Since he came down from the Trump Tower elevator in 2015 to announce his candidacy, Donald Trump has had a pretty good ear for what the American electorate wants. That’s how he won two presidential elections.
Lately he has gone tone deaf. Like all Republican presidents since the Cold War ended, Trump has become distracted by foreign policy, to the detriment of domestic concerns.
Consider Trump’s activities around the Nov. 4 election, held in the midst of the 43-day government shutdown. Oct. 30: He met with Chinese President Xi in South Korea. Nov. 6: A “summit” in the White House with the leaders of the five Central Asian “stans.” Nov. 11: Sent the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to prepare to attack Venezuela. That came in the middle of continued extrajudicial killings of alleged Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” in speed boats.
And in the most disgusting event I can think of in a long time, on Nov. 10 Trump met in the White House with Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa. Until recently the State Department listed him, under his nom de terror al-Jawlani, as “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” with a $10 million bounty on his head for his role as leader of the al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front.
Meanwhile, for most Americans, life is getting worse. His own vice president, JD Vance, posted on X the day after the Democrats’ Nov. 4 victories: “We need to focus on the home front…. We’re going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond.” He gets it.
Yet Trump keeps saying inflation is under control. He claimed on Nov. 7, during a meeting with Hungarian President Viktor Orban – yet another foreign leader: “I just saw that Walmart came out with a statement last night … that Thanksgiving this year will cost 25% less than Thanksgiving last year,” when Joe Biden was president.
But AP reported, “While Walmart’s 2025 meal basket costs about 25% less than the one from 2024, that’s because it offers fewer items and different products that make it more affordable.”
Overall, inflation in September hit a 3% yearly rate, similar to Biden’s last year, albeit down from 9.1% in June 2022.
On Nov. 4 the National Association of Realtors reported the “share of first-time home buyers dropped to a record low of 21%,” while the typical buyer’s age stretched to a record 40 years. Trump’s “solution”? A 50-year mortgage. Pay it off when you’re 90! No wonder many youngsters back socialists Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont, and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
Then the tariffs. Although I’m against all increases in taxes and tariffs, a rational policy would be a swap: Raise tariffs, but cut other taxes an equivalent amount. Trump started with 15% tariffs across-the-board, offset by income and business tax cuts. Then he flailed around, using tariffs above 100% as punitive sanctions willy-nilly against any country with whom he had a tiff.
As a businessman himself, Trump obviously knows executives need certainty to plan for the future. I’ve been in the private sector most of my working life, and businesses take great pains to project costs several years into the future. A predictable change in taxes or tariffs, up or down, can be factored into planning. Quixotic changes by a president cannot.
Business uncertainty factors down to families, not just as higher prices, but as delayed raises and reduced new hiring. How can the company you work for give you a raise when it has no idea if it will have the money to pay for it?
Trump has a year before the Nov. 3, 2026 mid-term election. If he doesn’t want Democrats to take over Congress, he must shelve the foreign adventures, stabilize taxes and tariffs, stress kitchen-table issues and bring inflation below 2%. Stay home, Mr. President.
John Seiler is on the Southern California News Group’s editorial board and writes at johnseiler.substack.com
