For decades, Republicans have run on a single economic promise they have never kept: that they are the party of fiscal responsibility and working-class prosperity. Corporate media, owned almost entirely by billionaires who pocket the tax cuts Republicans deliver, has dutifully amplified that claim election cycle after election cycle. A Fox News poll conducted April 17–20, 2026 suggests Americans may finally be done believing it.
For the first time since May 2010, Democrats lead Republicans on who handles the economy better — 52 to 48.
That it took until now, after everything we have watched unfold in real time and experienced, is its own indictment.
Trump: Making America Worse for the Working Class
Here’s just some of the appalling numbers:
Trump ended his first term with 2.7 million fewer Americans employed than when he started.
Trump added $8.4 trillion to the national debt — a figure his supporters would have never shut up about if any Democrat would’ve come within a trillion of it.
The disrespect is in the details. The 2017 tax giveaways he signed into law gave corporations permanent reductions. Working families got temporary ones, with an expiration date baked in from the start. When those cuts passed, Trump told the members assembled at his Mar-a-Lago club, “You all just got a lot richer.” He was not talking about the people who clean the rooms or park the cars.
His second term has continued in the same abysmal tradition. GDP grew at 2.2% in 2025, down from 2.4% under Biden in 2024 and 2.8% in Biden’s final year. J.P. Morgan has since slashed its 2026 forecast to 1.3%.
In 2024, the American economy added 1.5 million jobs; in 2023, it added 2.5 million.
Trump’s entire first year back in office produced fewer than 200,000. Among those losses, 361,000 working-class jobs — held by workers without college degrees — were eliminated in 2025 alone.
Since “Liberation Day,” 58,000 manufacturing jobs have vanished.
The tariffs Trump celebrated as a negotiating masterstroke drove the average import duty from 2.4% to 9.6%, the highest level in 80 years, with 90% of those costs passed directly to American consumers.
Real wages declined. Median weekly earnings grew at just 0.7%, half the rate of 2024. Disposable income sat at 0.4%. Consumer sentiment collapsed 33% to near-record lows.
And in the middle of all of this, Trump revoked a Biden executive order that had raised the minimum wage for 300,000 federal contractors, cutting roughly $9,256 per year from their paychecks.
The Historical Record is Clear
The Fox poll result is striking not because it represents some new truth, but because it finally punctures a myth that the data demolished long ago. Since 1953, ten of eleven recessions began under Republican presidents. The last five recessions, without exception, started on Republican watches.
Since 1980, real wages grew by $210 under Republican presidents over 23 years in power. Under Democrats, they grew by $5,975 — roughly 40 times more.
Job creation under Republicans has averaged 950,000 per year; under Democrats, 2.1 million.
GDP growth under Republicans since 1953 averages 2.54%; under Democrats, 4.35%.
These are not talking points. They are the accumulated record of governance, available to any journalist willing to use a spreadsheet.
Who Keeps the Myth Alive
The reason this myth has survived as long as it has is not a mystery. The corporations that own the networks and the newspapers are the same corporations that benefit most directly from Republican tax and labor policy. They have no financial incentive to explain to their audiences that the Republican Party promising economic stewardship has, across seven decades of data, consistently delivered slower growth, fewer jobs, stagnant wages, and recession.
They have every incentive to keep the mythology intact, because a working class electorate that votes for its actual economic interests may cost their shareholders some money.
The Bill Always Comes Due
Republicans are not bad at managing the economy by accident. Their policy agenda — permanent tax relief for corporations, gutted worker protections, tariffs that function as a consumption tax on the middle class, and minimum wage cuts dressed up as deregulation — produces exactly the outcomes it is designed to produce.
The working class pays while the so-called “donor class” reaps the benefits.
Trump told his Mar-a-Lago guests the quiet part out loud in 2017, and the
results of his governance, first term and second, have confirmed it in full. That 52% of Americans now tell Fox News they trust Democrats more on the economy is not a revelation. It is long overdue.
he truth out and save the “Grand Experiment” from the right wing forces currently destroying it.
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