Gosh. Golly gee. Whodathunk.

For at least the third time during his second term, Donald Trump broke his own record for worst-ever consumer sentiment polling.

US households, many of which were still reeling from the most acute inflation shock in half a century when Trump took office for a second time, were absolutely despondent this month.

Friday’s lonely pre-holiday macro release found America’s marquee gauge of consumer moods falling even further from what was already a record low in data back to 1978.

At 44.8, the final read on the University of Michigan headline for May was down from 48.2 in the preliminary estimate. May’s drop from April now counts as the largest month-to-month decline, in percentage terms, since “Liberation Day.”

As the figure shows, we’re now well below the June 2022 print, when the Biden-era inflation undercut the prior year’s “stimmy”-fueled joie de vivre.

“The cost of living continues to be a first-order concern,” survey director Joanne Hsu said Friday.

Under the hood, the current conditions index printed a new record low at 45.8 and the expectations gauge, at 44.1, is now an astounding 34ppt below the long-term average.

“57% of consumers spontaneously mention[ed] that high prices were eroding their personal finances, up from 50% last month,” Hsu went on.

The release suggests Americans are struggling badly with soaring pump prices and also with grocery bills which, you’ll recall, posted the largest monthly gain since the summer of 2022 in April.

The figure below shows you the impact of the war on Michigan measures of current and forward-looking personal finances and business conditions, rebased to February.

Simply put: The war, and specifically perceptions of the conflict’s impact on prices, are a psychological death knell.

Notably, the biggest declines in sentiment this month weren’t registered among Democrats, who were already “record dejected,” so to speak. Rather, the largest decreases were among Independents and Republicans.

Broken down by income and education cohorts, sentiment fell the most among lower-income consumers and those without college degrees. Those demographics, Hsu remarked, “are more sensitive to increases in the cost of gas and other essentials.” They’re also the demographics which go for Trump on election day.

Speaking of the mid-terms, the most disconcerting takeaway from Friday’s release if you’re the GOP was the increase in longer run price growth expectations. As Hsu noted, the uptick was particularly pronounced among Republicans, whose multi-year view on inflation has “more than doubled” since Trump took office early last year.