Trump may be inheriting ‘Morning in America’
Already, liberals are complaining that Donald Trump is returning to the White House on a golden parachute, just in time to benefit from a Democratic recovery. The former president owes his re-election in significant part to economic discontent, but as Kamala Harris surrogates tried unsuccessfully to emphasize through the fall, nearly all conventional indicators — inflation, unemployment, growth — have improved dramatically since the pandemic period.
It’s not clear yet how much of this will actually benefit Trump politically. A lot of sharp economic analysis from the last year has shown how those top-line indicators obscure declines in well-being still felt by many Americans. The cognitive distortions of partisanship that clouded Republican views of the economy under President Biden are likely to dampen Democratic perceptions going forward, at least somewhat, in a likely muted reboot of “Trump derangement syndrome.”
And the basic mood of the country is so pervasively gloomy, it’s not clear any news, really, could shake the vibes loose — when only 19 percent of the country is happy with the direction of things, you’re a long way from “Morning in America.” The last time at least half the country reported feeling satisfied, according to Gallup, was January 2004, a month before Facebook was created. If you’d been born right then, you might be graduating college this spring having experienced a single year in which this once famously upbeat country seemed to feel the sun was shining on it.
But there are also three really important, positive social trends that the new president is inheriting, which together may shape public perceptions of the country’s future just as profoundly as our impressions of its economic trajectory. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Americans told pollsters that in addition to immigration, they were preoccupied with inflation and the cost of living. But if you poked a little deeper, you’d often hear voters unspooling a longer and more impressionistic story of national decline, typically punctuated by references to drugs, poor health and crime. And at the moment, important measures of all three are pointing in the right direction.
Take drug overdoses. The broad strokes are familiar enough that most Americans have long since stopped clocking the astonishing continued growth of the crisis: Between 2015 and 2022 — less than a decade — deaths from overdoses doubled. Since the turn of the millennium, they have grown more than fivefold. In the year I was born, 1982, there were 6,299 deaths, as I wrote a few months ago; in 2022, the year I turned 40, there were 107,941. This was an absolute tsunami of drug mortality unlike anything this country, or any other, had ever seen. And it showed no sign of stopping — even when the number of Americans using opioids started trailing off, the mortality effect of that decline was swamped by the arrival of fentanyl, which is many times more deadly.
And then, in 2023, the trend began reversing. At first, the change was relatively small — slowing growth followed by gradual decline. But the data from recent months is far more positive — nearly a 17 percent drop in the 12-month running total. In many states, from Ohio and Virginia to Nebraska, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, declines are larger than 20 percent. In North Carolina, overdose deaths have dropped by more than 35 percent in a single year.
The second trend concerns obesity, now one of the leading behavioral causes of death in America and perhaps the clearest intuitive sign for many Americans that the country is in a state of profound ill health — physical, behavioral and even spiritual. In 1992, when Bill Clinton made a point of jogging to McDonald’s, the obesity rate for American adults had just crossed 20 percent. In 2016, when Trump secured office and would soon be serving mountains of McNuggets at the White House, it was approaching 40 percent, and growing steadily. But last fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced, the adult obesity rate had actually declined for the first time in many years. And if the turn is the result of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, as many theorize, it may mean we are entering a new era, in which the long, relentless climb in obesity mercifully reverses.
The third trend concerns crime. In 2024, the data analyst Jeff Asher has calculated, the country likely experienced the largest decline in murder rate in recorded history. The second largest decline had been the previous year, 2023, meaning that in each of the last two years the country’s most reliable measure of violent crime has improved at a faster rate than at any point during the spectacular decline of the 1990s and 2000s. These declines are measured against the sudden spike in murder in 2020, which means rates of improvement don’t tell the whole story. But Asher’s analysis suggests that while the national murder rate remains slightly above the 2010-14 trough, it is nevertheless lower than at any other point since 1963. Even if the trend slows down, it is quite possible that 2025 could break that 60-year record, and make this year the least murderous one recorded since 1960.
These are not all the same phenomenon, and the fact that each is unfolding at the same time represents a serendipitous social coincidence so unanticipated that The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson recently called it a “mysterious health wave.”
Each also comes with caveats. While the drop in overdoses is quite large, the absolute level of drug deaths remains astoundingly high — sometimes 10 or 20 times higher than is observed in a peer country, and many multiples worse than Americans had ever experienced on the other side of the millennium.
The decline in obesity, though encouraging, is quite small — in fact, so small, researchers aren’t sure it’s statistically significant, and even with widespread use of GLP-1s, severe obesity, which is more strongly associated with severe heart disease, diabetes and a lower quality of life, is still on the rise.
And it’s not yet clear where the crime story will go, either — or how Americans, so accustomed to hysteria about crime rates, will process it. In recent weeks, a series of gruesome, high-profile crimes have occupied the news cycle — the killing of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive; several horrifying attacks on the New York City subway; New Year’s Day terror attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas — and citizens and commentators alike seem increasingly concerned about the category of loose menace and lower-level crime, which are often grouped together under the umbrella terms “social disorder” or “antisocial behavior.” At the moment it is probably safer to see in the decline of murder and violent crime a return to the relatively comfortable prepandemic years, rather than the beginning of a new era for safety in the country.
There are obvious contrary indicators, too — perhaps most notably, the latest homelessness data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development showed an astronomical jump in 2024, marking both by far the largest annual increase and the highest level observed since reporting began in 2007. Credit card debt continues to set records, and mortgage rates — which the notorious inflation hawk Larry Summers has suggested explain a much larger share of cost-of-living anxiety than the conventional Consumer Price Index suggests — are only slightly lower than their post-pandemic peak. As always, Trump has the power to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: Conventional wisdom holds that, should something like the tariff-heavy economic agenda Trump campaigned on actually be implemented, the result would be politically disastrous inflation. (Even the fights over implementation could prove nearly as bad, politically.) The geopolitical landscape is a minefield, and it isn’t exactly encouraging that the country’s public health capacity might be handcuffed by design just as the bird flu risk reaches what some public health experts have called “DEFCON3.”
Nevertheless, if those three big trends — drug overdose, obesity and crime — have in recent years provided the concrete basis for pervasive American narratives of social decline, at the moment each looks sunnier than it has in some time. Indeed, we’re quite far from the “American carnage” Trump invoked as he assumed office the first time, producing shivers of recognition among many of his voters and reportedly prompting George W. Bush to whisper blithely about how weird it was.
If you are the kind of person who might be inclined to stitch together a “Morning in America” story right now, there are other encouraging signs, too — disability claims have been steadily falling, the country is in the midst of booms in both new business formation and manufacturing investment, traffic fatalities are in decline, and to the extent you attribute recent turmoil and distress to problems metabolizing spikes in immigration, border crossings are now already lower than they were when Trump left office. Wall Street analysts are predicting big gains for the S&P 500, gas prices are down, and, as my newsroom colleague Peter Baker noted in a good-news survey over the weekend, even though it isn’t exactly a time of global peace and stability, Trump will be the first to assume the presidency since 2001 without American troops engaged in fighting active wars abroad.
Some of this is a direct credit to Biden and his administration, however poorly he’s managed to claim credit for it, and some of it is more indirect. Much is the result of deeper social developments unfolding below partisan politics, however difficult it is for Americans to see any such stories in a nonpartisan light. But it is all just in time for the country’s 250th birthday — to be presided over by a president whose appetite for finding fault with the country is exceeded only by his eagerness to take credit for anything and everything. Will we give it to him? Perhaps the more interesting question is: Putting the partisan dynamics aside, will we even allow ourselves to see good news if it comes?
We are not prepared for the new urban firestorms
As I was preparing to send this newsletter, an extreme wind event swept through Southern California, with horrifying fires quite predictably following. I wrote about it for The Point, Times Opinion’s in-house blog. I’ll be writing more about these fires in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, please, let’s not look away.
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