From prosperity to austerity: Trump’s tone shifts ahead of tariff impacts

The president’s tone, and that of his aides, has shifted notably in recent weeks, as they warn of sacrifice and “transition” until, by their telling, his heavy tariffs pave the way for a boom.

President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday.Read more- / The Washington Post

by Naftali Bendavid, Washington Post

Published May 6, 2025, 11:47 a.m. ET

During his campaign and the early part of his current presidency, President Donald Trump promised an economic boom that would take off upon his return to the White House — reviving the American Dream and producing four years of unparalleled prosperity.

“Your paychecks will be higher, your streets will be safer and cleaner, your communities will be richer, and your future as an American will be much better than it ever has been when I get in,” Trump said in his final campaign rally, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Because this will be the golden age of America.”

But Trump’s tone, and that of his aides, has shifted notably in recent weeks, as they warn of sacrifice and “transition” until, by their telling, his heavy tariffs pave the way for a boom. Trump has spoken of the need to take economic “medicine,” warned Americans they may need to cut back on items like dolls and pencils, and suggested a short-term recession might be an acceptable cost for the prosperity he predicts will come.

“This is a transition period,” Trump said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “I think we’re going to do fantastically.”

Regarding consumers, he added: “I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”

This departs not only from Trump’s longtime rhetoric but also from the historically upbeat language of American politics. Herbert Hoover’s campaign promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” Ronald Reagan welcomed “morning in America,” and politicians from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon vowed to bring “prosperity.”

It is not clear how Americans will respond to such a message, including voters who ousted Democrats from the White House because of high prices and Trump’s promise to make their lives better.

“I don’t think it will resonate very well,” said Marc Short, a longtime top adviser to former vice president Mike Pence. “I think it’s particularly optically difficult when the president is earning a billion dollars in crypto while asking Americans to cut back on toys and products for kids. That seems like a disconnect to me.”

White House officials said Americans have already experienced economic relief under Trump’s presidency, as prices have fallen or remained flat and the private sector has added jobs.

They also said Trump signaled the possibility of an economic transition even before taking office. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in December, Trump declined to promise that prices would not go up as a result of the tariffs, saying: “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow.”

But the ramping up of that message appears to reflect the recent rocky stretch for the economy, which shrank in the first quarter while the stock market fluctuated wildly amid predictions that the tariffs could create further problems.

On April 6, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that “eventually [America] will be the most dominant country economically in the world … But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

In the latest “Meet the Press” interview, he suggested that buying cheap goods from China played into Beijing’s hands. “I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs — that’s 11 years old — needs to have 30 dolls,” the president said. “I think they can have three dolls or four dolls, because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable. We had a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars with China.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who chaired President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the rhetoric recognizes economic reality but goes surprisingly far.

“I think they are trying to insulate themselves from the fallout of the tariffs — both the inflation, which is inevitable, and the unemployment, which is likely,” Holtz-Eakin said. But “it’s a little tone-deaf to tell people they are spoiled to begin with. I don’t understand that at all.”

Trump’s top officials have joined in the messaging shift. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox News that Americans could respond to high egg prices by raising chickens in their backyards. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CBS News that a recession would be “worth it” to bring about Trump’s vision of enduring prosperity.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking to the Economic Club of New York in early March, declared that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream. The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security.”

During his campaign, Trump left little doubt that he planned to impose a series of sweeping tariffs. He described “tariff” as his favorite word and said the levies would spur a manufacturing renaissance, higher wages and lower taxes.

Since taking office, analysts of both parties said, the White House messaging on tariffs has been inconsistent — suggesting at times that they would carry no costs for consumers while signaling at other times that they would require sacrifice, and being ambiguous about the precise goal.

Many economists believe the tariffs will not produce the promised gains and could carry significant economic costs. Jared Bernstein, who chaired President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, said that makes the calls for sacrifice even less resonant, especially coming from wealthy individuals like Trump and his top advisers.

“The easiest thing to do would be to send you the ‘mind blown’ emoji and leave it at that,” Bernstein said when asked for his reaction to the messaging. “I can’t imagine what it sounds like to most Americans to have billionaires tell them they have to cut back on their living standards for some undefinable and unreachable goal.”

Trump may be risking even more political danger, his critics say, because he has signaled so clearly that he is personally directing large parts of the American economy. He has been setting tariffs on individual countries, deciding which businesses get exemptions, opining on individual companies’ policies and browbeating the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.

Americans have quickly soured on Trump’s economic policies. Nearly 2 out of 3 Americans disapprove of his handling of tariffs, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos national poll. More than 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy overall, according to the poll.

Many presidents, of course, deploy policies they hope will reshape the economy in some way. Biden pushed a bill to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry, arguing that America’s lag in that industry had created a national security risk. President Barack Obama’s health-care law overhauled an industry that made up more than one-sixth of the economy.

But Trump often speaks as if he were orchestrating the economy more directly. Speaking recently to Time magazine, he compared the U.S. to a massive department store and himself to its owner.

“It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there,” Trump said. “And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, ‘If you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.’”

Some in Trump’s orbit argue not just that Americans may have to do with less out of necessity, but also that there is more to life than material goods. Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said that sentiment has been growing on the right, on the theory that rapid economic growth is not worth the cultural upheaval it brings.

“This has been a current among social conservatives for years, and on the far left as well — this idea that economic growth is overrated, that our leaders have been too focused on economic growth and not on a lot of other things,” Strain said.

But whatever the merit of that argument, Strain said, it is not the role of the president to make that choice.

“I do think that in our culture, material acquisition is overrated,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s the job of the executive branch of the federal government to make sure that my soul is properly ordered. For me personally, it’s the job of the cardinal who gets elected pope in a few days.”

Trump’s critics have seized on the broad message from Trump that Americans may see short-term consequences as the country builds toward greatness. In some quarters, it has drawn sarcastic comparisons to communist leaders like China’s Mao Zedong.

Former Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan), a longtime critic of Trump, posted on social media several weeks ago: “GOP in 2010: Stop the socialists! GOP in 2025: the conveniences of modern life are overrated. We will reorder the economy and redistribute wealth. Your losses are a small sacrifice for the glory of the nation!”

Critics have also pointed to comments such as Bessent’s remark to television host Tucker Carlson in early April that workers who are being forced out of the federal government through Elon Musk-led cutbacks could find employment in the factories that will spring up as a result of Trump’s manufacturing renaissance.

“We are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings,” Bessent said. “And then on the other side of that, we will have the labor we need for new manufacturing.”

More immediately, Bernstein said, the administration is trying to prepare Americans for a tough economic stretch ahead.

“The only sense one can make of this is that they are trying to enlist people in a pay-now-gain-later scenario where if you just sacrifice this Christmas, next holiday season will be, insert whatever Trumpian superlative you want,” Bernstein said.

But, he added, “You can’t find anyone who’s not being paid to believe that scenario who thinks it’s going to work.”