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The Right’s New Inflation Message: Let Them Eat Ramen

Militarists push for austerity to keep a disastrous war going.

Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) leaves the US Capitol on Thursday, July 16, 2026.

If the GOP gets wiped out in the midterms this fall, the biggest cause will likely be war-induced inflation, a double betrayal of the campaign promises that brought many new voters into the Republican fold in 2024. 

After all, two of Donald Trump’s chief attack lines against Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were that they had let inflation run rampant and that they had plunged the United States into endless conflict in the Middle East and Europe. But with his bungled, inflation-spiking war against Iran, Trump has done exactly what he warned voters his opponents would do—and turned a wide swath of the public against him. According to a late-July poll by Marquette University Law School, 76 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation, and 69 percent disapprove of his handling of the Iran War.

Writing in UnHerd last week, Sohrab Ahmari, a heterodox conservative, noted that the Iran War and the rise in inflation are deeply intertwined:

In June, inflation rose to 4.2%, nearly double where it stood just before Operation Epic Fury. Gas is a fungible global commodity. Thus, even though the United States is the world’s chief net energy exporter, the supply squeeze in the Strait of Hormuz puts inflationary pressure on gas prices in America. And it’s not just gas prices which are affected, but those in many other sectors, too—from transportation to agriculture to restaurants and hospitality.

In June, inflation rose to 4.2%, nearly double where it stood just before Operation Epic Fury. Gas is a fungible global commodity. Thus, even though the United States is the world’s chief net energy exporter, the supply squeeze in the Strait of Hormuz puts inflationary pressure on gas prices in America. And it’s not just gas prices which are affected, but those in many other sectors, too—from transportation to agriculture to restaurants and hospitality.

It’s hardly surprising that affordability is becoming a proxy front in the larger conflict between hawks and military restrainers on the right. Revealingly, the battle lines in this conflict revolve around whether concerns about war-induced inflation are even legitimate. The most militarist wing of the right is taking the position that inflation either........

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