IT’S NOTHING LIKE IT WAS UNDER BIDEN, BUT INFLATION STILL VEXES TRUMP. On Wednesday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new numbers for inflation in September, and the news is politically terrible for Republicans. It’s bad for all Americans, of course, but politically terrible for the GOP.
The government said inflation rose by 3.7% on an annual basis in September. Energy accounted for most of that increase, with the price of gasoline leading the way. Gas was up 34.2% on an annual basis in September.
Democrats were quick to pounce, of course. Why shouldn’t they? Pete Buttigieg, one of the leading candidates for 2028 who is now perhaps the party’s most energetic 2026 surrogate, posted this: “Inflation is up again. Not because of a pandemic. Not because of a natural disaster. Because of Trump’s war, tariffs, and corporate tax breaks. It really is this simple: Republicans took over, and then drove up the cost of living in America.”
Ouch. Of course it is much more complicated than that, and not least because it ignores the terrible 9.1% inflation that Joe Biden inflicted on the nation. But Buttigieg’s core point was correct. Looking at overall inflation, when President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, the annual rate stood at 3%. Now it is 3.7%. Trump was elected to make it go down, and he has not done that.
There are other contributors, but the main reason for continued inflation now is the energy prices that have increased because of the war in Iran. The president does not dispute that but instead argues, as he did Tuesday night at a campaign event in Alaska, that higher gas and diesel costs are a “small price to pay for stopping [Iran] from having a nuclear weapon.”
At other times, Trump has argued that higher prices are “peanuts” when compared to the benefit of stopping the Iranian nuclear program. “We cannot let them have a nuclear weapon,” he said back in May, in the war’s third month. “You want to see the world exploded? You want to see a problem? This is peanuts, and I appreciate everybody putting up with it for a little while.”
After months in which he predicted the war would end very quickly, Trump has taken to saying he expects it to last until just after the midterm elections. Then there will be rapid improvement, he promised Tuesday night in Alaska. “That war is going to end very soon,” he said, “and when it does, your prices are going to come tumbling down.”
But it’s not going to happen in time to save Republican candidates on the ballot across the country. Trump’s job approval rating for handling inflation stands at 27.4%, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. That’s a mind-bogglingly low number. (Trump’s job approval rating for handling the entire economy is 34.2%, which is also distressingly low for Republicans.) Put it all together, and it is a predictor of trouble ahead for the GOP.
One last, small hope for Republicans was that they might be able to argue in the final few weeks of the campaign that inflation was moving in the right direction. Now, that is not possible.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
