At rallies in the campaign’s final days, former President Donald J. Trump’s team has posted “Trump Will Fix It” banners. Online, ads flash the same slogan. “I’ll fix it,” Mr. Trump said in an election-eve ad posted on Monday. Inflation, immigration and crime, he says, are all sky-high, and only he can bring them down.
But there is one wrinkle when it comes to his promise to fix those three major problems. They already have been fixed, more or less. Illegal border crossings have fallen back down to below where they were when President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office from Mr. Trump. Crime is close to its lowest level in decades. And inflation has slowed to a relatively normal rate.
Any of them could be improved further, of course, and current fixes may only be temporary. Moreover, the lingering effects of higher inflation and illegal immigration from earlier in the Biden-Harris administration remain salient. Prices are not going up as much anymore, but they have not gone back down. Fewer people are entering the country illegally, but millions who came in the past few years are still here. And there is widespread consensus that the immigration system as a whole remains broken.
Yet Mr. Trump talks as if the three issues were all still at the same acute crisis stage they were earlier in Mr. Biden’s term — as if prices were still skyrocketing by the day, the border were still being trampled as never before and the streets were flowing with the blood of a horrific crime wave. “We will rapidly defeat inflation,” Mr. Trump vowed at a closing rally at Madison Square Garden in New York a week ago. “I will also restore our borders,” he added a little later. “We will crush violent crime,” he said at yet another point in the rally.
“He’s out of date on the problems,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard professor and former economist for President Barack Obama who presciently warned Mr. Biden about the likelihood of inflation early in his term.