Mick Clifford: Trump promised to put Americans first. So why are voters still struggling with inflation?
TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump throws MAGA hats to the crowd upon arrival to speak at a midterm campaign rally at Shoemaker Center in Chillicothe, Ohio, on October 28, 2026. (Photo by Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images)
During the 2024 US presidential election, Donald Trump had a zinger of a political slogan. “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
Nine words unspooled like a victory pennant. Kamala Harris, the slogan inferred, was obsessed with cultural issues, particularly contentious matters around transgender rights. Trump, on the other hand, was just trying to sort out the ordinary, every day problems that the average American faced. Would you gonna vote for if you want somebody working on your behalf?
I travelled across the swing state of Pennsylvania a few weeks before polling day. There was but one issue for average Americans. Everytime I asked what the biggest problem was with the country the response was invariably inflation. That was even the case at a major Trump rally in Penn State university. Not immigration, not any other front on the culture wars, not the resurrection of a politician who had fomented an attack on American democracy on 6 January 2021. Not even fear of returning a man who once suggested detergent as a vaccine for covid.
Prices were going through the roof and the administration – in which Harris was the vice president – was being blamed. Trump’s campaign effectively adopted the old Clinton slogan, “it’s the economy”, stupid, substituting the original for “it’s inflation, stupid”. And it worked.
Trump effected a stunning comeback to elevate him to the position of the most consequential politician of this century, and possibly as far back as World War II.
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Now, two years down the line, the American electorate has a chance to offer its verdict on the comeback kid.
The US midterm elections take place next Tuesday. Polls suggest that Trump will lose the House of Representatives, with the real battle taking place in the Senate. If that goes also, his goose is cooked. He will be condemned to limp towards the next election, if he even makes it that far in one piece.
He will still be in a position to concentrate on his main agenda, which is building ballrooms and such like as monuments to himself. But the level of enrichment that his family has experienced since he re-entered the White House might be arrested. According to various reports, his family and associated businesses have accumulated between $1bn and $2bn over the last two years. If the Democrats take control of congress, it won’t be as easy to keep up that pace for the next two years.
During this election campaign, the man who would be king is not looking as assured. The slogans are thin on the ground. His rhetoric in attempting to demean opponents looks redundant.
There is precious little talk of cultural issues because the electorate is far more worried about, well, inflation once again. This time it’s on Trump’s watch. According to the Bureau of Statistics, inflation over the last two years has increased between 6.8% and 6.9%. So how come he didn’t move heaven and earth to address inflation for all those who elected him in 2024?
Quite simply because he has been too busy looking after other matters. For instance, the main feature of his economic policy has been the imposition of tariffs. He was told that this would increase inflation but he drove on. He likes the idea of tariffs because they provide him with a personal lever of power.
If some foreign leader displeases him he can simply slap on or increase a tariff. And if another country, such as Ireland, welcomes him like a messiah, he can use his power to lower a tariff. So it went at the Irish Open in September when he was so pleased with the sycophantic reception in Doonbeg that he said he was lowering the tariff on Irish whiskey. This exercise of power as if it is a personal weapon or gift has been the main feature of his economic policy.
In the book Regime Change, a searing account of Trump’s second presidential term, authors Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan outlined what a typical day’s work looked like for Trump. He spends his time at his desk “in a series of rolling bull sessions”, with a core group of his inner circle.
“These were supplemented by a rotating cast of extras, and on any given day they could be Republican lawmakers, titals of industry, former pro wrestlers, country musicians, Gulf royals, crypto bros, or friends of felons seeking pardons.”
The scene sounds like something halfway between a circus and the court of a mob boss. It’s all happening in plain sight. A Washington-ABC news poll last month shoed that 66% of Americans believe Trump is “using the presidency to enrich himself”. A Fox News poll found that 88% are extremely or very concerned about government corruption, topping a list of issues including inflation, gas prices and health care.
Meanwhile, his regime is fully occupied harassing immigrants in various US cities and prosecuting a war in Iran that has hiked up the price of gas.
If all things were equal, the verdict on Trump’s two years of misrule would be swift and decisive. It is difficult to imagine any elected leader anywhere in the developed world over the last seventy years surviving what he has been engaged in.
Yet Trump, and by extension, his party, is not out of the game. There is no guarantee that the Democrats will take control of both houses. That of itself is a stunning indictment of politics as a whole. The Democrats are up against an incumbent who is forced to stand on an appalling record, and having conducted himself in such a manner, they can’t close the deal with a slam. It’s as if too many people have completely lost faith in the capacity for things to improve irrespective of who is in power.
If they do succeed in winning congress, and anybody concerned with the drift from democracy must hope they do, they would be well minded to tread carefully thereafter. Hunting down Trump with an impeachment process would confirm for many that politics has been reduced to a game of us and them. Far more profitable would be an attempt to improve lives of ordinary Americans in a practical way and let Trump take care of his own, inevitable, downfall.
What happens in the USA matters. The problems that led to a master manipulator like Trump ascending to the top elected office are writ large across the developed world. The exclusion of too many from a system of liberal democracy designed to improve lives requires urgent attention. A new approach from US democrats would be a good start.
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