What do Americans want?

For many, to be rich

Excerpt: "President Donald Trump’s newly imposed tariff regime sent the market into free fall, wiping away trillions of dollars in a matter of days. Administration officials have largely dismissed the decline; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, labeled it a “short-term” reaction.

Others have bristled at the idea of caring about a drop in the market: Senator Eric Schmitt responded to the financial panic by saying, “America isn’t an economic zone. America isn’t a strip mall with an airport attached to it. America is a place. It’s our home. It’s our people.”

But Americans aren’t buying it. A majority—not just a wealthy few—opposed the tariffs even before they went into effect. More recent polling found a majority agreeing that “Republicans are crashing the American economy in real time and driving us to a recession.” The source of public fear and outrage is not only the 61 percent of Americans who own stocks, many of whom just saw much of their wealth evaporate. It is also the small businesses with razor-thin margins that just saw their input prices explode, and the consumers still recovering from the last round of inflation and fearful of the next.

Millions of those now alarmed by surging tariffs voted last year for Trump to return to the White House. They did this not because they wanted tariffs, but because they thought a second Trump presidency would mean fulfilling that most American of desires—the desire to get rich."