Trump Tanked Casinos, Doesn’t Get Tariffs — Voters Still Think He Is Better On The Economy

WASHINGTON — If a year from now prices at Walmart and Target have spiked 15% and a deep recession is suddenly on the horizon, blame Mark Burnett.

Donald Trump has for decades mismanaged the hundreds of millions of dollars left to him by his father, most famously bankrupting casinos, and to this day displays fundamental misunderstandings of basic economics, including his insistence that consumers would not pay at all for the massive tariffs he is proposing. Yet the former president nevertheless continues to hold a lead over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris with voters on the question of who would better manage the economy, based in large part because of the decision by Burnett — a reality television impresario ―` to cast Trump as the genius businessman hero on “The Apprentice.”

“People were primed when he ran, that this is the businessman who can do the deals,” said Ryan Cummings with the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a former economist in President Joe Biden’s White House.

That same faith in Trump’s acumen later allowed him to claim that the economy on his watch was dramatically better than under his predecessor, Barack Obama, even though it was essentially the same, Cummings said. “When he went out and said the economy is great, people tended to believe it,” he said.

And as Trump runs to regain his office, he is basing much of his economic agenda on imposing tariffs as high as 20% on all foreign goods and 60% on those from China, which experts warn would bring back high inflation and risk a major recession.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the tariffs would increase inflation, decrease the gross domestic product and cause higher unemployment. “Just how much economic