By David A. Graham
Friday, May 15, 2026
Donald Trump deserves plenty of criticism for his serial
dishonesty, but on the rare occasions when he speaks frankly, that causes
problems too.
This week, a reporter asked the president whether the
deteriorating economic situation has created any urgency for him to reach a
peace deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” he
replied. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think
about anybody.”
Who can doubt that he was being sincere? Trump has
conducted the war as though he is both uninterested in and unaware of the
economic effects that it is having. He has reportedly mused about simply
withdrawing from the field of battle and leaving the Strait
of Hormuz closed, despite the disruption that has caused for global trade.
He’s previously called talk about affordability a “hoax.” And with his own bank
accounts growing
fatter through corruption, he doesn’t feel the pinch of inflation himself.
Trump, a billionaire who inherited a real-estate fortune,
has always been a curious sort of populist. As
I have written, he managed to convincingly campaign as one by flaunting his
genuine scorn for cultural and intellectual elites. This served him well for
many years, especially during the 2024 presidential election, when inflation
was a major concern for many voters. Once in office, however, Trump didn’t
actually have any ideas for combating rising prices. He’s hardly unusual in
this—elected officials have few good tools for fighting inflation, though most
of them at least act sympathetic. Joe Biden tried a different path, trying to
convince voters that they weren’t really experiencing high costs. (It didn’t
work out well for him.) Trump’s decision to tell voters that he just doesn’t
care is a novel strategy, but not a very promising one.
The sentiment that Trump was (apparently) trying to
convey might be defensible in some cases. When the nation is at war, a
president must at times call on the people to make sacrifices in the name of
the greater good. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt
all did this. The conservative commentator Marc
Thiessen, using tortured logic, argues that “if we cannot accept a few
months of higher inflation and a few months of higher gas prices in order to
stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, we’re not a superpower anymore.” The
problem is that Trump hasn’t definitively stated that ending Iran’s nuclear
program is the goal of the war, nor has he laid out any reasonable path to
achieving it. As a result, the president is asking Americans to suffer for no
clear reason, and he is also suggesting that he doesn’t care about their
suffering.
This was only the worst in a string of notable gaffes
from Trump over the past few days. Over the apparent objection of First Lady
Melania Trump, he said that the White House was a “shit
house” when he arrived. Trump used to be celebrated for the creativity
of his insults, but this week he kept it simple, snapping at a reporter
who asked him about the ballooning cost of his planned East Wing ballroom: “I
doubled the size of it, you dumb person.” The president also can’t
get his story straight on whether he selected or even knows the contractor
adding a garish cerulean hue to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
When a reporter asked the president how he’d respond to
Black voters worried that changes to congressional districts—changes
spearheaded by his GOP allies and urged on by his Justice Department—would
reduce Black representation, he replied, “I think it’s
been a wonderful process.” This may have been another moment of imprudent
honesty, but at least he’s answering his 2016
question to Black voters: “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Will these remarks hurt Trump? One plausible answer is
that they won’t. He’s been making outrageous statements for years, and it
hasn’t slowed down his political career. Another possibility is that they will
but that it doesn’t matter to him. His approval rating continues to decline
steadily. CNN’s Harry Enten noted
with amazement this week that Trump owns the five worst polls on inflation
of any U.S. president in history. But Trump, who won’t face voters again, seems
less concerned with poor polling than he was in his first term.
The catch is that although Trump won’t face another
election, many of his fellow Republicans will in less than six months.
Republicans have been pleading with the White House to formulate and stick with
a consistent message for the midterms. Instead, they’re getting a president who
is either nodding
off in public or dismissing the concerns of the public.
The media have puzzled over Trump’s fixation
on footwear this spring. The president has commented on aides’ choice of
dress shoes, and he presented a visibly ill-fitting pair to Secretary of State
Marco Rubio. But perhaps Trump cares so much about feet and what goes on them
because he knows that, sooner or later, he will place his own in his mouth.
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