Stubborn Inflation Complicates GOP Pitch Ahead of Midterms
Left 67%
Center 0%
Right 33%
2 left · 0 center · 1 right
What happened
The Commerce Department reported that year-over-year inflation in August was 3.4 percent, unchanged from July, with gasoline up 27.4 percent and fuel oil up 52 percent from a year earlier. President Donald Trump took office in January 2025 with inflation at 3 percent; the rate fell to 2.3 percent in April 2025 and later rose, standing at 3.4 percent after 19 months in office. The administration’s war with Iran is in its seventh month. At a rally last month in Garden City, New York, Trump asked voters to accept gasoline near $4 a gallon so Iran would not obtain a nuclear weapon; at this week’s Republican midterm convention in Dallas, 54 days before the elections, he said the war would end “immediately after the election” and gasoline would then fall below $2 a gallon. Mortgage rates have been climbing, and inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s target.
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Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
Left-leaning coverage never reports that Trump has tied high gas prices to a war he says will last until after the midterms. Right-leaning coverage carries his forecast that oil will tumble only after the election. Without the New York Times ever mentioning that timeline, a reader there sees only high gas prices and inflation remaining "well above target." That turns a wartime price spike the president says will last past Election Day into a generic cost-of-living complaint.
Right-leaning coverage opens on a 3.4 percent inflation rate unchanged from July. Left-leaning coverage opens on high gas prices and climbing mortgage rates instead, and never gives the figure he inherited.
How much of the latest inflation reading comes from the war, and how much from tariffs?
Bottom line
The New York Times never reports Trump's own forecast that oil falls only after the midterms, which the Washington Examiner treats as the core of the inflation story.
The receipts — 5 facts one side's coverage lacks
- Trump predicted the Iran war will end immediately after the election and oil prices will then be tumbling downward
- The price of gasoline was up 27.4% in August from a year earlier
- The inflation rate stood at 3% when Trump took office in January 2025
- Trump's tariffs have still raised some prices
- Mortgage rates are climbing
The Left View
The New York Times frames the August inflation backdrop—high gasoline prices, climbing mortgage rates, and inflation that “remains well above target”—as complicating Trump’s midterm appeal to voters. It treats current living costs as a direct political problem for the president’s pitch, without recasting them as an inherited hangover or a wartime trade-off.
The Right View
The Washington Examiner states that Trump “has not brought down the rate of inflation” and that many supporters expected something lower than the “stubbornly high” 3.4 percent. It locates the gap mainly in energy costs from the Iran war, with tariffs a lesser factor that “have still raised some prices,” while noting that items such as fruits and vegetables, nonalcoholic beverages, and restaurant meals rose only about 3.2–3.7 percent. The paper contrasts 3.4 percent with the 9.1 percent peak under President Joe Biden in June 2022, recounts Trump’s plea for patience on gasoline and his forecast of a post-election drop, and records his convention claim that Democratic “green energy scams” caused an “affordability crisis.” It concludes that, with Trump predicting the war will last past Election Day and a majority already disapproving of the war, energy prices “will continue to be a problem for Trump and the Republican Party” and “could add up to a tough midterm experience for Republicans.”
Our Take (balanced)
The left’s strongest argument is that the promise to bring prices down is unmet heading into the midterms: inflation is stuck above target, gasoline is high, and mortgage rates are climbing, which the Times presents as undercutting Trump’s pitch. The right’s strongest argument is that non-energy inflation is modest, 3.4 percent remains far below the Biden-era 9.1 percent peak, and the spike is concentrated in energy Trump explicitly ties to blocking an Iranian nuclear weapon. The central unresolved tension is whether the midterm verdict should turn on the unmet promise of lower prices now, or on a wartime energy shock judged against the prior peak and a security rationale whose costs Trump himself says will ease only after the election.
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