Opinion: What do you think of how Trump's handling our economy?

USA Today

25-03-2025

Opinion: What do you think of how Trump's handling our economy? | The Excerpt
On a bonus episode (first released on March 24, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: Trump and Republicans campaigned aggressively in 2024 on the economy. So now that he's in office, we asked: do you think that President Trump is doing enough to fix the economy? Do you think grocery prices will rise or go down? Forum is a new series from USA TODAY's Opinion team, dedicated to showcasing views from across the political spectrum on issues that Americans are starkly divided on. Today you'll hear from a few folks detailing their opinions on the economy. If you'd like to weigh in on a different topic, you can find more questions at usatoday.com/forum. And if your submission is selected for print, we might invite you to add your voice to a future special bonus episode like this one. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to [e-mail].
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Michael McCarter:
Hello and welcome to the Excerpt. I'm Michael McCarter, Vice President and Group Editor of the Opinion Sections of Gannett, the parent company of USA TODAY. This is a bonus episode of the Excerpt highlighting the new series from USA TODAY's opinion team that we're calling Forum. It's a weekly space dedicated to showcasing views from across the political spectrum on issues that Americans are starkly divided on. Today we're hearing from people about how they feel the economy is being handled by President Donald Trump.
Trump and Republicans campaigned aggressively in 2024 on the economy. So now that he's in office, do you think that President Trump is doing enough to fix the economy? Do you think that grocery prices will rise or go down? Here's what some readers told us.
Allen Maricle:
Actually, they're getting lower. I just bought a dozen eggs for 2.89. It was almost $6 or something like that, close to that, about not more than a little over a month ago.
Michael McCarter:
Allen Maricle is 62 and lives in Shepherdsville, Kentucky.
Allen Maricle:
And I see it getting lower. I guess when you get outside of an urban area. I live close to Louisville, but I live in Shepherdsville, which is about 25 miles, something like that, south of Louisville, and everything's much cheaper. Gas, everything.
Jobs are coming back, around here especially, we've got some pretty big companies that's moved in. The only problem that I've seen that when it comes to layoffs is the bourbon industry, which I'm right in the middle of it. Okay. I think the terrorists has hurt them really bad, and you've noticed that they've laid off some people in Louisville, not where I'm at, but in Louisville, I think that's going to be tough on the industry. Economies go up and down. It doesn't matter who is president. You just got to understand how the situations are going. Are the terrorists going to hurt us down the road?
Could be. It's just going to depend. Truly going to depend on how things go in the next six months. I've always said this, give a president one year and we'll see how it goes. I feel that we need to get, and I'm thinking of my grandchildren. I'm thinking of my great-grandchildren. We got to get our house in order because we keep doing this, borrowing money and everything like that. It's going to hit us. It's going to hit hard. But I always tell my television folks, if you really want to hear what the people think, go to the bars, go to the restaurants, go to places where people, park or whatever, and ask them the questions they're going to tell you.
Michael McCarter:
54-year-old Jennifer Miller has a different opinion. She lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Jennifer Miller:
Well, the one that I've paid attention to is the cost of eggs over the last several weeks. They used to be under $3. Now the cheapest I've found them is six. Costco even didn't have any eggs the last time I went to Costco, which is just, when is Costco out of stuff? Not since the pandemic. So they've kind of fluctuated. Every time I see it go down a little bit, that's when I'll buy my next dozen eggs.
I expect them to rise further with the tariffs. A lot of our produce here, especially in the winter months, we get from Mexico, and I don't see how the tariff costs are going to not trickle down to consumers.
It feels a lot like the pandemic in a lot of respects for me. I worry that costs are going to go up. I worry that there's going to be supply chain issues. I worry that our products are going to be boycotted. I don't feel great about how he's handling the economy. It feels very contradictory and in the sense that why cut 6,000 IRS employees during tax season? I would really like President Trump to focus on what the majority of us would like him to do. I wish he would listen to advisors who advise him that tariffs are not tax breaks. Tariffs do not save money. They cost money. They're going to cost us money. They are a tax. Given how contradictory his behavior is I have to believe that the purpose isn't cost-cutting. It's something else, and I suspect that it's serving him and his own greed and his oligarch's greed, and it's just going to screw most of us every day Americans.
Brenda Wilson:
Some things are high, some things aren't.
Michael McCarter:
That's Brenda Wilson, who's 67 and lives in Bluffton, South Carolina. She told us it's just too early to see a difference in the economy.
Brenda Wilson:
They're just normal to me in the sense of nothing's so exorbitant that you couldn't buy them. Eggs still a big deal. I know they're on their way down, but they'll get there. I believe grocery prices will start to come down. With the economy, I feel like I think we have to be patient. There are a lot of changes going on, and I think that we have to let some of those changes play out, in a new administration two months is hardly enough time for any type of policy to really take effect. So I am patient. I'm waiting, but I just want to give some of the benefit of the doubt and more time to see where everything goes.
President Trump is a force of nature. He's an interesting person because he's a businessman. I think he's handling it the Trump way. His strong suit as a businessman is that he has tough skin and he's just going to plow through there and say, let's get it done. Just like any businessman, person, woman, or man, wouldn't matter, if you're in a business and you've got to see how to get something done you've got to get it done. So I'm okay with how he's doing it. I just feel like we have to, again, wait and see. For me, getting the debt down, getting the spending and stuff in order, I think that impacts everyone, and I think that would be what I really, I think he's trying to focus on that, and that's what I'd like to see improve.
Michael McCarter:
Larry Mays, who lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, said that he wants to see more support for small businesses. He's 75.
Larry Mays:
The grocery prices here seem to be doing what I think typically happens in most economic periods where inflation is in place, which is they simply go up because they can, and they rise substantially more than makes sense. So in other words, if a product is $6, it doesn't go up 4% to 6.24, it goes up to 6.75 because the manufacturer of the product can, and they want to get the whole bite of the increase up all at the same time. So I'm actually stunned personally by how much grocery prices have increased. I'm glad that I'm not raising our family of three children anymore because I don't know how people can afford it. I'm not feeling good about the economy at all. There are way too many indicators that are coming to me as a small business owner that tell me as it has been for the last couple of years in particular, things are not improving or they're not as good as people think they are.
There's no way to feel good about the economy based on the evidence I deal with every day. And then the second component is the chaos that has been unleashed on the American economy by the change in the administration. We hear the President and everybody in the administration saying that they're trying to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, and the approach that's being taken is to simply tear down everything. Simply eliminate bodies like it's a body count is all that matters. So I asked the following question, what's the plan for after we tear down and destroy the American system of government? What's next? I don't think there's a possibility on God's green earth that the current administration has any interest whatsoever in actually fixing any of the problems that the small business owners of America face. Unadulterated non-stop chaos is not an environment in which a small business can be successful, and we're seeing the results of that already, and I personally expect them to get worse.
Michael McCarter:
That's all we have for today's episode. This is a co-production with the Forum team at USA TODAY, where we invite our readers to weigh in writing on a national topic of interest. If your submission is selected for print, we might invite you to add your voice to a future special bonus episode like this one. There's a link to forum in the show description. Let us know what you think about this episode by sending an email to [e-mail]. Thanks for listening. I'm Michael McCarter, Vice President of the Gannett Opinion Group. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of the Excerpt.