Five years into an inflation nightmare that the current president promised to fix on day one, American consumer confidence just hit its lowest point in seven months. Gas is still above $4 a gallon, July's jobs report was a quiet catastrophe, and the midterms are fewer than 70 days out. Donald Trump is, naturally, still blaming Joe Biden.
The Number That Should Terrify Republicans
The Conference Board's consumer confidence index dropped to 89.4 in August, down from 90.2 in July, according to The Guardian. That's the worst reading in seven months. And for context: back in late 2024 and early 2025, that same index was consistently sitting above 100.
So we have gone, in the span of roughly eighteen months, from above 100 to 89.4. That is not a blip. That is a direction. Americans are not warming up to this economy. They are cooling on it, steadily, like soup no one bothered to cover.
The Conference Board collected its survey responses from August 3rd through August 16th. Write-in comments skewed more pessimistic than last month, with references to oil and gas prices, war and geopolitics, food prices, trade, and job security all ticking upward. These are not abstract economic anxieties. These are people writing down, in their own words, exactly what is eating at them.
The Iran War Is Not Free
The ongoing conflict in Iran has kept US gasoline prices above $4 per gallon, and Americans are noticing. The Guardian reports that oil and gas price mentions in the Conference Board's open responses remained elevated again this month. When people sit down to fill out an economic survey and their first instinct is to write 'gas prices,' that is not a communications problem. That is a real-world money problem.
The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation measure, the personal consumption expenditures price index, clocked in at 3.7% year-over-year in June, per The Guardian. That is down from May's 4.1%, which is something, but it is well above the 2.8% the country was at before the Iran war started on February 28th. It is also well above the 2.5% inflation rate on the day Trump was inaugurated in January 2025.
So inflation went up after Trump took office. Not before. After. That is simply what the numbers say.
The Jobs Report Nobody Wanted to Talk About
If the confidence numbers are bad, the July labor market data is worse. The US economy shed 23,000 jobs last month, The Guardian reports. Employers did not add jobs. They cut them. That was already unexpected and ugly on its own.
Then came the revision gut-punch. The Department of Labor went back and erased 103,000 jobs from previously reported May and June payrolls. Jobs that were announced, celebrated, cited in press briefings, and quietly deleted. The economy created six figures fewer jobs than we thought it did, and we only found out after the fact.
The unemployment rate did fall to 4.1%, but The Guardian notes it fell for the worst possible reason: thousands of Americans stopped looking for work altogether. When people leave the labor force, the unemployment rate goes down mathematically, because the denominator shrinks. It is the economic equivalent of solving a math problem by erasing numbers you don't like.
Trump Blames Biden. The Data Disagrees.
Trump's response to all of this has been consistent and consistent with nothing in the factual record: blame Joe Biden. The Guardian notes that Trump continues to pin high prices on his predecessor despite inflation having risen since his own inauguration.
This is worth sitting with for a moment. The PCE was 2.5% when Trump took office. It is now 3.7%. The war that is driving gas prices started on his watch, in February 2025. The jobs that were revised away came from months he presided over. These are not Biden's numbers. Biden has been a private citizen for over a year.
With midterms fewer than 70 days away and a confidence index trending the wrong direction, the 'blame the last guy' strategy is going to need to start producing results it has not produced yet. Voters who are paying $4-plus to fill up their tank every week tend to be less interested in historical attribution and more interested in what happens next.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe, based on official White House messaging, that everything wrong with the American economy is a Biden hangover. The inflation, the gas prices, the shaky jobs market. All residue from the previous administration. This requires you to ignore that inflation was 2.5% when Trump walked through the door, that a war his administration is prosecuting started in February 2025 and immediately drove energy prices through the roof, and that July's jobs report just wiped 103,000 previously announced positions off the books like a hostess erasing a reservation that was never really confirmed.
The Conference Board's survey is valuable precisely because it cuts through the spin. Real people, writing real words, about real frustrations. And what they wrote in August was: gas, war, food, jobs. That is the list. That is the vibe. Consumer confidence at 89.4 is not a disaster headline on its own, but it is the seventh consecutive month of readings that would have been unthinkable two years ago, and the trend line does not point up.
Seventy days until midterms. The economy is losing jobs, revising away jobs it thought it had, keeping gas above $4 a gallon, and running inflation nearly a full percentage point hotter than the day this administration started. The White House can keep pointing at Biden's shadow if they want. The gas pump doesn't care who they're pointing at.
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