Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked President Donald Trump this week if the affordability issue was a factor in races in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City. “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats,” Trump said, before going on to harangue the media and instruct the GOP to tell voters prices are down.
Now, I stand behind few in my contempt for legacy media, but it’s far more likely that the average voter feels like prices are high because they’ve actually been in a supermarket during the past year. Yet, Trump officials have apparently landed on a strategy of gaslighting consumers. This was tried not very long ago. The Joe Biden administration constantly waved away “transitory” inflation. No issue did more damage to the administration.
“Grocery prices are actually down significantly under Trump,” National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said on CBS News last weekend. Inflation, as Hassett knows, has been tempered, but is still compounding. We’re doing better than historic 9% year-to-year increases we saw during the Democrats’ self-destructive mishandling of the post-COVID economy. But 3+% on top of those spikes isn’t going to placate many. Trump averaged 2.46 % inflation during his first term when prices had been relatively stable for years.
Back in 2022, Democrats let their ideological preferences trump political prudence by ignoring warnings from economists that if they pushed through the “Inflation Reduction Act” during a hot economy. Indeed, Biden told Americans that the price tag for the bill was “zero.” His advisers, when they weren’t mocking inflation worries as a “high-class problem,” made the preposterous case that more spending would mitigate the problem.
It didn’t. One MIT Sloan study found that government spending was responsible for 42% of the 2022 inflation spike. Biden never recovered.
Hitting consumers with billions in sales tax increases in the guise of tariffs over the last year isn’t a much better strategy for Trump. Most economists predicted that tariffs would contribute to price hikes, and yet Trump’s love of protectionism trumped pragmatism. The president has been pulling back on his historic tariffs since Liberation Day, though plenty have already contributed to economic uncertainty and inflation.
“You’re going to see some substantial announcements over the next couple days for things we don’t grow here in the U.S.,” Bessent, who also claimed prices were down, promised on “Fox & Friends” this week.
Wait, did the administration just learn about comparative advantage? Because tariffs were allegedly instituted to help American workers and industry. Fruit prices have gone up. Ground beef prices have spiked 13%. Coffee has jumped 19% — 66% higher than in 2019. Americans like these things.
Rather than admit it was a mistake, Trump has taken a page from Biden by blaming “gouging” and big, greedy corporations for inflation. This strategy never works, either.
Remember that one of the other arguments for tariffs was that revenue would bring down the debt. The United States federal debt accelerated to its highest level ever last quarter, reaching $38 trillion. Trump has not cut any spending. That also threatens inflation. At the same time, Trump has launched a relentless campaign to convince the Federal Reserve to keep cutting interest rate cuts for more easy money.
On top of that, the president wants to dump billions of tax revenues from tariffs back into the economy via $2,000 checks to middle- and low-income Americans – even as Washington keeps borrowing. Some people might fall for this kind of populist ruse. It’s short-sighted economically as we know from the last time Washington helped spike inflation by mailing out checks.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S UNIMPRESSIVE WIN
There’s no magic bullet to bring down prices. The president can only do so much. One thing he can do is ‘no harm.’ But even if voters are wrong, no politician has ever convinced the electorate to change their minds about the economy. Wide majorities in virtually every poll now say their grocery, utility bills, healthcare, housing, and fuel costs have all gone up during the past year. Most of them are feeling the aggregate cost of inflation.
Gaslighting them is political suicide.