The most important thing a president does is defend the United States; foreign policy is not a distraction or a tangent. It's a crucial aspect of his job. But it's not his only job. Donald Trump now has a golden opportunity to pivot away from foreign policy, at least for a little while. A lot of the foreign policy stuff he's been dealing with lately has been forced upon him. The semi-humans of Hamas going on a rape and murder spree, the Iranian mullahs trying to get nukes, and Vladimir Putin gobbling up chunks of Ukraine are all important and had to be dealt with. None of that's his fault. None of it could be ignored. But now, as things seem to be simmering down, it's time to pivot to the economy. Maybe let Venezuela stew in its own juices for a while.
Americans care about the economy, and they think it sucks. How bad is the economy? It depends on who you are. I'm a guy who's at the tail end of his career, and things are pretty good for me. Look at the stock market. It's going through the roof. But look at younger people. They're completely screwed. They can't afford homes, they can't get good jobs, and a lot of them have the millstone of debt hanging around their necks from the gender studies degree from the University of College that someone talked them into taking out a $250,000 loan to finance. I'm not going to be in this game that much longer. They are, and they're the future. We need to start focusing on them.
Prices are way out of control. Donald Trump is correct when he points out that a lot of things have come down—gas, eggs, and such. But we still have problems, and Trump needs to focus like a laser on the economy. I was at an H-E-B in Houston the other day, and while I noticed beef prices were lower, they were still exorbitant—$26 a pound for a rib-eye? And when I got to the check-out, I just happened to glance at the candy rack—not wanting to get diabetes. I'm not a huge candy guy—and a bag of M&Ms was $2.54. I'm not talking like a Halloween bag either. It was a normal candy, and the other candy bars were comparable. My wife, who's in charge of Halloween candy procurement, told me she spent $70 on candy this year. What? I can't go to lunch without spending $25 to $50, and I'm not exactly getting lobster and caviar with champagne. This is crazy. And this is what we Republicans need to focus on. We need real results.
James Carville, who's gone nuts lately, it's still right: It's the economy, stupid. It's always the economy. Have you ever in your entire life seen an election that wasn't at least partly about the economy? Sure, foreign policy occasionally intervenes, but the individuals who succeed in politics understand the fundamentals. And the fundamentals say fix the economy.
I've been down this road before. In 1980. Ronald Reagan took office and began cleaning up the mess left by Jimmy Carter. That took time. The GOP got slaughtered in the 1982 midterm elections. But then the economy came back and kicked butt. And we all remember Donald Trump in 2016. Again, it took time to undo the damage of the Obama economy, but he did it, and we had the best economy ever, even though our midterms in 2018 were a disaster. That's the pattern. But we don't have to keep to it.
It's going to be tough for Trump to get the economy going in time for 2026, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't try. He's got some things that he can leverage to his advantage. For one thing, he gets to replace the terrible Fed chairman in the middle of next year, which will be followed by some significant rate cuts. That will be huge. Consumer debt is eating people alive. Nobody's going to buy a house at a 6 percent interest rate unless they don't have any other choice. And guys like me, who managed to lock in at 3 percent, certainly aren't giving up their mortgage anytime soon, meaning fewer houses are available to buy.
As for the tariffs, the promised disaster hasn't materialized, and, in fact, we've secured numerous favorable trade deals. We will likely obtain many more, assuming the Supreme Court doesn't undermine the president with a misguided decision. We are all aware that tariffs can pose an economic risk. Everybody agrees with that. However, remember that the tariffs aren't only about the economy. There are also about foreign policy, including shaping trade deals. Trump has finally leveraged American power. You know, our enemies, both foreign and domestic, have always tried to keep us from leveraging American power. We're the biggest guy on the block, and they've tried to impose a scenario where we can't punch anybody. Trump doesn't play by those rules.
If patterns hold, the economy is going to come roaring back. The only question is whether it comes warring back in time for the 2026 elections. The stats are improving, but it's not just statistics that matter. You can quote statistics all day, but nobody cares if they're going to the store and they can't get their kids a candy bar because it's nearly three bucks. Trump's been getting out there explaining that the economy isn't so bad, but there's always a chance that he's going to sound tone deaf. The last thing you ever want to sound is tone deaf about people suffering hardship. You can't tell suffering people, "No, things are actually awesome." Remember Joe Biden? He kept telling us things were cool. Things were not cool.
The economy eventually booms when a conservative Republican is in charge. Things are going to boom under Trump. That's really what the Democrats are afraid of. They're not afraid of him failing. They're afraid of succeeding, yet again, like he did the last time, like Ronald Reagan did. Suppose you're old enough to remember Ronald Reagan, which I am. In that case, you'll remember how they were totally opposed to everything he did, how they said that his trickle-down economics were going to impoverish the country. Even George H. W. Bush, the dean of the GOP establishment, called the return to capitalism "voodoo economics." It's not voodoo economics. It's just plain economics. Let people go out and start businesses, stop hassling and regulating them to death, lift their tax burden, and not have the Fed artificially constrain commerce, and you're going to have a boom.
Trump has a chance to pivot to the economy. That was the number one thing that people said coming out of the polls last week, voters' number one focus. It's called" affordability" now, but it's really the entire economy people are worried about. Can you get a job? Is it a good job? Can you buy food? Can you buy a house? Do you have a future, or more specifically, do you feel like you have a future? We can get there again. We've done it before. Trump's got to pivot to the economy and soft pedal foreign policy stuff. Let's take advantage of this little lull to run up the score.
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