INFLATION AND THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS. On Friday, the Commerce Department released inflation figures for August, and what they show is … more of the same. The year-over-year inflation rate last month was 3.4%, a rate unchanged from July and one many analysts call “stubbornly high.”
For President Donald Trump, it’s a stubborn problem. Trump campaigned on a promise to bring down inflation, and millions of people voted for him to do just that. When Trump took office in January 2025, the rate stood at 3%. It dipped in Trump’s first few months, hitting 2.3% in April 2025. But it later rose, and now, after Trump has been in office 19 months, it is 3.4% in the new report. The bottom line is that Trump has not brought down the rate of inflation.
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Of course, as many Trump supporters will point out, a 3.4% annual rate is wonderful compared to the worst inflation of the Joe Biden era. In June 2022, inflation hit 9.1%, a rate not seen since the bad old days of Jimmy Carter. But with the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, the annual rate fell to 6.4% in January 2023 and then kept falling, hitting 3% in June 2023. It stayed in that range for the rest of Biden’s presidency.
So Trump inherited an inflation rate of 3%. It’s fair to say that many Trump supporters expected inflation to be lower by now. One of the main drivers keeping that from happening has been Trump’s tariffs, which, while they have had less negative effect on the economy than many hysterical reports at the time predicted, have still raised some prices. Another, of course, is Trump’s decision to launch the Iran war, now in its seventh month, which has caused a big rise in energy prices.
The president has made several statements that indicate he is quite sensitive to the connection between the war and gas prices. At a campaign rally in Garden City, New York, last month, he made a frank appeal for more patience. “So I just say this, for you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have — a country, really, it’s the No. 1 state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon. So remember that, when you have to pay a little bit more. You’re at $4 [a gallon]. It’s OK. I mean, it’s — I’m not — I’m not, I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing, but you could — you know if you didn’t have [the war] you’d be at, I mean, I had it down to below $2 in many states.”
This week, with the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump predicted that the war will end “immediately after the election.” And that, he added, means gas prices will go down then, too. “Shortly, but right after the election, because they’d like to have it that way, but right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward,” Trump said. “They’re going to be tumbling down and we’ll get them down, I think, for gasoline. We’ll get them below $2 a gallon, but not until after the midterms. I think it’s going to take a little bit longer than the midterms.”
As with previous inflation reports, energy is by far the main problem for prices in the new CPI report. The price of gasoline was up 27.4% in August over the year before, while fuel oil was up 52% in the same period. Other products were up, but at a far lower rate: fruits and vegetables, 3.2%; nonalcoholic beverages, 3.7%; full-service restaurant meals, 3.5%; and more. Some portion of those increases, of course, is attributable to higher energy costs.
The midterm elections are 54 days away, and with the president himself predicting the Iran war will last until after the voting, it seems clear that energy prices will continue to be a problem for Trump and the Republican Party. And that is on top of the reality that a majority of voters already disapproves of the war and Trump’s handling of it. It could add up to a tough midterm experience for Republicans.
In his main address to the GOP midterm convention, Trump placed a lot of the blame for inflation on Democratic green energy programs. “Our predecessors killed and buried the American dream with trillions of dollars in waste and green energy scams, the greatest scams in American history — green energy,” Trump said. “Every country that’s gone green is down the tubes, you do know that. But it caused prices to skyrocket. They used the word affordability, right? It’s fake. They are so fake, because it was them that caused the affordability, to use their word, crisis. And I’m bringing the prices way down, way, way down. They caused the prices, but we’re fixing it.” Perhaps — but not, it appears, in time for the midterm elections.
