Republicans loved to talk about inflation when Joe Biden was president. Now, they'd rather not, and they only have Donald Trump and themselves to blame for soaring prices.
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Just three months ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) touted the “tangible, immediate benefits” of the GOP’s policies.
“We made promises, we’re keeping our promises by every conceivable metric,” he said, pointing to lower inflation, interest rates, and gas prices. “Americans are better off today under Republican governance than they were under the Democrats. And these trends are only going to continue.”
While the economy’s performance already didn’t justify Johnson’s exuberant rhetoric at the time, and Americans had long soured on Donald Trump’s job performance, especially with regard to his inability to lower their cost of living, things then were merely bad for Republicans.
Now they are much, much worse.
On Tuesday, the Department of Labor announced that the consumer price index had soared to 3.8 percent in April, the highest level in nearly three years, and that inflation outpaced real wage gains for the first time since early 2023.
In addition, the price of gasoline has skyrocketed 50 percent since Johnson proclaimed that “the tangible, immediate benefits of our policies are indisputable.”
What is indisputable is that the war in Iran and Trump’s tariffs are to blame for higher prices, even though Republicans would love to pass the buck to his predecessor Joe Biden.
However, anybody who can read a graph can clearly see that inflation plunged quickly from its peak of 9.1 percent in June 2022 and, a year later, started leveling off at around 3 percent. It reached 2.4 percent two months before the 2024 election and inched back up to 3.0 percent when Trump took office.
Now, less than six months before the midterms, it is rising again. And, unless Trump manages to bring the war to an end in a way that results in the immediate re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and a substantial decrease in gasoline prices, inflation is not expected to drop down below 3 percent any time soon.
Oh, and he may want to give up on his tariffs, which are also contributing to Americans paying more for the things they need.
Worst of all for the GOP is that, even if prices were to ease, they also have to manage to win over voters who have no confidence in them.
A new poll shows that 70 percent of them disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, which nearly three in four rate as “poor.” The numbers are even worse for how he is dealing with inflation and gas prices.
And a majority of Americans now says that the economy and the cost of living are the most important issue facing the country, dwarfing topics like crime and safety, which the GOP would like to focus on.
Finally, nearly two-thirds of voters believe that Trump’s policies have made things worse. What is particularly bad for Republicans is that a plurality of Americans (41 percent) believe that the changes to US tax laws they are touting have made things worse.
In other words, there is no good news here for the GOP, and it will take a lot more than gerrymandering southern states for them to hold on to the majority in Congress and for Johnson to keep his job.
