Donald Trump has always excelled at playing the blame game. His winning strategy here is simple: Take credit for anything good that happens and blame others when things go poorly.
Trump, for example, repeatedly claimed credit for the stock market’s big gains in the first quarter of 2024. He even posted the following message on Truth Social last March, claiming “our Stock Market is rising only because Polls are strongly indicating that we will WIN the Presidential Election of 2024.” But he was quick to blame President Biden when those profits receded the following month. As he stated in April 2024, “The stock market is, in a sense, crashing. The numbers are very bad. This is Bidenomics.”
Trump’s blame game victories
Trump’s approach seems to be effective, too. He got much of the credit for the country’s growing economy during his first three years in office. Most people thought that President Trump was more responsible than President Obama for the current state of the economy when Quinnipiac University last asked this question in August 2018 (52% to 37%, respectively).
Trump also received much more credit than Obama in open-ended polling (e.g., surveys that feature questions without any response options), which asked who or what is most responsible for the current condition of the national economy. The share who said Trump/Republicans were most responsible were three times the percentage who said Obama/Democrats in the August 2018 Fox News poll (44% to 15%, respectively). In a January 2020 Fox News poll, that ratio expanded further (42% to 9%).
Trump then managed to evade responsibility for the rise in inflation that began shortly after he left the White House. Despite the significant inflationary effects of the pandemic era stimulus checks that began during the Trump administration (and were extended in 2021), Americans immediately blamed Biden for the sharp rise in prices during the first year of his presidency.
The earliest polling on the inflation blame game – a November 2021 ABC News/Washington Post poll – found that half of Americans blamed Biden at least a “good amount” for rising prices, with a plurality (32%) blaming him “a great amount.” When ABC News asked in April 2022 about Trump’s responsibility for rising prices, only 25% placed a good or great amount of blame on his shoulders. A majority in that same poll (51%) didn’t blame Trump at all for rising prices, compared to only 20% who said the same about Biden.
It’s no surprise, then, that Trump consistently held a double-digit issue advantage over Biden in 2024 polling on which candidate would do a better job of handling inflation.
The blame game in historical perspective
Trump’s decisive victory over Biden in the inflation blame game was a big departure from other outgoing presidents who were held responsible for the economy long after they left the White House. Presidents Reagan and Obama, for example, both effectively shifted blame onto their predecessors for the economic problems that they encountered early into their presidencies.
During Reagan’s first term, only a minority of voters blamed him for the prolonged recession from July 1981 to November 1982. A March 1982 LA Times poll showed that Americans blamed prior presidents much more than Reagan for the economic downturn (63% to 22%, respectively). Even near the end of that lengthy recession, an October 1982 NBC/AP poll showed that more Americans still blamed previous administrations more than Regan for the high unemployment rate (43% to 38%).
George W. Bush similarly caught the blame for the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession during Barack Obama’s first term in office. Quinnipiac’s polling showed that a majority of voters from 2009 up through the 2012 election consistently blamed Bush more than Obama for the current state of the economy. In keeping with those findings, 58% of voters in the 2012 national election exit polls blamed Bush more than Obama for the country’s economic problems.
The blame game has now turned on Trump
It’s now Trump, however, who’s losing the blame game early into his presidency. Trump has repeatedly tried to blame Biden for the sharp declines in the stock market and consumer confidence in March 2025. But the chart below from YouGov polling shows that more Americans think Trump is responsible for the state of the economy.
Now, you can see that there’s a very large partisan divide here. Most Republicans still blame Biden and most Democrats point the finger more at Trump. It’s quite telling, nonetheless, that far more independents think Trump bears greater responsibility than Biden for the state of the U.S. economy.
With more Americans now blaming Trump, his greatest first-term strength has quickly become one of his biggest liabilities. Most Americans approved of how Trump handled the economy throughout his first presidential term but several polls conducted over the past few weeks found that Trump’s net economic approval rating (approve minus disapprove) is at least 10 percentage points underwater.
Why Trump’s losing the blame game in 2025
There are multiple reasons why Trump has failed in shifting blame onto Biden. The profound unpopularity of Trump’s tariffs is one big factor. And his unrealistic campaign pledges to bring down prices “on day one” and to immediately usher in an economic “boom like no other” may be another.
But it also surely stems from the economy he inherited. To be sure, economic pessimism remained high throughout the 2024 presidential campaign. But U.S. inflation, real wages, GDP, consumer sentiment, and the stock market were all trending in a positive direction before Trump returned to the White House. It’s difficult to blame Biden when some of these economic indicators are now reversing course and heading in the wrong direction under Trump.
Inherited economic trajectories also help explain why Reagan and Obama won the blame game against their predecessors and Biden didn’t. Reagan inherited a contracting 1980 economy with 13.5% inflation and Obama entered the White House amidst the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It was easy to shift blame onto Carter and Bush, respectively, in those environments.
Biden, however, inherited an economy with a 1.2% inflation rate that was rapidly recovering from the covid-19 recession. It didn’t matter that the same Trump-era fiscal policies that helped the country recover so quickly from the economic effects of the pandemic also contributed to inflation by boosting consumer demand. Americans saw the rise in prices begin under Biden, and therefore held him responsible.
This, after all, is precisely how Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s theory of “blind retrospection” works: Presidents are rewarded or punished for changes in the economy regardless of why they happened. So, if the economy turns bad during Trump’s second term in office, even all his blame-game bravado probably won’t save him from being held responsible.
