Of Course Trump is Getting Ready to Deny Another Election. It’s All Going So Poorly.

Trump's speech comes after a string of losses.

We’d call President Trump’s speech on Thursday a uniquely disgraceful use of presidential power, but there’s nothing unique about this.

Every time this man loses, he’ll tell you why it was rigged. Every time he senses he’s about to lose, he’ll tell you it’s going to be rigged.

It wasn’t even a “speech” so much as it was a threat that unless the Senate passes a bill that would suppress the votes of millions of Americans, he won’t accept the results.

But that’s also what makes this speech so revealing. If the President wasn’t underwater by 32 points on the economy, a gobsmacking 40 points on Iran, and even 19 points on immigration, then we doubt he would have delivered it.

He’s living in his own reality inside the White House, because outside it, the world looks different.

Voters see that surging oil prices, wages that are barely keeping up with inflation, two more deadly ICE shootings, tariffs that are both expensive and useless, and even job cuts at the CDC are taking their toll on the country, and Trump won’t fix it.

His voter suppression bill won’t pass – he is further from his goal than ever now that Sen. Lisa Murkowski is out – so sowing distrust in the system is his only option.

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1. Oil prices are surging

This weekend, American military forces conducted a new wave of strikes for the ninth consecutive night. It culminated in tragedy: the Pentagon announced three members of the military died in incidents linked to the conflict.

The attacks also sent oil prices skyrocketing again: around 3% from the latest strikes alone.

The biggest challenge, though, is not the drumbeat of daily price hikes. It’s what oil markets are saying about the future.

Take these scary sentences from the Wall Street Journal:

“Oil markets and Middle East producers appear to be aligning around a new reality: The Strait of Hormuz is no longer expected to return to a prewar norm.”

…“The chance of the region and Hormuz going back to the old normal is effectively zero,” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.

It will take several years and billions of dollars to secure alternative pathways for oil supply. No amount of “Freedom Fuel” can solve that problem.

2. Wages are barely keeping up with inflation

The economic pain is broader than that. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed this week that wages are just barely keeping up with inflation.

June’s average hourly wage gain was 3.5% from a year earlier; exactly the same as the 3.5% inflation reported over that year-long period. According to a Washington Post analysis of the data, workers’ paychecks are up a mere 27 cents per hour in today’s dollars since Trump took office in 2025.

In simpler terms: if you got a raise this year and it was less than 3.5%, then you fell behind in Trump’s economy.

Think about what this means for the average American worker: your work brings home the same income that it did at the end of the Biden administration, when Trump won on the economy by 10 points.

3. ICE is killing more immigrants

It’s an extraordinary sentence to write, but the government’s chief immigration enforcement agency is now responsible for four deadly shootings and another seven non-fatal shootings this year.

Two of those fatal shootings happened this week, ending the lives of a Mexican immigrant who lived in Texas for 35 years, and a young Colombian father in Maine.

It was enough to make the administration briefly suspend most vehicle stops so it could retrain its agents. Trump himself had other ideas, saying a day later that he’d overrule the agency.

With questions surrounding the use of force in ICE shootings, border czar Tom Homan said he thinks “body cameras are the way to go,” but DHS has already been granted $20 million for those cameras, and all the way back in February, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the department would “rapidly acquire and deploy them.”

So here we are again: a president who refuses to retrain his border force, and promises on body cameras that – in the very recent past – haven’t been kept.

4. New data shows tariffs aren’t even effective

Tariffs have been expensive for the American worker: according to a Tax Foundation report this year, they raised the retail price of imported goods by about 7 percentage points compared to the pre-tariff trend.

In Trump’s world, they were all worth it to hammer the economies of our biggest rivals, forcing them to soon crawl back to the negotiating table.

We got news this week that shows this simply isn’t happening. Another scary sentence from the Journal’s reporting:

“China’s exports surged more than expected, defying forecasts of a slowdown and providing a vital boost to an economy still weighed down by weak domestic demand.”

Outbound shipments rose 27% from a year earlier in June, nearly 10 points higher than the growth forecast by economists the newspaper surveyed.

It was such a strong increase that Robin J Brooks, the former chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, declared that “China is winning” the tariff war, with exports almost back where they were during the Biden administration and “no indication US tariffs had any discernible effect.”

So for those keeping score: the cost of living is way up, and so is China’s economy.

5. Job cuts at the CDC are coming back to haunt us

That brings us to an outbreak of cyclosporiasis, which you’ve hopefully only heard about in the news this week.

Food safety is a perennial problem in a country as large as the US, and of course outbreaks occur, even when the agency tasked with preventing them – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is firing on all cylinders.

But the agency has lost as many as 4,300 employees since DOGE wielded its axe last year, leaving it between 22% to 33% short of its previous workforce.

There are mixed views on the impact of jobs cuts on the outbreak, but it’s more than zero. The cuts, according to one official who quit last year in protest over Secretary Kennedy’s policies, don’t necessarily impact the current situation, but make it harder to track the problem and its scale.

And as Wired reported this week, the CDC’s purpose-built cyclospora lab got a DOGE downsizing last year, forcing outbreak responses to be “greatly diminished,” according to a former lab director.

We’ve said many times that DOGE’s “savings” were minuscule in the scale of government spending; that’s more clearly the case than ever in the wake of billions of dollars in Iran war spending. So it makes even a small impact on an agency like the CDC hard to digest.

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It’s easy to see why Trump is living in a dangerous fantasy land. If he was even half the leader he says he is, he’d stop denying reality and start fixing the country.