Will talk of ‘Trump boom’ backfire at the ballot box?

Initial reviews indicate that the media blitz seems to be working. Bessent and the Treasury Department hosted a so-called Trump Accounts Summit on Wednesday in Washington featuring Nicki Minaj, MAGA’s newest celebrity. Bessent informed Trump, and reporters, at Thursday’s Cabinet meeting that content the administration created from Minaj’s appearance earned more than a billion impressions in less than 24 hours.

However, Trump’s economic approval rating currently sits 14 points underwater, according to the RealClearPolitics aggregate, and some economic and political experts are still questioning whether the administration’s promises will actually make a dent in the public’s souring economic perception of the president. 

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In particular, Bessent, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and even the president himself, have been promising since December that, this spring, Americans will see historically high tax refunds, averaging between $1,000 and $2,000 per household. 

“I think 2026 is going to be the year for the Trump boom,” Bessent declared Thursday at the White House.

While senior administration aides point to the tax reforms included in last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act as driving those savings, Treasury Department officials declined to provide modeling and methodology behind those exact numbers.

White House spokesman Kush Desai told the Washington Examiner that the “effects of President Trump’s historic tax cuts for American families go beyond a one-time tax refund check.”

“Americans are going to benefit from the President’s leadership each time over the coming year when new parents sign up their baby up for a Trump Account, seniors receive their tax-free Social Security checks, tipped workers receive a generous — and tax-free — tip at work, and workers sign up for tax-free overtime hours,” he wrote in a statement. “With more money in families’ pockets driving consumption and full equipment expensing driving investment, every American is going to feel accelerating job, wage, and economic growth,” he added.

Ryan Young, a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, suggested that, even if tax refunds do register at historic highs, the gap between the spring and when voters head to the polls in November should be concerning for Republicans.

“People have short memories,” he told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “If people don’t spend the money, if they save it instead, is it really going to cause any short-term stimulus? And if you have it too close to the election, then the spending isn’t going to show up in the data, which is obviously going to affect the narrative in the media.”

Bessent has also promised voters that GDP will grow at an expedited rate this year, but Desmond Lachman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that growth generally doesn’t matter as much to middle-class consumers as it does to investors.

“They’re probably going to have good growth, but it depends where the growth is going,” he told the Washington Examiner.

Much of the growth Trump ushered in last year came in the artificial intelligence sector, and Lachman noted that, because of AI data centers, “the electricity prices in a lot of places are going through the roof — so it’s going to be a real difficult sell to say that there isn’t an affordability problem.”

So far, Trump’s tariffs have averted the significant inflationary spikes that many economists predicted. But inflation did rise 2.7% for the year ending in December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier this month in an update to the most closely watched inflation gauge, the consumer price index.

And, in the personal consumption expenditures index, which is the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, inflation rose one-tenth of a percentage point to 2.8% for the year ending in November 2025. That blip caused the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to hold interest rates constant at their January meeting this past Wednesday.

The decision infuriated the president, who, along with Bessent and other senior administration officials, has claimed that lowering interest rates will allow GDP growth to virtually double.

“With the help of the Fed, we could hit numbers that have never been hit before. We could hit 8%, 9%, 10% [GDP growth],” Trump declared during Thursday’s Cabinet meeting. “There’s no reason why not.”

One former Trump White House official complained to the Washington Examiner that Trump is “doomed if he does, doomed if he doesn’t” when it comes to spinning his economic agenda.

“I mean, what else are we supposed to do? Seriously. Biden just sat back — asked for patience, and it killed him,” that person stated, acknowledging that Trump hasn’t accomplished all of the economic goals he set on the 2024 campaign trail. “This president isn’t going down without a fight. That I can guarantee you.”

But it isn’t all bad news for Trump.

Peter Loge, the director of the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, told the Washington Examiner that the administration and Republicans simply need to make people feel like the economy is working, considering that most voters don’t pay attention to macroeconomic arguments.

“I mean, any good economic story the Republicans can tell is good for Republicans,” he said. “People want things to work. They want to feel like the economy is working and it’s working for them. If people feel like it’s working for them, they reward the people in charge.”

Vice President JD Vance, who is also serving as the finance chairman of the Republican National Committee for the 2026 cycle, expressed a similar sentiment to the Washington Examiner.

“People are starting to feel the lowering of costs of prescription drugs, the lowering cost of eggs, the lowering cost of gas,” Vance said in an interview on the campaign trail last week. “What we need to do is to get them to connect the thing that they’re seeing on the ground with some action the administration has taken, because when they do make that connection, they’re much more likely to vote for us.”

Still, the flip side of Vance’s assessment presents a unique challenge for this White House and a president who notoriously likes to weave off script. 

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For example, during Thursday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump riffed on how he believes he can both drive the creation of new housing supply to allow price relief while still keeping prices elevated for existing home owners, and the president’s critics quickly jumped on his comments. 

“People that own their homes, we’re going to keep them wealthy. We’re going to keep those prices up. We’re not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn’t work very hard can buy a home,” he said immediately following comments from Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner. “You know, ‘there’s so much talk about, ‘oh, we’re going to drive housing prices down.’ I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes.”