average household? More than $2,300 a year, according to a new estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. That’s actual, real, hard dollars that will zap every household budget in America.

Companies that once said they would consider just absorbing the costs of those tariffs rather than pass them on to consumers are buckling. Walmart is now squarely in Trump’s line of sight after it said it had no choice but to pass the costs of Trump’s tariffs on to customers.

Trump is furious at Walmart right now for stating the obvious: that it would need to raise prices because of Trump’s trade war. Trump said Walmart just needed to “eat the tariffs” after the White House earlier blasted Amazon for also stating the obvious: that his tariffs would raise prices on nearly everything American consumers buy online.

Then there is Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that passed the House Budget Committee under the cover of darkness just before midnight on Sunday and is now headed to the floor of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is going to do two things when it passes Congress under the reconciliation process:

• First, it’s going to cost most working people hundreds of dollars, not lower their taxes. Under the economic plan Trump is jamming through Congress right now, people making between $17,000 and $51,000 a year could lose $700 in after-tax income. People making more than $4.3 million a year would gain an average $389,000, according to a new study.

• Second, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is going to kick nearly 9 million people off Medicaid. The GOP-controlled House, under pressure from Trump, voted to cut $880 billion from the committee that oversees Medicaid in its budget bill this spring. Trump’s tax cut bill is going to drop millions of the elderly and children from Medicaid, one of the most popular federal programs in U.S. history, to pay for these tax cuts for the wealthy.

Combined with other cuts his administration is making to the Medicaid program, Trump’s "big, beautiful bill," will “take Medicaid and health insurance away from 13.7 million Americans, shutter hospitals and cause premiums to skyrocket across the country. Insane,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.,) said.

Not to be forgotten are Trump’s foreign policy blunders, including his decision to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development. One net result? Children are starving to death in Yemen because Trump and Elon Musk cut the $1-a-day peanut paste that kept them alive. They cut that line item—literally causing children to starve—while spending $7 billion blowing up Yemen.

Don’t forget the promises Trump made to anti-abortion groups to roll back reproductive rights protections—promises that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is delivering on. Last week, Trump’s HHS ordered a review of mifepristone, a safe and effective abortion procedure, after a dubious report on the drug.

“Nope, the Trump administration hasn't given up on trying to ban abortion,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) posted on X. “Just this week, RFK Jr. pushed a fake report about the abortion medication mifepristone. He's peddling misinformation so he can lay the groundwork for restricting abortion access no matter where you live.”

We also should not forget Trump’s efforts to do substantial harm to Social Security—“the most damaging 90 days in Social Security’s history,” according to Martin O’Malley, President Joe Biden’s Social Security commissioner—by firing thousands of career officials whose job it was to protect the integrity of the popular social insurance program.

The only good news of late is that federal judges are routinely curtailing obvious overreach in Trump’s many executive orders. The question, of course, is whether the Supreme Court will uphold the rule of law when these cases land on their docket.

Meanwhile, some of the most high-profile investigations they proclaimed loudly at the start of his administration have come to nothing. Recently, for instance, a Justice Department investigation Trump’s White House announced with fanfare into the Environmental Protection Agency’s $20 billion-plus climate and renewable energy grant program that was begun during the Biden administration fizzled out after the FBI and prosecutors found no evidence of wrongdoing.

It's nice that there are the occasional rays of sunlight in what has otherwise been a dark, troubling first three months of Trump’s second trip through the Oval Office.

But the stark truth is that the blizzard of Trump actions has caused many Americans to simply ignore the pain and impacts of his actions. It’s one of the reasons his poll numbers haven’t tanked dramatically. Many Americans just aren’t paying close attention.

Which is too bad. Because, as any farmer will tell you, it really is true that all chickens do eventually come home to roost.

Jeff Nesbit was the public affairs chief for five Cabinet departments or agencies under four presidents.

---