Donald Trump

Trump Is the High-Prices President

Trump's signature policies are pushing prices higher—and voters are pushing back.

Peter Suderman | 5.20.2026 7:29 AM

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(llustration: Adani Samat/Midjourney Photo: JIM LO SCALZO/UPI/Newscom/GoldenDayz/Envato)

When Donald Trump won his second presidential election in 2024, supporters crowed that this time would be different. Trump's sometimes chaotic instincts had been honed and refined into a populist-nationalist conservative policy agenda that was supposed to make Americans better off and build a broader, more durable right-wing coalition, with a particular appeal to working-class voters.

MAGA 2.0 would be predicated on a rejection, or at least a skepticism, of the free market, libertarian economics that Trumpian intellectuals insisted were hobbling the GOP. These ideas filtered up to the presidential ticket itself. In 2024, then-Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) told The New York Times that mainstream economists were simply wrong about the effects of clamping down on immigration and the deployment of tariffs, and that free market libertarians were out of touch.

In many ways, the administration has governed accordingly. No, Trump hasn't abandoned capitalism entirely. But his second term has been a populist-statist-protectionist mishmash, with a heavy dollop of crony self-dealing.

That approach has left Americans worse off and struggling with economic uncertainty and the highest inflation in years. And it has resulted in cratering approval ratings for the president and his party—including, notably, with the white, non-college-educated voters........

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