Not to belabor the point or otherwise lampoon a man who doesn’t take especially well to criticism, but aggregate polling data suggests the US body politic doesn’t see, in the evolution of the US economy over the past year, a new American “golden age.”

Donald Trump’s promise, delivered during his indoor, VIP-only, second inaugural, to usher in an American renaissance, was destined for derision. If you’re going to declare an epoch-in-the-making, it’s best to do it coming out of a deep recession. Because the cyclical odds are with you.

Cycle timing’s only a little easier than market timing, which is to say it’s mostly impossible, but it was always going to be difficult for Trump to sustain jobs growth at the pace seen during the Biden era. The same goes for nominal GDP growth.

To be fair, Trump didn’t “tank the economy” in 2025, as some liberal commentators still insist, against the evidence. But he didn’t do himself any favors with the tariffs either. It’s absolutely the case that the uncertainty associated with “Trade War 2.0” undermined hiring early last year. Just ask the ADP revisions.

Although the BLS says hiring turned a corner in January after a veritable plunge in payroll growth during 2025, Americans are circumspect.

The figure above shows the deviation in three survey-based, forward-looking measures of household labor market perceptions versus their pre-pandemic average. As you can see, “Liberation Day” took a heavy psychological toll.

Hat tip to BMO’s Ian Lyngen for highlighting that chart which, as he noted in his latest, was initially cited by Mary Daly who this month warned that notwithstanding an otherwise decent outlook for the economy, households are skeptical about the prospects for employment.

“Is the economic outlook good or bad?” Daly wondered. “If you talk to businesses, they’re cautiously optimistic [but] talking to workers, they’re not so sure.”

“We’ve been in a relatively ‘low-hiring, low-firing’ environment for some time, but workers are aware that things could change quickly, leaving them in a ‘no-hiring, more-firing’ labor market,” she went on.

I’d note that the most recent job cut data from Challenger (strongly) suggests that shift — to a ‘no-hiring, more-firing’ scenario — is underway. Recall that hiring plans totaled just 5,306 for January, the lowest since August and the fewest announced hiring plans for any January on record. The BLS jobs report argues in the other direction. We’ll see who’s right.

The figure above shows the entire second-term history of Trump’s approval rating on the economy. He hasn’t scored in positive territory on single-issue economic polling since his tariff blitz began in early March of 2025.

There again, all the evidence points to the tariffs as a psychological albatross for US households. There’s just no way around that conclusion. And it’s ironic because, according to Trump, the tariffs are the centerpiece of America’s new “golden age.”

As BMO’s Lyngen observed, the University of Michigan series shown in the first chart in yellow is currently at 60%. “Since the beginning of the series in 1978, a spike above 50% always corresponded to a recession and a large spike in the BLS unemployment rate,” he added.