Why is Trump copying Biden’s economic playbook?

The Republicans’ 2025 election losses have certainly gotten the Trump administration’s attention. After voters told exit pollsters that their top concern was an unaffordable economy, administration officials have announced a slate of new policies designed to make the economy more affordable.

But solving a problem is harder than announcing a policy, and many of the Trump administration’s latest moves sound like they were borrowed from the same Bidenomics playbook that failed both on its own terms and with voters.

Inflation

The most obvious affordability issue is inflation, which makes everything more expensive. This weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested that the Trump administration has finally dispatched this adversary. “We had to stop the increase first, now we are starting to see prices level off, come down.”

This plea for voters not to assign Trump the blame for their pocketbook pain does not reflect the government’s own inflation statistics. In September 2025, annual inflation remained at 3.0%, half again higher than the Federal Reserve’s target rate. And President Trump has spent much of his first year lobbying the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, thereby taking its boot off of inflation’s neck.

Thus, Bessent’s premature promise of victory over inflation sounds suspiciously like former President Biden’s disastrous declarations. In 2021, Biden called the mounting inflation “transitory,” claimed “no serious economist” foresaw “unchecked” inflation, and inaccurately predicted the U.S. had reached “the peak of the crisis” in December — even while the worst was yet to come.

At the time, conservatives rightly warned that inflation was not some political enemy that could be bullied into submission by sheer force of will, but a real economic phenomenon that caused real economic pain, which the administration ignored at its peril. That warning remains relevant.

Home prices

Yet the Trump administration seems poised to repeat the Biden administration’s mistakes of trying to bring down specific prices, instead of addressing the underlying causes of inflation itself. This is like trying to lower a pool float by stepping on its highest points, instead of by draining the pool.

“Look at the cost of housing,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Friday. If people think, “‘My parents bought a house at 32 years old; when I’m 32, I can’t buy a house,’ that’s a huge problem in America. You want people to be able to afford the American dream.”

Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte announced that the Trump administration is toying with a novel new approach to home affordability: a 50-year mortgage. (Given the average U.S. life expectancy of 78.4 years, this would mean the average 32-year-old homebuyer would leave his mortgage for his kids to pay off.)

Rising home prices remind voters of a major topic of conversation in the 2024 election, when the Kamala Harris campaign developed a detailed plan to lower housing costs through more government intervention, instead of by fixing the economy so that home prices (and interest rates) would fix themselves. At least the Trump administration gets credit for thinking up a novel solution.

Meat prices

Another familiar issue from the Biden era is the price of meat, and the Trump administration has copied Biden’s homework in painting meatpackers as the villain. “I have asked the DOJ to immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation,” President Trump announced.

In January 2022, the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee published a factsheet rebuking the Biden White House for “accusing the meatpacking industry of ‘pandemic profiteering,’” when, in fact, “meatpackers are no exception to the rising cost of labor,” and “production costs have also skyrocketed.”

Scapegoating meatpackers for prices may be politically advantageous, but underlying economic conditions are more likely the explanation. This year, one reason for rising meat prices is the president’s steep tariffs on beef-exporting countries like Brazil. As economist Jerry Bowyer explained last week on “Washington Watch,” “When the president says to beef producers, ‘Hey, cut the price of beef, I did you a favor with the tariffs, the beef producers say, ‘Wait a minute, the tariffs were so we could raise the price of beef.’”

Tariff rebates

Speaking of tariffs, President Trump’s latest tariff declaration also evokes Biden-era (or, more accurately, COVID-era) economic miscalculations. “People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” Trump declared Sunday. “We are taking in Trillions of Dollars and will soon begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion … A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

This proposal for direct cash payments evokes the COVID-era stimulus checks, which the government sent out in March 2020, December 2020, and March 2021, totaling $3,200 per eligible individual, plus extra for dependents. Once Americans started spending money again, this injection of extra money into the economy, without a corresponding increase of goods produced, helped contribute to the high inflation of 2021-2022. Inflation occurs when too many dollars are chasing too few goods.

Thus, at the same time the Trump administration is claiming to have defeated inflation, it also proposes to send out direct cash payments, which will likely add to lingering inflation.

(Critics have pointed out other deficiencies in the tariff rebate scheme, such as planning to use the same dollars to pay down the national debt, and for direct cash payments, or in claiming monetary benefits from tariffs while claiming before the Supreme Court that tariffs are not a tax.)

Voter dissatisfaction with America’s economic performance benefited Trump as an outsider in 2024, but the same dissatisfaction now hurts his approval with the public, unless he can turn the economy around. Tariffs are not the way to do that (they didn’t feature majorly into the economic success of Trump’s first term). But, instead of focusing on time-tested growth strategies like deregulation and tax cuts, the Trump administration is now in danger of deploying the same economic playbook that spelled disaster for the Biden administration.

Voter pain over high prices is not a public relations crisis to be managed with surface-level salves, but a fundamental economic problem that demands a real solution.

Originally published at The Washington Stand.