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.