The cost of living is the number one issue for Americans in 2026, just as it was in 2024. But while voter rage at high prices was Democrats’ problem two years ago, the shoe is now on the other foot and it’s provoking some hilarious meltdowns in conservative politics.
The latest started with Matt Walsh making the good point that Donald Trump driving up prices with his Iran war was a huge political mistake.
Then Andrew Kolvet from Turning Point USA chimed in to say it’s not just groceries; one of his student members offered the following succinct take on affordability: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” At this point, the conservative columnist Marc Thiessen chimed in to defend the Trump administration.
And that in turn led Vice President JD Vance, who perhaps hadn’t been following this exchange closely, to make fun of Thiessen for being fat.
This illustrates the Trump Pain Cave on affordability about as well as anything I can point to. If you want to defend the Trump record, Thiessen’s argument that at the end of the day the price of takeout burritos is not a big deal is the correct one. America is not suffering from mass unemployment or runaway inflation. People are not starving. There are plenty of ways to be a lot thriftier than DoorDashing Chipotle for your family.
At the same time, Vance’s instinct that this is politically toxic is perfectly correct. And Vance and Thiessen have an argument about foreign policy in which Thiessen wrote a column criticizing Vance a few days before the burrito spat as a way of arguing that Trump should stay tough on Iran. So Vance was on a hair trigger, ready to lash out at Thiessen, and when he saw Thiessen saying something politically dumb, he pounced.
But the dumb thing Thiessen said was defending Trump’s policy choices!
Because the fact is that after winning an election in which Trump explicitly and repeatedly promised to bring down the cost of living, he’s done the reverse.
No victory gardens for Iran
I went on Instacart and verified that I could get two pounds of chicken thighs, 16 ounces of dried pinto beans, 32 ounces of uncooked white rice, eight Mission brand burrito-sized tortillas, a bag of Great Value shredded “fiesta blend” cheese, and pico de gallo ingredients (onion, tomato, jalapeño, lime, and cilantro) for just under $20.
Alternatively, I could get eight burritos with those ingredients delivered from Chipotle, and it would cost over $110.
Of course, there are plenty of in-between options that are neither the burrito taxi nor thrift-maxxing by starting with dried beans. The point is that in an affluent society, the vast majority of people are not living anywhere near a subsistence level, even as they still feel subjective financial stresses.
Consider, for example, the economic situation facing families living in Iran, and you’ll swiftly see that a lot of people are worse off than today’s complaining Americans. During World War II, famously, Americans not only started from a much lower baseline of material prosperity but also put up with all kinds of rationing and other forms of forced and quasi-forced thrift to support the war effort. The government urged Americans to limit meat consumption to 2.5 pounds per person per week under the slogan “share the meat” and put out information promoting the consumption of “v-meats” such as tongue, liver, kidney, brains, and tripe that were exempted from rationing.
And even that was a sign of American affluence! In much of the world, it’s just totally normal for people to eat those undesirable organ meats even when not engaged in total war.
America was a very rich country in the 1940s and we are richer still in the 2020s.
The whole problem with the Trump administration’s war in Iran isn’t that the economic pain it’s inflicting on the American public is, by objective standards, all that large. The problem is that this is not World War II and the voting public has zero patience for incurring any economic pain at all.
Trump took office on an explicit promise to bring prices down and to avoid costly foreign wars. He is instead spending billions of dollars on a war that is pushing up the price of energy, fertilizer, and everything that is made out of energy and fertilizer (i.e., food), and he’s making no effort to justify the sacrifice to the public because he doesn’t want to admit that’s what he did.
Thiessen is a true-believer hawk who thinks the war is worth the price and wants to go out and make that argument. And I appreciate his intellectual honesty. But Trump and Vance know this won’t fly, so they’re left sputtering with rage at their own supporters.
Trump repeats Joe Biden’s sins
The signature facts of the current midterm election are (1) that Trump is hideously unpopular and (2) that while the G.O.P.’s generic ballot numbers are bad, they’re not nearly as bad as Trump’s approval rating.
Some of this gap is just because even when a president gets down this low, a lot of the people who don’t like him still have very conservative policy views.
If you want to ban abortion and don’t care about helping the poor, it’s very unlikely you’ll vote for congressional Democrats no matter how mad you are at Trump. The best Democrats can reasonably hope for is that you’ll get demoralized and stay home. Still, trying to win over some of these conservative Trump-disapprovers in reach states and reach districts is in fact the key to driving a stake in MAGA, so I would urge Democrats to think about how to expand the tent and recruit edgier candidates in reach seats.
The more tractable issue is that lots of the people who are furious at Trump over the cost of living haven’t forgotten being furious at Biden over it. In tests I’ve seen, the anti-Trump message does better if it’s paired with some distancing from the Biden record to create a generalized anti-elite message.
As someone who observed the Biden administration pretty closely, I think it’s fair to say that once they grasped what a problem inflation was for them politically, they pivoted their whole message to be about the cost of living. The problem is that they didn’t really change their policies.
Their antitrust initiatives suddenly had a cost-of-living frame, but the people they put in charge explicitly wanted to overturn the consumer welfare standard. Their social spending flipped from “this will create jobs” to “this will help people with costs,” but it was still basically the same set of policies. There was nothing Biden championed that Democrats wouldn’t have done if unemployment had been higher and inflation had been lower. They took progressive economic policy ideas that they liked and put them in a cost wrapper.
And then Trump, having explicitly promised to focus on lower prices, proceeded to make policy with almost no regard for their effect on the cost of living:
Tariffs have pushed up the cost of everything.
The war in Iran has pushed up the cost of everything.
The One Big Beautiful Bill raised the deficit (raising the cost of loans) while making it harder for poor people to get medical care and nutrition assistance.
This is just Trump pushing a generic MAGA policy agenda he could’ve cooked up in 2019.
We’ve seen the negative consequences of an austerity regime (regressive tax hikes and cuts to social programs) but no actual fiscal consolidation (the deficit is up thanks to regressive tax cuts), plus there’s a war that costs money and is dealing a supply-side blow to the whole global economy. Total economic growth is healthy because of the A.I. boom, but Trump’s addiction to A.I.-fueled stock-market gains also means that he won’t address export controls sensibly or account for people’s mostly valid anxieties about this technology.
To mount a proper defense of all this, you’d need to acknowledge that Trump has chosen to blow off his campaign promises in order to pursue other goals and just insist that the cost of food is ultimately not that dire.
Congressman Dan Crenshaw, for example, thinks the solution is that people should “stop whining” because “the market doesn’t care what you think something ‘should’ cost.”
He already lost a primary and doesn’t need to worry about how this will play with voters. But every Republican whose name is actually on the ballot should.
There's a lot of really great cost-of-living discussions going on, especially around cooking, that made me want to re-up up Matt's piece arguing you can afford a tradlife: https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife
I mean, the funny thing is, I kinda agree with those conservative commentators who say we shouldn't declare an "affordability crisis" solely based on vibes and some of the most expensive food options out there. But that was also true in 2024! Where the whole Republican party chimed in to declare an affordability crisis! (Eagerly helped on by the hard left.) So, I think it's true what Matt said: We really shouldn't feel bad for Trump if this part of his platform suddenly blows up in his face.