The U.S. economy is "worse" today than when former President Joe Biden departed office last year, according to economist and political commentator Peter Schiff, who warned that the nation faces the "threat" of a Democratic socialist winning the White House in the 2028 presidential election.

President Donald Trump is "unpopular because the economy is worse now than it was when Biden left office," Schiff, chief economist and global strategist of Euro Pacific Asset Management and host of "The Peter Schiff Show" podcast, told Fox News Digital in an interview on Wednesday. A longtime critic of the Federal Reserve, Schiff rose to prominence warning of the 2008 financial crisis and ran unsuccessfully for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Connecticut in 2010, and he has spent years urging investors to favor gold over dollars.

"Trump ran promising to fix what Biden broke," but then "broke it more," Schiff asserted. He noted that Trump "said that prices will come down on day one as soon as I become president," adding that "inflation is a bigger problem now than it was when Trump was elected."

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House on Thursday.

Although Republicans currently hold majorities in both chambers of Congress, Schiff said he believes the GOP will lose many House seats in this year's midterm elections — when all 435 House seats and roughly a third of the Senate are on the ballot — and that the party has "a real chance of losing the Senate too." He said he expects Republicans to lose control of the Senate in 2028 if they have not lost their majority in the chamber before then, and he thinks the GOP will lose the presidency in 2028 as well. The "real threat" looming over the 2028 White House contest, he warned, is the possibility of "a real Democratic socialist" being elected president.

Schiff, who is involved in selling precious metals through SchiffGold, a dealer he founded, made a case for people buying gold and silver, a call that comes as gold has climbed to a series of record highs in recent years. "Buy real money that will preserve its purchasing power," he said. He also argued that investors should be "diversifying into stocks in international markets" to protect against "a weak U.S. dollar."

Looking further ahead, Schiff said "stagflation" — a combination of stagnant growth and elevated inflation most famously associated with 1970s America — will "be a big problem for the U.S. economy for years to come," and he warned of a "crisis" pertaining to "sovereign debt" as well as "currency."

"But I want people to understand that this is not about a failure of capitalism. It's about a failure to have capitalism. It's a failure of central planning, central government, central banking. It's big government that interfered with the free market that created the problem. And the solutions that are gonna be proposed by government to increase the size of government, to have even more regulation, to have even more taxes, they will just make all the problems worse," Schiff said.

The U.S. national debt has surpassed $40 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury, and the interest payments on that debt now rank among the federal government's largest annual expenses.

"We need to rein in government. We need massive cuts to government spending, deregulation, we need free market forces," he said.

Schiff added that "Republicans are in a predicament because doing the right thing economically is probably political suicide, which is why they won't do it."