Poorer and with less voice: Americans after two years of Trump

WashingtonTwo years in politics is a long time. Two years with Donald Trump in power have been almost an eternity for the United States. And, technically, they are not even two full years yet (the Republican was inaugurated on January 20, 2025), but the speed with which he has deployed his agenda has disrupted time. Trump has turned the country upside down inside and out. In a way, everything has changed – trade war, war with Iran, the terror of ICE, the honeymoon with big tech – so that nothing changes: every day it is harder to fill the shopping cart for many families.

On November 3, Americans will cast their discontent (or their hopes) at the polls with the same concern as in 2024: the cost of living. The perception that citizens had with Joe Biden regarding the economy has not changed much with Trump. When the Democrat left the White House, only 28% considered that the country's economy was doing well. Now that percentage has decreased a little more with Trump: only 24% have a positive view, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

The same poll shows how 6 out of 10 Americans consider that the economy has worsened under Trump's government and fewer and fewer have hopes that it will improve during the coming year. In January, 31% believed that the situation would improve.

Many Americans voted trusting the promise of a supposed "golden age," especially for rural America and the Midwest, drained by industrial relocation. Now, ranchers and farmers find themselves even more stifled by the pincer movement of the president's tariffs and the impact of the war in Iran on fuel prices. A bleeding that has been aggravated by Trump's desperate attempts to lower the price of ground beef in supermarkets: the Republican has imported tons of beef—one shipment from Argentina and the other of unknown origin—to which a tariff exemption has been applied.

A "real kick in the nuts," as Kansas rancher Kyle Hemmert said in statements to the New York Times last October. "Come on, President Trump, is this really the policy America First'?". Now this republican bastion, has become one of the swing states in the midterm elections. The pastor Adam Hamilton could make history on November 3rd as the first Democrat to win a Senate election in Kansas since before World War II.

Corruption comes into play

The loss of purchasing power among the middle and working classes is even more painful when they see the equestrian statues of Washington recently gilded in gold, or the golden filigree with which Trump has transformed the White House. The Versailles-like airs of the American president are not only in form, but also in content.

Tuesday, at a rally in Texas, Trump made the following comment about the cost of living and the $5,000 check he has promised to every adult if the Republicans win the legislative elections: "You could even come to Mar-a-Lago [the magnate's private mansion], you would be my guests. The problem is that with $5,000 you could only buy a hamburger or a small dessert. Well, I'm not sure you could even buy that!" If they have no bread, let them eat cake. Or in this case, hamburgers.

Trump allows himself these types of comments to his followers, just as in these two years he has not hidden how he has turned the presidency into his most profitable asset. As the New York Times calculated, just during the first year of his second term, the Republican has allegedly enriched himself by more than 1.4 billion dollars. Much of it thanks to having turned access to the presidency into a bargaining chip: whether with the petrostates of the Gulf, or with the big tech companies.

The marriage with Silicon Valley became explicit on the very day of the inauguration, with the front-row presence of Elon Musk (X, Tesla), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google, Alphabet), Tim Cook (Apple), and Shou Zi Chew (TikTok). "Things that used to happen behind closed doors are now broadcast live: we see company CEOs and foreign leaders bringing gifts to Trump," explains Zach Everson to ARA, a member of the ethics lobby Public Citizen, which is dedicated to tracking the magnate's conflicts of interest. He asserts that the Republican took note during his first term of how to dodge the consequences of these types of practices and is now simply picking up where he left off.

The perception of how large fortunes meddle in politics has been further accentuated in this campaign by the obscene amount of money that some of the technooligarchs have invested to help the Republican party. Musk has contributed about 446 million dollars – almost double what he spent in the presidential elections to support Trump – to boost different Republican candidacies, and the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, has contributed about 25 million dollars with his wife through the pro-AI super-PAC Leading the Future.

Along with the cost of living, corruption has become one of the main concerns of Americans, according to a CNBC poll. The loss of purchasing power is now also accompanied by the feeling of loss of political power. In one of his latest campaign videos, the Senator Bernie Sanders claimed that "democracy is one person, one vote".

Concern about AI

The expansion of AI under the Trump administration has also become a major concern for citizens. Not only because of how it may affect the economy or jobs, but because of how the White House is using it to increase control within the country. The raids by immigration agents in Minneapolis, which the president has turned into his armed wing, also revealed how an application had been created that functioned as a kind of Google Maps to track migrants.

The system used by ICE is designed by the technology company Palantir, which also developed the Project Maven, the artificial intelligence system with which the Pentagon has made bombings in Iran more efficient. Human rights groups believe that the attack on the school in Minab, during the first hours of the war—in which at least 110 girls died—could be related to the use of this system. Paradoxically, the increase in the use of this type of technology has coincided with a purge in the Pentagon's military leadership that has left many critical positions in the army's decision-making process vacant.

A 'Trump first'

The Iran war has not only been an accelerator of social unrest due to the rising cost of living, but it has also exposed the extent to which Trump has managed to erode the guardrails of the presidency in his first two years. "The Founding Fathers would have expected Republicans in Congress to have insisted that the House have a role in decisions such as going to war with Iran," David Miller, a political scientist at American University, explains to this newspaper.

Miller points out that it is not just that the Republican has weakened the democratic system, but that Congress –under the control of the Republican majority– "has abdicated its own power." This renunciation of overseeing the executive, which was already hinted at in February 2025, has allowed Trump to explore the scope of a presidential power that, furthermore, has a favorable Supreme Court. "The Supreme Court has explicitly expanded the powers of the executive in various areas. But even more significantly, it has made it very difficult to challenge the exercise of these powers," adds David Super, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University.

The omnipotence that the tycoon has been able to feel behind closed doors was also exacerbated by the military incursion into Venezuela at the beginning of the year and the kidnapping of the Chavista leader, Nicolás Maduro. The operation with which the US president began 2026, which contravened international law, made it clear that the "America First" that he preached during the 2024 election campaign was in reality a "Trump first".

In two months, Trump carried out the military incursion into Venezuela, deployed ICE agents to Minneapolis where they killed two US citizens, and bombed Tehran at the start of a war that has inflamed the region and affected the global economy. Trump's accelerationism normalized democratic erosion, but the unrest is already beginning to seep through in small things, such as the grocery bill or the price of gasoline.