The Myth that Trump is “Good for the Economy” has its Roots in Reality TV

Young men’s support for Trump has collapsed in response to his economic performance

The recent decline in Donald Trump’s public approval rating is due to the fact that one of the central myths of his political career – that he is a tough, successful businessman who “knows how to manage the economy” – is floundering on the rocky shores of economic reality.

Trump has cultivated this distorted image of himself for decades, an image that stands in stark contrast to his and his companies’ long record of civil fraud and criminal convictions for tax evasion and falsifying business records, among many other transgressions and crimes. Numerous books and studies have detailed Trump’s shady business past, including an in-depth investigative reporting study of Trump’s business empire, entitled "Trump, Inc.: The Secret Deals, Politics, and Greed of Donald Trump" by the staff of WNYC and ProPublica (2020).

In his brilliant book Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America (2019), the New York Times television critic James Poniewozik outlined the many differences between Trump’s carefully curated public image and his actual business history.

He argued that Trump learned much of what he knows about fame and popularity – and about presenting himself as a fabulously successful businessman -- from his media consumption.

Poniewozik referenced a 1990 interview with Playboy in which Trump cited the popularity of 1970s and 1980s TV series that presented the lifestyles of the rich as a model and justification for his own ostentatious flaunting of his wealth. “Dynasty did it on TV,” Trump said. “It's very important that people aspire to be successful. The only way you can do it is if you look at somebody who is.”

Poniewozik wrote that Trump realized, maybe more than most, the importance of TV in shaping people's dreams and values. “All these long running soaps featured rich people Americans loved to hate,” the critic wrote. “But love-to-hate is the first step toward love.”

Poniewozik also pointed out that Trump understood, early in his career, that there was much more upside in playing a businessman than in being a businessman. “By performing yourself to match the mental cartoons people generate when they hear the words wealth and success and luxury,” he wrote, “you come to represent those things. And thus anything you're selling -- an apartment, a bottle of water, a political platform -- becomes imbued with those things.”

Also, let’s not forget Trump’s fourteen-year run as a reality TV actor, playing the powerful businessman and star of NBC’s The Apprentice, under the direction of the trailblazing producer Mark Burnett. As Poniewozik wrote, Trump fit naturally into the role because “he had been playing himself as a character for years. He embodied a lifestyle that was enviable but accessible. His life looked like the last five seconds of a commercial for scratch-off lottery tickets.”

Poniewozik noted that The Apprentice didn’t need a businessman to play the star’s role. “It needed the idea of a businessman. That was Donald Trump. It was the entire point of him. He had spent a lifetime in symbiosis with television, adopting its metabolism, learning to feed its appetites. Now, finally, he would merge with it.”

The power and durability of the myth of Trump as a super-competent businessman is partly responsible for the mess we’re in as a country, and even as a national project. The myth has done wonders for Trump’s political career, and for many others who – for a variety of ideological and self-interested reasons -- hitched their wagon to the plutocratic populism he and MAGA represent.

But for the rest of us, Trump’s reality show presidencies have been an unmitigated disaster. It isn’t possible to catalog here all of the ways in which Trump has harmed this country and its people -- its democracy, economy, security, and international standing. The bill of particulars is long and detailed. People will be writing books about it for decades.

Let’s just stipulate that among its many accomplishments, Trumpism has shredded the myth of America as a potent force for international order, economic stability, and at least rhetorical respect for human rights, if not necessarily the practice of it. People around the world have looked on in amazement and horror at the damage he and his GOP colleagues have already done to the rule of law, the U.S. economy, and to countless vulnerable people at home and abroad -- including millions of working-class people who voted for him.

The idea that Trump would be “good for the economy” helped him win young men’s votes in 2024

Contrary to his self-mythologizing, Trump has a very mixed record as a businessman. Financial experts have repeatedly pointed out that he has declared bankruptcy numerous times, flouted countless regulations, stiffed untold numbers of contractors, and violated many laws. But he has undeniable and instinctive skills as a brander and marketer, and he’s absolutely mastered the attention economy.

Trump figured out long ago that the image he created of Donald Trump as a “great businessman” operates in a media ecosphere in which political success – especially at election time – depends on matters of narrative and story much more than on actual data, policy, or other material factors – and he rode that insight right into two terms at the pinnacle of political power in the White House.

A wealth of 2024 data demonstrates that the lowest propensity, lowest engagement voters -- the ones who follow current events and politics the least -- were most likely to vote for him over Kamala Harris. This includes many of the 56% of men aged 18-29 who supported Trump not because of ideology or policy, but in large part because of a “vibe” that he was a “fighter” who was the “men’s candidate,” and someone who would be “really good for the economy.”

This time around, he also gained legitimacy from the support he got from tech and hedge fund billionaires like Marc Andreessen, Bill Ackman, and others.

CNBC reported that a survey by the National Endowment for Financial Education found that men were more likely than women to say they believed the results of the election would impact their financial life in the short term. Those voters largely favored Trump.

This in itself is unremarkable; voters often cast their votes based on concerns about high prices, inflation, and other matters related to the economy. “It’s reasonable that many Americans were weighing their current financial well-being and prospects for the future while casting their votes this November,” said Billy Hensley, NEFE’s president and CEO.

What was notable in the 2024 election was the degree to which the Trump campaign and its allies in right-wing media and the “brocast” sphere were able to convince millions of voters that Trump’s chops as a businessman would improve their economic prospects. They drove home this point over and over: Trump is a businessman who knows what it takes to run government more efficiently. He’ll bring down prices and create jobs. His economic policies worked in his first term, and they will again this time around.

It didn’t hurt -- especially with young men -- that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, became a fanatic supporter of the former president. As one New York Times headline put it, “Frenzied Musk Going All In to Elect Trump.” Musk gave hundreds of millions of dollars to pro-Trump organizing efforts, and tweaked his platform X to promote Trump and populist views more generally.

Musk’s image as a real-life version of Tony Stark/Ironman – a combination of business acumen and engineering genius -- also put wind in the sails of the argument that Trump’s economic management was urgently needed to save the country from ruin. This was all long before Musk’s ghastly, chainsaw management of DOGE over the past few months damaged his reputation for managerial competence.

Another influential figure in the successful pro-Trump propaganda effort in 2024 was the superstar podcaster Joe Rogan, whose show regularly draws 20 million viewers, 80% of whom are male, and more than 50% of whom are young adults. In the past Rogan, who for years has platformed numerous right-wing and conspiracy-minded guests, has nonetheless espoused liberal positions on a number of issues. In 2020, he claimed to support Bernie Sanders for president.

But due in part to his outrage over government policy during the Covid 19 pandemic, Rogan’s politics moved rightward during Biden’s presidency. After years of professing to dislike Trump, Rogan had him on his show last October. Over the course of a very broey three-hour conversation, they discussed many “non-political” topics like boxing and celebrity.

Trump was gregarious and chatty, showcasing a side of himself that burnished his credentials as a “regular guy” who can hang with the boys and shoot the shit. Rogan -- who is not a journalist and is typically non-confrontational with his guests -- barely challenged Trump’s typical barrage of lies, like his repeated false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. The show was a major event, with 58 million views to date.

Trump’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, and then Rogan’s endorsement of him on the eve of the election, are seen by many political observers as a turning point, especially in terms of the young men’s vote. Rogan then attended Trump’s inauguration on January 20, further solidifying his place in the MAGA universe.

But all of that was before Trump took office and enacted his policies. Now that some of those policies are proving to be deeply unpopular, especially on the tariffs and deportations, Rogan appears to be having second thoughts.

Here’s what progressive podcaster Kyle Kulinski, who has been unrelenting in his criticism of Rogan’s support for Trump, had to say about the dilemma Rogan now finds himself in:

“He (Rogan) is a wave rider. He's a vibes guy. (During the latter portion of the 2024 campaign)…the vibes in the culture were very pro-Trump. In the podcast sphere, in the MMA sphere, in the comedian sphere, surrounded by pro-Trump shit 24/7. Well, now, the vibes have shifted so immensely that he feels like, well, the vibes are basically saying ‘this is crazy, the end of due process.’ So now you have the left and liberals winning the vibe war, which is why he (Rogan) is where he is.”

This is the highly volatile state of American politics in 2025: policies that affect hundreds of millions of people here at home, and billions around the world, are decided in many instances by politicians who are elected in part based on “vibes” about manhood.

For people who recognize the danger that Trumpism poses not only to the national and global economy, but also to American democracy itself, there is one ray of hope: reality intrudes. In response to the tariffs and high levels of uncertainty, the dollar has plunged, along with consumer confidence, economic growth has stalled, the markets have taken a huge hit (though they have mostly recovered), and a possible Trump-induced recession looms. (Container traffic at key ports is down dramatically, often an early warning sign of a recession).

Trump’s popularity has nosedived as his prowess on “the economy” runs headlong into hard numbers. His popularity with young voters, especially young men, has suffered a precipitous decline: as the Young Men Research Initiative reported, new polling shows that Trump’s approval rating among young men who are registered to vote has fallen from 60 percent approve to 34 percent disapprove, to now just 43 percent approve to 54 percent disapprove. That’s a net approval change of 37 points!

This decrease in popularity, one can only hope, might impede Trump’s ability to enact his corrosive authoritarian agenda.

Dueling narratives on “the economy”

I’d like to conclude this essay by offering two very different perspectives on Trump’s management of the economy. The first is from Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, former Princeton professor and longtime New York Times columnist. The second is from Trump himself.

Paul Krugman

In a Substack piece entitled “It’s Trump’s Economy Now,” Krugman pointed to a Times story “Trump boasts about the economy, but says weak data is Biden’s problem.”

“There will be much more of this as the data get worse,” Krugman wrote, “which they will.”

…Trump has already said that reports of rising prices are ‘fake news. For now, however, it’s important to be clear that the bad news is all on Trump’s head, and we mustn’t let him get away with claiming otherwise. It’s true that most of the time presidents have much less impact on the economy than many people believe. It’s also true that a president’s policies usually don’t have large economic effects in the first few months of their administration…But Trump’s policies have been so extreme that they are already making the economy visibly worse.

What I and everyone else did expect was that when the economy turned bad, Trump would refuse to accept responsibility and blame his predecessor. And right on cue, that’s what is happening…So this is a good time to remember that Trump actually inherited a very good economy, one that was outperforming all its peers… In short, pay no attention to Trump’s excuses. The U.S. economy was in good shape when he came in. If everything is going to hell — which it is — he has nobody but himself to blame.”

Donald Trump

Now let’s hear from the former reality TV star and current American president:

Trump called into a recent NewsNation town hall program marking his first 100 days. When asked to name the biggest mistake he’s made so far, Trump said he didn’t think he’d made any.

As reported by Julia Mueller in The Hill, he said “I’ll tell you, that’s the toughest question I can have because I don’t really believe I’ve made mistakes.” The country is in a “transition period” and will see “tremendous economic victories” ahead.

Trump contended that he knows his stuff “perfectly,” even as his dramatic tariff moves heighten economic anxieties.

“We have to have fair trade. We’re losing billions and billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars. And it’s not fair, and it’s time for the American people to be properly protected by somebody that knows what he’s doing,” Trump said.

“And I know what I’m doing perfectly,” he asserted. He added that “it’s a little complicated subject” and “I’ve got to explain it.”

“The president has been celebrating his 100-day mark amid sagging approval numbers,” Mueller wrote, “but he brushed those off, too, lambasting ‘fake polls’ and touting his November win as a sign of his enduring success.”