Trump may be inheriting ‘morning in America’

Already, liberals are complaining that Donald Trump is returning to the White House on a golden parachute, just in time to benefit from a Democratic recovery. The former president owes his re-election in significant part to economic discontent, but as Kamala Harris surrogates tried unsuccessfully to emphasize through the fall, nearly all conventional indicators — inflation, unemployment, growth — have improved dramatically since the pandemic period.

It’s not clear yet how much of this will actually benefit Trump politically. A lot of sharp economic analysis from the last year has shown how those top-line indicators obscure declines in well-being still felt by many Americans. The cognitive distortions of partisanship that clouded Republican views of the economy under President Biden are likely to dampen Democratic perceptions, at least somewhat, in a likely muted reboot of “Trump derangement syndrome.”

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And the basic mood of the country is so pervasively gloomy, it’s not clear any news, really, could shake the vibes loose — when only 19 percent of the country is happy with the direction of things, you’re a long way from “morning in America.” The last time at least half the country reported feeling satisfied, according to Gallup, was January 2004, a month before Facebook was created. If you’d been born right then, you might be graduating from college this spring having experienced not a single year in which this once famously upbeat country seemed to feel the sun was shining on it.

But there are also three really important, positive social trends that the new president is inheriting, which together may shape public perceptions of the country’s future just as profoundly as our impressions of its economic trajectory. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Americans told pollsters that in addition to immigration, they were preoccupied with inflation and the cost of living. But if you poked a little deeper, you’d often hear voters unspooling a longer and more impressionistic story of national decline, typically punctuated by references to drugs, poor health and crime. And at the moment, important measures of all three are pointing in the right direction.

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Take drug overdoses. The broad strokes are familiar enough that most Americans have long since stopped clocking the astonishing continued growth of the crisis: Between 2015 and 2022 — less than a decade — deaths from overdoses doubled. Since the turn of the millennium, they have grown more than fivefold. In the year I was born, 1982, there were 6,299 deaths, as I wrote a few months ago; in 2022, the year I turned 40, there were 107,941. This was an absolute tsunami of drug mortality unlike anything this country, or any other, had ever seen. And it showed no sign of stopping — even when the number of Americans using opioids started trailing off, the mortality effect of that decline was swamped by the arrival of fentanyl, which is many times more deadly.

And then, in 2023, the trend began reversing. At first, the change was relatively small — slowing growth followed by gradual decline. But the data from recent months is far more positive — nearly a 17 percent drop in the 12-month running total. In many states, from Ohio and Virginia to Nebraska, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, declines are larger than 20 percent. In North Carolina, overdose deaths have dropped by more than 35 percent in a single year.

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