President Donald Trump has belatedly recognized the threat the lingering aftershocks of inflation pose to his second term and Republican congressional majorities, but it won’t be easy to wrest control of the affordability narrative back from the Democrats.
Trump devoted a pre-Christmas prime-time address from the White House to the most important issue of next year’s midterm elections as he and Vice President JD Vance embarked on a multistate affordability tour.
But now that Trump and Vance are incumbents, they run the risk that any arguments they make for who originally caused the current wave of inflation — which ran at a 41-year high under former President Joe Biden and his replacement as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris — will come across to voters as blame-shifting and accountability-dodging.
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Worse, any arguments Trump and Vance make that things are improving could be seen as out of touch with economic reality until public perceptions about the cost of living improve.
A recent poll by Echelon Insights, a Republican firm, found that 74% would only accept a decline in prices as proof that inflation was finally under control. Many Trump 2024 voters likely cast their ballots for him hoping pre-pandemic price levels would return.
Prices on some goods and services, like gasoline, can and have come down. But the consumer price index isn’t going to decline broadly absent other serious economic problems.
Inflation-induced price increases are cumulative. As Biden and Harris quickly discovered, a drop in the rate of inflation didn’t immediately improve public perceptions of the economy because things were still generally more expensive than they had been in 2020. The Trump administration faces this problem now even if good news on inflation continues.
Not everyone will believe positive economic data on inflation or other important metrics even if such reports persist. Trump himself has cast doubt on government statistics before. It is now more socially and politically acceptable for others to express skepticism about these numbers with Trump in charge of the government.
Media outlets that tried to spin the Biden economy as being better than voters believed won’t tell similar stories under Trump. The president and his allies will have to make the case themselves, which can, in turn, alienate voters who don’t feel the economic progress yet.
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Pretty much anything else Trump can focus on ahead of the midterm elections could be seen as a distraction from the economy. And if Republicans lose control of Congress, or even just the House, in November, he will be extremely limited in what he can do on domestic issues for the remainder of his time in office.
All this contributes to why Trump is frustrated by inflation becoming a political liability for him like it once was for Biden and Harris, leading him to sometimes call it the “affordability hoax.” This makes some voters feel he does not take inflation seriously or believe the high cost of living really exists.
When Trump refers to something as a “hoax,” whether it is affordability, Jeffrey Epstein, or Russia, he is usually not referring to the underlying issue at hand but its use by the Democrats as a cudgel against him (though the first-term Trump-Russia investigations arguably had some real-world effects on his dealings with Russia). But that’s not always how swing voters, in particular, see such rhetoric.
There is considerable debate about how much impact Trump’s tariffs have had on prices in general. They have, at a minimum, made it easier to blame his policies for things being more expensive, and are at a maximum contributing to upward pressure on prices.
Finally, Trump is going to appoint a new Federal Reserve chairman when Jerome Powell’s term expires next year. It is not clear that inflation control will be his highest priority when he picks Powell’s successor or that he will work as well with a tight-money chairman as Ronald Reagan did with Paul Volcker during the resolution of the last inflation crisis more than 40 years ago.
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Meanwhile, Democrats could reap the electoral benefits of persistent inflation they helped create despite warnings from allied economists and without showing any appreciation for its monetary and fiscal causes. Throughout the Biden administration, Democrats mostly treated inflation as some unfortunate side effect of COVID-19 or supply-chain bottlenecks that Republicans were exploiting for cynical purposes. Today, many Democratic voters believe that electing socialist mayors to major cities that house much of the financial sector is a good way to help keep the cost of living down.
It is a difficult political and economic battle for Trump, who, like other incumbents before him, risks paying the price at the ballot box.