Trump’s Polls Are Tumbling. So Is the Stock Market. Coincidence?

It would be difficult to dispute that the economy has stumbled on Trump’s watch. Inflation started rising immediately after Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs. Job creation cratered starting in June and July. It rebounded in September, but we have no clue what happened in October and the Bureau of Labor Statistics says it can’t tell us because of the government shutdown. Future scholars may regard the October 2025 jobs report as elusive as “A Corona for Vivien,” the missing sonnet cycle at the heart of Ian McEwan’s new novel, What We Can Know.

Consumer spending has stayed high, but only because the top 10 percent in the income distribution was buying stuff; it now accounts, grotesquely, for about half of all spending. At some point, the coming bear market will shut that down. The metaphor of choice for the economy right now is a Jenga tower. Have you ever played Jenga? You take turns pulling rectangular blocks out from a tower made of them and piling the blocks on top until the whole thing crashes down. As the U.S. economy rests on fewer and fewer pillars—a handful of affluent consumers, a handful of tech companies like Nvidia—it wobbles more and more.

The leading edge of financial decline has been crypto. Bitcoin’s gains for the past year have been wiped out. Paul Krugman suggests that crypto is a “Trump trade.” With little utility as a currency except for criminals, crypto, Krugman argues, is a speculative investment dependent on Trump’s promotion of the industry. “An industry that’s still having very little success in finding legal use cases for its products basically bought itself a president,” Krugman wrote Wednesday. “But with Trump’s power evaporating, it’s starting to look like money down the drain.” We may see something similar soon in the construction of data centers, which is associated with parallel corruption in Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s family.