For all the hype about President Joe Biden‘s supposed election year comeback, the president’s rebound is not really reflected in the polls. FiveThirtyEight’s expert aggregation shows the Democrat‘s net approval rating rising from a nadir of a negative 18.2 a month ago to a negative 15.9 as of Thursday. While former President Donald Trump‘s general election lead has narrowed from 2 points last month, per RealClearPolitics, to 0.7, a swing-state poll from the Wall Street Journal has the former president leading the incumbent in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania and the pair tied in Wisconsin.

While the record-shattering influx of illegal immigrants into the country has surged to the forefront of voters’ concerns, a key component of Biden’s inability to capitalize on Trump’s personal chaos is the chaos that Biden himself has brought to the economy. Now, Biden is trapped between a rock and a hard place: denying that the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years is still extant (and, if anything, getting worse once more) and actively exacerbating this price instability in his futile attempts to make the problem appear less punitive to his base.

Let us begin by establishing the fact that despite the Federal Reserve’s aggressive and mostly successful campaign to bring inflation down from its near-double-digit apex in 2022, that war has not just stalled — now, the central bank is slowly losing ground. In February, headline consumer price index inflation, producer price index inflation, and personal consumption expenditures price index inflation rose. While the Fed’s preferred inflation measure of core PCE inflation slightly fell from 2.9% to 2.8%, core PCE on a six-month annualized basis, a more precise and recent assessment of the data, rose to 2.9% from 2.6%.

So not only is inflation compounding, meaning that voters have already suffered an aggregate 18% increase in prices since Biden took office, but the problem is getting worse, as indicated by nearly every inflation measure increasing to well above the Fed’s maximum 2% benchmark. This has translated to a 5% cut in our average real weekly earnings. Consider inflation a unilateral tax by the federal government, and this is the equivalent of Uncle Sam stealing 1 1/2 paychecks from the average worker per year.

So, inflation, which most voters under 50 have never lived through before now, is indeed still running rampant, rendering Biden the least popular president since Jimmy Carter. Even though immigration has superseded the economy as the problem voters are most concerned about, more voters still consider the economy our most pressing problem than they did at any point during the Trump administration.

Whereas congressional Democrats used “Bidenomics” nearly 500 times last July, neither they nor the White House almost ever utters the word now. By contrast, congressional Republicans used the term 500 times in March alone.

When Biden isn’t denying the crisis exists, he’s making it worse in his idiotic attempts to escape the political ramifications. He has tried to defy the Supreme Court to issue hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness to disproportionately wealthy borrowers. Now, he is trying to con first-time owners into taking on a quarter-million dollars in new interest payments in exchange for a $10,000 credit to sell their homes.

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Not that the federal government has the money for any of this. Because the White House has pursued an explicitly inflationary fiscal policy, the Fed may very well be unable to cut interest rates as it had hoped to this year, which the Bank of America projects would render America’s net interest payments for this year alone at a staggering $1.6 trillion, more than we spend on our national defense.

It’s not that Trump is some orthodox fiscal conservative, but for all his refusal to touch the entitlements projected to catapult the country into a debt crisis, voters have already experienced his presidency, and the fact is that interest rates and inflation remained near zero, unemployment around half-century lows, and real wage and economic growth booming. Hence, swing-state voters say that, by a double-digit margin in every state polled by the Wall Street Journal, Trump would be better at handling the economy, inflation, and rising costs than Biden. Voters may not love Trump, the person on Truth Social, or the defendant in the courtroom, but they prospered while living in Trump’s America. They have suffered under Biden’s America while he continues to make price instability even worse, and no amount of gaslighting can convince voters otherwise.