With Donald Trump’s approval rating now perilously close to falling below 30 percent in some polls, it’s clear that a wide majority of Americans disapprove of his performance. It’s also fair to assume that many of them are rather annoyed by the president, who started an intractable war with Iran that has driven up gas prices and myriad other costs here at home—yet seems to spend all of his time either raving on Truth Social about how great he is or forcing his gaudy building projects on the disenfranchised denizens of Washington, D.C.
But Trump, for all of the obvious ways he annoys us, is also busy annoying us in ways that we might not realize are also his fault.
Last week, The New York Times revealed in depth how the Trump administration has halted or rolled back the Biden administration’s efforts to expand airline passengers’ rights. The Department of Transportation, under Secretary Sean “Golden Age of Travel” Duffy, killed the proposed cash compensation rule, which would have forced airlines to pay up to $775 per passenger when at fault for major travel disruptions; abandoned another proposed rule that would have forced airlines to be transparent about junk and other extra fees during the booking process; is moving to eliminate a long-standing requirement that the final ticket price be displayed most prominently; and is even delaying enforcement of a new rule that expanded rights for disabled travelers.
Biden’s DOT, under Pete Buttigieg, issued a record $225 million in fines against airlines for violating consumer protections. Duffy, a former airline lobbyist, also has yet to issue a single fine. In fact, he’s done quite the opposite, waiving $25 million in fines that had already been assessed. The consequences for passengers are clear: With airlines no longer worried about having to compensate customers for inconveniencing them, we’re now seeing the most delayed flights in over a decade.
This is part of a broader pattern; Trump is eroding customer rights not only in air travel but throughout the economy. For all his faux-populist talk of standing up for the common man, these efforts show that he’s much more intent on fighting for the corporate powers that have cozied up to him—and who make a tidy profit by annoying the hell out of us.
It’s called the “annoyance economy”—a term coined by Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank, to describe all manner of tricks and traps that corporations use to separate Americans from their hard-earned money. “These costs show up in many forms: hours spent on hold with customer service or lost in convoluted insurance paperwork; the relentless ping of spam calls or political messages warning of doom unless we donate; the steady creep of extra fees and surprise surcharges on everyday transactions,” the group wrote in a widely cited February report. Groundwork estimates that this costs Americans over $165 billion in time and money per year.
Biden fought to end this tyranny. Not only did he take on the airlines, he also fought overdraft charges issued by banks, reined in usurious credit card fees, and moved to stop medical debt from appearing on credit reports. His head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, told TNR’s Perry Bacon that he estimated the agency had saved consumers $10 billion under his watch. But Trump has defunded and defanged the CFPB, leaving only a skeletal staff and costing Americans an estimated $26.5 billion so far. Last year, Trump’s CFPB officials—what remains of them—actually joined with the banks to ask a federal judge to toss out a rule their agency had created limiting credit card late fees to $8. With no one arguing the opposing view, the judge agreed with them.
Perhaps nothing is more illustrative of Trump’s selling out of the American people and his tolerance for the annoyance economy than the Live Nation settlement arranged by his Department of Justice, as detailed in a recent Wall Street Journal piece. In the wake of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour fiasco in 2022, during which fans were kept waiting hours by Ticketmaster (which merged with Live Nation in 2010) and were either forced to pay excessive fees or locked out of buying entirely, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, filed a lawsuit to break up the two companies, which together control 70 percent of the live concert industry.
At first, after returning to the White House, Trump seemed ready to continue that fight, even after Live Nation ponied up half a million dollars for his “inaugural fund.” In a March 2025 executive order, Trump declared that the concert industry had been “blighted by unscrupulous middlemen who sit at the intersection between artists and fans and impose egregious fees while providing minimal value.” It was an obvious veiled reference to Live Nation, and appeared to be the type of red meat his aggrieved MAGA base could eat up, even if it had little actual impact.
But as the Journal reported, Live Nation’s standing with the administration improved after it enlisted Sullivan & Cromwell—a firm with close ties to Trump—and sought the help of former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. The company also hired lobbyist Mike Davis, a close Trump ally who wields such enormous power that he reportedly played a role in the firing of Gail Slater, the head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, and two of her deputies. One of those deputies, Roger Alford, an archconservative who has served in both Trump administrations, later wrote in an op-ed that “Live Nation and Ticketmaster have paid a bevy of cozy MAGA friends to roam the halls of the DOJ in defense of their monopoly abuses.” Trump’s legal counselor, Boris Epshteyn, also took a strong interest in the case—to the point, the Journal noted, that the officials they spoke with “didn’t know whether he was working for Trump or Live Nation, or both.”
Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation, met with Trump in February, purportedly to discuss how to improve bookings at the Kennedy Center. After that meeting, four things happened: Trump insisted that the case against Live Nation be settled; meetings were set up with Attorney General Pam Bondi for that purpose; Richard Grenell, Trump’s man at the Kennedy Center, was appointed to Live Nation’s board of directors; and Trump chose James McDonald, who had headed Live Nation’s team from Sullivan & Cromwell, as Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster, of course, were not broken up.
Sometimes, the annoyance economy isn’t just inconvenient or costly; it can be deadly too. A 2019 study found that almost a quarter of health care recipients delayed or forwent care due to administrative burdens. It’s not just excessive wait times that cause people to avoid care: HMOs don’t update websites and make it difficult to find in-network doctors. A report by New York Attorney General Letitia James found that 86 percent of mental health providers listed were “ghosts” who could not be reached, were not taking new patients, or were no longer in the network.
Artificial intelligence seems certain to make the annoyance economy even more annoying. AI voice agents are starting to be employed by HMOs, and AI chatbots are everywhere—and extraordinarily inefficient. Now, with Brendan Carr as Trump’s head of the Federal Communications Commission, there’s serious consideration being given to the idea of allowing AI robocalls to target you with political ads.
Democrats are trying to do something about these annoyances. As TNR reported back in July, Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois signed into law an anti–junk fee bill that prohibits “resort fees” for renters and “restocking fees” charged by retailers. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani put into effect a rule banning hidden hotel fees. The CARS Act, which was signed by Gavin Newsom and took effect this month, targets deceptive pricing at car dealerships across California.
“Americans want their political leaders to fix this mess,” Groundwork Collaborative wrote in its report, noting the popularity in polls of restricting robocalls and banning hidden or extra fees. The report’s authors, Groundwork policy fellow Chad Maisel and Stanford economist Neale Mahoney, are also part of Project 2029—a sort of progressive antidote to the conservative Project 2025—which sees combating the annoyance economy as a winning electoral issue. It won’t be easy, though, they noted: “American companies derive big profits from these painful interactions, and fight to protect them.” The Democrats will need to fight even harder to eradicate them.
