President Donald Trump said Tuesday afternoon that Americans’ financial situation was not pushing him to strike a deal with Iran, brushing aside the idea that economic pain at home was affecting his calculus. Asked on the White House lawn to what extent the state of the economy was motivating him, Trump replied, “Not even a little bit,” and then added, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”
That answer landed against a backdrop of rising costs that have become one of the most damaging legacies of his second act. Trump won the 2024 election in large part because the post-pandemic inflation shock doomed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and he promised voters, “We’re going to bring those costs way down.” Instead, the article says, he has made inflation worse.
The economic picture he inherited was already easing before he returned to power. Inflation had been slowly returning to normal since 2023, after the Biden-era surge that followed the disruptive reopening of the global economy after the coronavirus pandemic and was also fueled in part by the large fiscal stimulus Biden signed. Bringing the nominal price level back down, however, would have been virtually impossible without a recession. That means the political test was never whether prices could be reset overnight, but whether they would keep climbing under Trump.
The answer, according to the article, is yes. The rise in inflation under Trump is almost entirely a result of his administration’s policy choices, beginning with a huge tax cut that increases the budget deficit by more than $4 trillion over the next decade. By putting additional money into consumers’ pockets, the cut tends to nudge prices higher. Trump’s restrictionist immigration policy has also created labor shortages in concentrated sectors, tightening supply where employers can least afford it.
Last June, Adriana Kugler warned that cutting off immigrant workers would “decreases the labor supply and could add meaningful upward pressure to inflation by the end of the year in sectors reliant on immigrant labor such as agriculture, construction, food processing, and leisure and hospitality.” Those were not abstract categories. They were the places where shortages could turn quickly into higher prices, and where the administration’s approach to immigration would show up in the checkout line and on payrolls.
Tariffs have added another layer. Higher costs are not a side effect of tariffs but the mechanism by which the policy works, and last year Goldman Sachs estimated that Trump’s tariffs would add a point to the inflation level during the second half of 2025 and the first half of 2026. The Supreme Court later curtailed Trump’s ability to levy tariffs, limiting one of the tools that was feeding the price increases.
Trump’s dismissal of economic pressure on his Iran diplomacy reads less like candor than evasion. The article frames his comments as evidence that he has treated the public’s economic well-being as an afterthought, even as his own policies help push costs higher. He was elected to tame inflation. Instead, tax cuts, immigration restrictions and tariffs have made the problem more, not less, his own.
The question now is not whether Trump feels that pressure. His answer Tuesday made that plain. What matters next is whether the cost of his policies shows up fast enough in prices to make that denial impossible to sustain.
