Troops on the streets, Ice thuggery – and prices still climbing: welcome to Trump’s ‘golden age’ | Steven Greenhouse

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

66% : In a big thumbs down for Trump, 53% of the public says his policies are making the economy worse.
61% : Likewise with the 22 million Americans whose health insurance premiums will double on average, often soaring by thousands of dollars, unless Trump and congressional Republicans extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act.
55% : At the same time, Robert F Kennedy Jr is undermining trust in vaccines, with the US seeing the highest number of measles cases since Bill Clinton was in office and signed a law establishing free universal vaccinations for children.
51% : We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionSince Trump returned to office, many countries’ views of the US have soured substantially and not just because they’re livid about Trump’s tariff war.
50% : Decoration spree aside, it in no way feels like a golden age when Trump sends the national guard into Los Angeles and Chicago to fight “the enemy within” or when he says the governor of Illinois and mayor of Chicago should be in jail for opposing his plans to deploy troops to Chicago.
50% : As part of his golden vision, Trump promised good times for working-class Americans, but 74% of the US public says the economy is in poor or fair condition and nearly two-thirds oppose his signature policy of tariffs and more tariffs.
50% : Trump promised blue-collar Americans he would increase manufacturing and the number of factory jobs, but factory activity has declined for seven straight months, and factory employment has fallen since April, too.
50% : It seems like anything but a golden age for justice when the Department of Justice indicts the former FBI director James Comey and the New York state attorney general Letitia James after Trump in effect ordered prosecutors to get them (or get fired).
50% : Trump can’t possibly feel golden about an August poll that found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe he is corrupt, with 45% viewing him as “very corrupt”.
50% : The next day, Britain’s Daily Mirror ran a front-page photo of Trump with the headline: “DERANGED – World’s Most Powerful Man-Baby.”In his inauguration speech, Trump said: “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.”
50% : When Pew asked residents of various countries whether they have confidence that Trump will do the right thing in world affairs, in Canada 77% of respondents said they had no confidence, while 22% had confidence.
50% : It’s harder than ever to view the US as a bulwark of democracy and freedom, considering that Trump has embraced Vladimir Putin, deployed troops to major cities, declared war on leading universities, dispatched masked agents to make mass arrests, and pushed to indict his political enemies.
50% : As they grow ever richer, the country’s billionaires are no doubt basking in this new gilded age as Trump slashes their taxes, strips away regulations and steers deals to his buddies (like Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest person).
50% : And Trump no doubt thinks it is a golden age for himself as he grabs ever more power, dominates the headlines, enriches himself further and decorates the White House with ever more gold.
50% : But to millions of us it feels like the opposite of a golden age as Trump takes a wrecking ball to truth, democracy and the rule of law.
50% : In declaring that it is a golden age, Trump is like the fraudster who says: “I have some wonderful, shiny gold I’ll sell you for $4,000 an ounce.”
49% : Showing Americans’ increased pessimism under Trump, a Wall Street Journal-Norc poll found in September that the share of Americans who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living has fallen to just 25%, a record low in surveys taken since 1987.The 10 million Americans who will lose health coverage because of Trump’s One Big (Not So) Beautiful Bill Act probably don’t consider this a golden age.
48% : Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
39% : When Trump spoke at the UN in September, the assembled diplomats must have thought it was a dark age for US diplomacy, not a golden one, when Trump berated them by saying: “Your countries are going to hell.”
33% : the federal government shut down for more than two weeks, the nation more polarized than at any time since the civil war, political violence growing and the job market slowing, it doesn’t feel remotely like a golden age, unless one focuses on Trump’s Louis XIV-like effort to gild as many things as possible in the Oval Office.
33% : What’s more, Trump’s tariff mania has created so much economic uncertainty that job growth has slowed hugely under Trump compared with under Joe Biden.
31% : Scientists complain that Trump is singlehandedly ending America’s golden age of scientific research with his deep, myopic cuts – cuts that could end US leadership in medicine and other vital fields of research.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.