Fox News host Bret Baier had to deliver some truly disastrous polling news to his golf buddy Donald Trump.
A stony-faced Baier, who attended a black-tie White House dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the president’s invitation, read the damning results of his network’s poll the next day. The survey included the embarrassing revelation that more voters view the economy negatively now than they did at the end of Joe Biden’s presidency.
The poll comes amid relentless claims from the administration that financial prospects for average Americans have never been better. It is average Americans, however, who are complaining that their groceries, bills, and healthcare costs have all gone up since Trump returned to the White House in January.
A crushing majority of 76 percent of Americans view the economy negatively. That’s 6 points more than the 70 percent who said the same at the end of the Biden presidency. Trump had managed to make progress on that number in July, getting it down to 67 percent. Now the numbers suggest his work has come undone, and then some.
Baier, 55, probably didn’t relish breaking the bad news to Trump after enjoying the president’s hospitality. As well as attending the glitzy White House dinner Tuesday, Baier was present at a lavish party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this month. Baier and Trump were pictured chatting together at the event, where guests dined on truffled gratin dauphinois, during the government shutdown.
A staggering 60 percent of respondents in Fox News’ poll said grocery prices had increased “a lot,” and a further 25 percent said they had increased “a little.”
Trump, however, seems to disagree with them. During his diplomatic tour of Asia in October, the president claimed, “Groceries are down except for the beef, which I’ll get down, too.”
The following week, in an interview with Fox News, Trump repeated the claim. “Groceries are way down, other than beef,” he said. A CNN fact check this month found that groceries were up 1.4 percent in September compared to January, and 2.7 percent higher year on year.
A majority of Republicans also say their bills have gone up. Voters for Trump’s own party have heaped misery on the White House in more ways than one, delivering a 24-point drop in overall approval, down from 92 percent in March.
After the shutdown, six out of 10 Fox poll respondents said Trump and lawmakers on both sides “didn’t care about people like them.” Some 46 percent of people said they’d been personally hurt by Trump’s economic policies in 2025, only 1 point below the figure for Biden in 2024.
The president himself, however, sees things differently.
“We’re making incredible strides to make America affordable again,” he told a U.S.-Saudi investment forum on Wednesday. The D.C. event was held to help Trump schmooze Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite his alleged role in ordering the 2018 murder of a critical Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi.
“They [the Joe Biden administration] had the worst inflation in history,” Trump said. “I mean, we’re bringing prices down, but they came up with a new word, affordability.”
It is the president that voters blame for the pinch they are feeling, Fox’s new numbers show.
Twice as many respondents blame Trump for the current state of the economy as they do Biden, at 62 percent compared to 32 percent. A surprisingly high 42 percent of Republican voters blame Trump, as do 62 percent of independents.
The White House, however, is sticking to its script. In a statement to the Daily Beast, deputy press secretary Kush Desai said, “Cleaning up Joe Biden’s economic disaster has been a Day One priority for President Trump. The administration’s robust economic agenda has already cooled inflation, raised real wages, lowered the prices of many essentials, and created 600,000 jobs in the private sector for native-born Americans.
“President Trump is just getting started implementing the policies that created historic economic prosperity in his first term, and Americans can rest assured that the best is yet to come.”
