Trump shouldn’t bank on his big war deal saving him: report

President Donald Trump is hoping that his recent memorandum of understanding with Iran will end his voluntary war and allow prices to go down — but one political analyst says he should not get his hopes up.

After noting that Trump's seeming end to the war in Iran could help gas prices gradually go down, “part of Trump’s problem is that in 2024 he promised not just relief from inflation but lower living costs in absolute terms,” wrote New York Magazine political columnist Ed Kilgore on Tuesday. “In a very real sense, his Make America Great Again brand had come to mean making the pre-pandemic economy, with which he was fortuitously associated, magically reappear. And that’s a very tall order, particularly in the limited time left before the midterms.”

Kilgore added that voter perceptions of a negative economy seem to be baked in, and therefore he will need to prioritize addressing cost of living concerns if he is to have even a chance of improving his political fortunes.

“Even if it’s not too late for Trump to actually reduce living costs, he has to get with the program; affordability must be his focus, day and night,” Kilgore argued. “And that could be a heavy lift. It’s not as though the Iran war has been his only or even his principal distraction. He’s been consumed with vanity projects like the White House ballroom, the ‘anti-weaponization’ slush fund, and the UFC fight on the White House grounds. He’s spent more time recently ranting about imaginary voter fraud than boasting about his peace efforts; more time demanding congressional passage of his wildly divisive SAVE America Act than persuading Congress to adopt his vision for the Middle East.”

Kilgore continued that “even if congressional Republicans craft a new party-line budget reconciliation bill that ostensibly addresses affordability concerns, the odds seem low that Trump will let them do so without adding in poison pills that have nothing to do with the economy at all.”

Ultimately Kilgore concluded that “from a purely political point of view, it was clearly a mistake for Trump to devote so much of this crucial year to a war of choice with no discernible payoff other than ending the carnage he initiated. Pivoting from the Iran war to anything else prior to the midterms will be difficult.”

He finally predicted that “sticking the landing on affordability — as opposed to Trump’s eternal agenda of self-glorification, grievances, and conspiracy theories — will require acrobatic skills this now-80-year-old politician just doesn’t possess.”

Earlier this month Iraq war veteran and entrepreneur Paul Rieckhoff described the rampant inflation exacerbated by Trump’s wars as “the thing he can't spin out of. No matter how many times he says the Iran war is going to be over, his base remembers that. He said no new wars. He said no regime change wars, and they're still ongoing. His base also remembers that he was going to bring down the price of milk, and every day they see that gas prices are still high — and that's going to continue throughout the summer.”

Rieckhoff continued, “This is dragging down the Republican brand even more than it's dragging down him personally. That's why I think there is an opportunity this fall for the Democrats. I'm not counting on them to take advantage of it, but there is a tremendous opportunity, maybe around this issue more than anything else.”

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