Trump Promised to Lower Prices If Reelected, Now He’s Explicitly Promising to do the Exact Opposite

(Alex Brandon/AP photo)

President Donald Trump offered one of the most eye-popping and rage-inducing promises of his presidency this week, not for the left, but for conservatives and his own MAGA voters.

Trump walloped Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election by promising to fix the Biden economy, which saw rampant inflation fuel a national affordability crisis. On Wednesday night, Trump spoke at the GOP’s unprecedented and controversial midterm convention and promised to give Americans a check for $5,000 if the GOP “wins” the midterms.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump Dividend,” Trump declared during a lengthy and bombastic speech.

While Trump clearly thinks that the prospect of paying off voters will not only help the Republican Party win votes, he seems either fully unaware of or simply not to care that government stimulus is what helped create the inflation during the Biden administration in the first place.

Conservatives from MAGA’s Matt Walsh to the National Review all swiftly condemned Trump’s promise and accused him of embracing inflationary socialism. Large-scale stimulus checks lead to consumer goods costing more as demand quickly increases and domestic supply often can’t keep up.

Trump managed to politically play the first stimulus checks he gave out during the Covid-19 pandemic brilliantly, heaping the blame for the inflation they fueled on Biden and helping to ride that anger back into the White House. Of course, Biden also added to the economic woes of his term with excessive government spending, and other factors, like supply chain disruptions, also contributed to inflation.

Trump closed out the 2024 presidential campaign making a slew of promises, which even his most diehard voters knew were more aspirational than grounded in reality.

In Reading, Pennsylvania on November 4, 2024, Trump promised, “I will end inflation,” and “We will cut your taxes and inflation, slash your prices.” While any economist will tell you that lowering prices is nearly impossible without some kind of economic downturn like a recession, Trump managed to get his message across, and voters overwhelmingly trusted him on the economy.

Conservative criticism of Trump’s worst instincts and mismanagement of the economy during his first term were almost completely memory-holed in the media in recent years, but now they are rearing their ugly head again. In October of 2020, then GOP Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) slammed Trump’s handling of the economy and Covid, saying he “spends like a drunken sailor” and argued “his family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity.”

Now almost a full six years later, the U.S. national debt has soared over $40 trillion, having more than doubled since Trump first took office in 2016 (again, Biden played his part), and he’s now openly flirting with adding another $1 trillion in debt – the cost of giving every American $5,000.

Trump time and again cites his tariffs as making America richer and promises that the tariffs and economic growth can somehow blunt his runaway spending. The great irony, of course, is that not only is Trump’s spending causing more inflation, but his tariffs are paid for by American consumers as the price of goods increases. Furthermore, the revenue generated by the tariffs comes nowhere near the numbers Trump has boasted about and are a drop in the bucket of the annual deficit.

Trump’s war in Iran and the resulting global energy shock have also compounded the problem and added to what many fear could be a looming financial crisis if the war drags on too long. The Federal Reserve is flashing indicators that at its next meeting next week, the board will vote to raise interest rates as oil prices jump and wholesale prices continue to rise. Higher interest rates will also mean the U.S. piles up debt even quicker as it will cost more to service the debt, which surpassed the size of the entire U.S. economy for the first time since World War II this year.

Trump, who clearly does not have a plan to actually combat the affordability crisis in the country, has promised a slew of dividend checks in the past. He promised Americans $5,000 stimulus checks as DOGE dividends and later $2,000 in stimulus as tariffs dividends, all of which have never happened. His latest promise is all but certain to be dead on arrival if it ever gets before Congress, but it serves as further proof that Trump, as president, like he was in the private sector, is the king of debt and that debt comes at a price.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!