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At the precise time, we should have taken our foot off the gas and put it on the break, we just stomped all the way on the gas.

And so what could have been essentially a non-inflationary episode

turned into the worst inflationary episode in four decades.

Five months into the Trump administration, I sit down with E.J. Anthony, Chief economist at the Heritage Foundation,

to find out how Americans are faring financially today.

If all we saw was growth, you'd need like 7% annual growth year after year in order to outgrow

this mess.

You're not going to get 7% growth per annum.

You're just not.

From the Big Beautiful Bill to the Iran-Israel war to tariffs and pending trade deals,

how is the American economy being impacted? If you look at all of the agreements and all of the deals from the first Trump administration,

China followed through on precisely none of them, not a single one.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellogg.

E.J. Antony, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Well, we spoke about nine months ago, about the state of the economy, about inflation,

about discrepancies between statistics and indicators and reality in the economy. So how have things changed nine months in

with the new administration? It's interesting to see we still have some of those problems that

we discussed previously, whether those are problems just with the statistics or problems in the

real economy. But it's remarkable how in just a few months, we've already seen

...