Today, Explained - Trump loves the inflation

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

President Trump's messaging on the economy is increasingly bizarre. So is our perception of it. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Dustin DeSoto, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. A sticker depicting President Trump on a fuel pump at a Shell gas station. Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.S. and Iran say they've agreed on terms to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. You already see oil prices from a high of $126 a barrel down to about $80 a barrel today. That's a lot of progress. The war, of course, drove up the price of gas and other essentials and has led to some ugly polling for President Trump. 61% of adults polled by NPR PBS and Marist disapprove of his handling of the economy. His handling in a certain light makes sense. his priority was preventing Iran from getting nukes. But Trump's messaging was unusual, unusual for a president.

Last month, the reporter asked Trump, to what extent was he thinking about Americans' finances when he negotiated with Iran? I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. What's he doing? Coming up on Today Explained from Vox. Support for today's explain comes from Fetch.

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Today, explain. I'm Shelby Talcott. I am the White House correspondent for Semaphore. President Trump has been talking about the economy a lot lately, and some of what he said has gotten a lot of attention.

What are the most attention-grabbing things? He has repeatedly, pretty bluntly said that he effectively doesn't care about it, right? He has made comments indicating that this is all short-term. He doesn't care about inflation. And so those comments, which he, again, has said more than once,

I'm not focused on Americans' economic situation when I'm negotiating with Iran. I think about one thing you could not let Iran have a no way. Is that all? I don't care about this inflation number. Oh, I love it. The numbers were great. Those comments have really stood out to people

over the past few months. My favorite was I love inflation. You know what I really love. I love the inflation. I love the inflation. And then he had an opportunity to walk it back. That's right. That's a perfect statement. I'd make it again. What do we make of that that he's telling us it is not a mistake? I think it indicates a few things. So first of all, I think, you know, when I'm talking to administration officials and people who have known the president for years, one of the things that continuously comes back around is this is all really said in the broader context. of this Iran war. When people hear me say it, everybody agrees.

Short-term pain. It's going to be short-term pain. Oh, when the war is over? Yes. It's coming down. I know you can't. It's going to come down like a rock. And that is something that the president cares deeply about and genuinely believes that

he needs to continue moving forward with this, right? He has talked a lot over the past few years about Iran not being able to obtain a nuclear weapon. One thing is certain, I will never allow the world's number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon. Can't let that happen. And so he's coming at this economic argument from the perspective of I have to defend the decisions I've made globally. But a big part of it is also about the legacy of Donald Trump. That's something that I think this term in particular he has been acutely focused on. He is far less worried about the midterms.

I don't care about the mid-times. About the price of groceries. Actually, I asked somebody who's close to the White House several months ago, you know, why isn't he more focused on this stuff? And the answer I got was when the president goes down in the history books, it's not going to be for eggs being a dollar carton. It's going to be for reinvigorating Venezuela. It was a great success. It was a one-day war. It was really, to be exact, 48 minutes of fury.

and it was over. And Venezuela is doing great. Going into Iran and getting their nuclear. They cannot have a nuclear weapon. They'd use it. And so that's what this president is focused on. And so when he talks about the economy, about I love inflation, I don't think about voters' economic situations when I'm negotiating this Iran war, it's because he is always thinking about what he's doing legacy-wise, right?

He has to defend that Iran war. that's part of his legacy. He has to defend the Venezuela situation that's part of his legacy. And so all of these answers are tied back into how he's thinking about his history and how he's going to be remembered. I think it's just the timing of when he's saying this is really notable because obviously there are a lot of Americans who are really struggling right now. I get what you're saying about why he's articulating them, but there's part of you that thinks the president must, know that now is not the time. However, let's give him a little bit of grace. Is there something about the time that maybe we're missing? Is it the case that the midterms, this is not going to mess with him in the party as much in the midterms as we may think? I don't know that it messes with him because he's not running again, right? This is his last term in office. And I think that is also an overarching theme of what we're seeing why he's making certain decisions is because he's

sort of unleashed this time around. It is certainly going to impact the party. And you're hearing from lawmakers who are concerned... We need some relief, and Congress can deliver some relief. And if Congress doesn't deliver the relief, you know, I mean, I think voters are not going to be pleased. Fuel prices are, you know, as you know, people are reminded of it every, almost every block they drive. People are really feeling it. I mean, it's not just gas prices, food prices, and other things. And I think there's a level of frustration.

You're even hearing from White House officials who are trying to sort of walk back what he said or say, well, he didn't really mean it in this context. He meant it in X, Y, Z context. Well, I don't think the president said that. I think that's a misrepresentation of what the president said. But look, I agree with the president that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. The president is doing everything he can. And this entire administration is doing everything we can to bring down the cost of living in this country.

And so there are administration officials who, when they hear the president say things like that, they just kind of, I think, sit back and sigh heavily because it does not. not make their jobs any easier. And there's acknowledgement about that. Who are these people? Who's driving the economic messaging at the White House? I think if we're being honest, the answer is the president, because there are advisors around him who are telling him what to do. You know, James Blair is one of the president's closest confidants. He has recently shifted over into a midterms role, but he's still very involved in the White House and is there often. The voters are talking about the economy. 48% of voters say their number one issues, the economy, and you spend half of your powder on an issue that's not even in the top five, it's just not going to work.

Susie Wiles has really urged the president, the chief of staff, has urged the president over the past several months to focus more on the midterms. And you're so, you're hearing from the people around Trump who recognize that the midterms, even though it doesn't directly impact Trump, he's not on the ballot. it's going to impact him because if Republicans lose, it's going to be, a lot harder for the president to get anything passed. It's already hard and Republicans have the majority. But it's also going to impact him because they believe that Democrats, if they take back the majority, are going to try to push things forward like they did in 2016 against Trump, right? There's impeachment concerns, et cetera. Democrats have already showed us what they're going to do.

They basically held the government hostage. They're going to obstruct. They're going to investigate everybody in the, Trump administration, and then they're going to impeach the president. I'll get impeached. And so you do hear from the people around Trump who care a lot about this topic and want him to be more focused in his messaging. But ultimately, as with everything else, this is Trump's show. What are the Democrats thinking?

Every time President Trump says something like, I love the inflation where I don't care about Americans' financial situations, what do we see on the other side of the aisle? I mean, they're giddy. They're kicking their feet, right? This is something that, I mean, even Republican operatives that I've talked to when the president made the comment about loving inflation. They said, you know, even if that's not what he meant, that's going to be clipped. The economy is a disaster, and we know why. It's because Donald Trump and Republicans don't give a damn about the personal finances of the American people.

Donald Trump said it and he meant it. The president of the United States admitted I don't think much about Americans' financial situations. Well, guess who does? I do. It's top of mind for me every single day. You're going to see that in ads across America. And so Democrats kind of not love this rhetoric, but they love this rhetoric because it is a way for them, just like Trump was able to do during the 2024 election, which was focus on the economy and say, this person who is in office right now doesn't care. He's not helping you, right? I will end the devastating inflation crisis immediately. Bring down. interest rates and lower the cost of energy. On day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again. We're going to bring prices way down and we'll get it to get it done fast. That's what Trump did in order to beat Biden and then Kamala Harris. They're doing that same thing

now with the midterms based on the president's comments. Now, the question is, are they going to be able to be organized enough to make that an effective measure? I think back, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, if you had an American president saying, I love inflation, or I don't care about Americans' economic circumstances, you do feel like that would have been the end of that president's term in office. There would have been people in the streets. The world has changed. The U.S. has changed. But I wonder what you think the broader lesson might be here. Do you think President Trump is changing the way that presidents talk about the economy or voters are changing the way they respond to messaging about the economy and saying,

like, it doesn't really matter what the president says. We feel what we feel. I think it's a little bit of both. I definitely think not just with the Trump administration, quite frankly, but over the past several years, there has been a shift with voters sort of dismissing the presidential argument for the state of the economy. We saw it during the Biden administration. Come on, man. We're seeing it now during the Trump administration. Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen. But I think part of that is because of how these presidents, like Trump, like Biden, are messaging, right? Their messages effectively, things are good.

There's nothing bad about the report. Nothing bad about the report. And the core inflation is actually down about a point and a half. We're in a situation where we've created more jobs. We're in a situation where, and look, the price of gasoline is falling. We know that you're saying things are not good, but it's short term. don't worry about it and actually look at all of this other data over here that shows that you're not doing as badly as you feel like you're doing, right? And so voters are looking at that and saying

that's not, that's not, I'm going to the grocery store, I'm struggling to pay for my groceries, that's not a real message. So they're kind of dismissing the presidential argument of it all. But I do think with Trump in particular, he has changed politics in the way that he is able to say things and sort of get away with them in a way that other presidents in the past have not. And I really think presidents in the future won't be able to either. I think it is unique to him. That was Shelby Talcott of Semaphore. Coming up, the Perma Session. A lot of stuff is expensive right now, but other economic indicators are really, really pretty good. So why do so many of us believe that this is the worst economy in history.

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with Shopify. Today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash explained. You can go to shopify.com slash explain. That's Shopify.com slash explained. Okay, let's see here. Today. Today. Explain. We're back with Annie Lowry. She's a staff writer at the Atlantic. recently wrote about what she calls the permissession. All right. So consumer sentiment last month was the lowest it's been since we started asking questions about consumer sentiment in 19 and 52. And notably, good economic news isn't cheering us up any. Annie says before the permissession,

there was, if you think back to the Biden years, the vibe session. The fact that the unemployment rate was good and the fact that are not that bad and the fact that wages were going up, like it didn't matter because prices were going nuts. Many Americans don't feel the economy is strong overall or helping them or their families. I think you'd have to be ignoring what's out there in the polling and the other indicators we showed to see that there is a bad vibe. When people feel that the cost of living is very, very high and they can't make ends meet, you can't tell them that they're wrong.

That, I think, made sense to me for a really long time. And that story kind of held, right? You needed to go a couple layers into the economic figures or just talk to people about their own lives. And I think on top of that, there are non-economic factors that have really started to weigh on people's understanding of the economy. A lot of people since the 2016 election have just felt like American democracy is in decline. We're in social media where we're just bombarded with now post-social media where we're just bombarded with negative messages. liberals need to take a look in the mirror and realize that they will be the downfall of this country. The Republican nominee for the presidency went on an interview, and he stated that America's

biggest problem is the enemy within our borders. For someone like Trump, who's clearly racist, sexist, C-N, and all the above. Actually, if you do align with his views, then that also probably makes you the same way. You know, the tenor of the news itself has gotten much more negative in a way that we can track. So all of those things figured in. But then I was looking at, you know, over the past year, you have had this pretty dramatic decline in consumer sentiment despite the fact that, you know, not much had changed and what had changed had gotten better, right? So again, let's hold everything constant. Unemployment's a little bit better. Wages are going up. Cost pressures have gone down.

and none of that seems to affect the consumer sentiment numbers, the economic sentiment numbers. U.S. consumers have never felt worse about the current and future state of the economy. That maybe rings true for you. Consumer sentiment hitting an all-time low amid growing concerns about inflation and Trump's war with Iran, which means Americans are more down on the economy than in any other time since 1952. So then you're like, wait, what? Right? Right. So we're not talking about that general, right?

Like the vibe is off. We're talking about why is it that consumer sentiment seems to have lost all of its relationship to all of the economic figures, not just the headlines. This is what I'm thinking of as the permiss session. Why do people think the economy is worse now than it was in like 2009? The signs were everywhere, but now it's official we are in a recession. Lehman Brothers is going bankrupt. And financial markets from Asia to Europe are doing their utmost to prevent Monday from turning from dark to black. And then also, if there are material improvements on the economy and all of these things, the unemployment rate is going down, wages are going up, people are less financially fragile, interest rates are going down, all of these things.

Why aren't they affecting the consumer sentiment number? And I think it's because the consumer sentiment number, the economic sentiment number, doesn't have as much to do with economics as it used to. And that's a really interesting phenomenon. When did that change happen? I think that it has happened gradually and suddenly to borrow from Ernest Teningway. You started to see this really heavy partisan influence, basically with Barack Obama, right? That Republicans were like, I'm never going to like the economy again if those guys are in charge. Democrats are like, I can't like this economy.

If they're in charge, look what they're doing. So I think that's when it starts. I think COVID matters here that people became much more anti-institutional and they're thinking. Now to growing concerns about the deadly coronavirus officially hitting the U.S. We feel cautiously optimistic that we will have a vaccine by the end of this year and as we go into 2021. This isn't just a 2021 thing or a coronavirus vaccine thing, but this is a mounting, ever-growing, distrust in the government at large. Social trust declined. If you've seen our conversations with top election officials in key battleground states,

then you've heard their warning that the one thing that concerns the most heading into election day is the spread of disinformation to voters. They're like, we can't trust the doctors anymore and the nurses. We can't trust the media. We can't trust the education system. The majority of Americans have lost faith and trust in U.S. institutions. And then I think that social media has had and the media environment, has had a big role in all of that.

I think that go back to a moment in American life when there was more trust in institutions, even if conditions were in a lot of ways tougher. You know, we have less trust in institutions than each other now than we did during the civil rights movement, right? The extraordinarily painful period that leads up to the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act,

less time than during Vietnam, less than when Abu Ghraib was revealed, less than we invaded Iraq. And, you know, we really, really, really don't think of the political system as responsive to us anymore. We don't trust each other. We don't trust the police, the courts, the schools in a profound way. And I don't think people are wrong about this entirely, right? Who existing in this modern day environment is like, oh, yeah, institutions have really acquitted themselves well. They haven't, you know? And who is going to respond to, but wages are up with, yes, and therefore everything in my life is great.

Right? Totally. Some of the data that you point out is really quite compelling. And this is often the case with economic data. It's really quite compelling. And you still have people saying, yes, but I don't feel it. So this makes me wonder, what is the? a danger, and I assume there is a danger in insisting in telling Americans, look, you guys,

the economy is really good when people are inclined to say to you, yes, but it doesn't feel like that way. It doesn't feel like that for me. I think that there's such a lesson here in Joe Biden's loss of his reelection campaign. And I should, Kamala's, right? But, you know, Biden was losing before Vice President Harris took over. People don't like being gaslit. People don't like being told that they're wrong, that their perception and how they feel and the fragility they feel, the fear they feel, the lack of trust they feel is wrong. And I think that it's one thing for me to do it, right? Like I clicky-clack on the internet and write nice magazine stories. I can make people mad.

I love it when people argue with me. But for a politician to do that, right? Like they're responsible for our civic welfare, right? This is dangerous in my mind. I don't think you're going to convince people that the economy is better now than it was 10 years ago because they don't, at some point, very often people, people are like, I don't care. Everything's so expensive. I'm not sure that my kid is going to have a job. I don't know if I'm going to have a job. How am I going to retire? Look at everything else going on. Why are you trying to tell me that, you know, like, don't do that. They think they're gaslit, right? Yeah. And so where I think it is hard is two things. So one is that I'm not sure that. that economic improvements will ever, for the foreseeable future, who says ever, everything changes, but for the foreseeable future will raise consumer and economic sentiment. And again, I want to be really specific about that. Economic improvements will not affect economic and consumer sentiment

because those sentiments are not solely about the economy anymore for good reason and for reasons that I think we are getting to understand that are complicated, that have to do with media and social media, have to do with politics, have to do with a lack of institutional trust, all of those things. I do think that it'll push politicians to constantly run on the negative. This other guy's screwing you, right? This guy's screwing you. This person is screwing you. They're trying to tell you that everything's great now, but don't believe them. I'm not a political scientist. I'm not a pollster. But I do worry that we are just bombarded with so much negativity about things vastly outside our control.

Up until about a year ago, if you ask people how their personal financial situation was, they would say, mine's good, but I'm worried about everybody else. And I was like, that's pretty telling, right? I'm okay, but I'm worried. Now people actually think that their situation isn't very good either,

which, you know, I'm not sure that we're going to explain it. But I do just worry about the intensely negative Hobbesian view that has settled in, which at least for me, I think it's important to kind of be like, Okay, but some things have gotten better. Not everything, but some things are improving. Annie Lowry is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Hottie Mugdi and Dustin DeSoto produced today's show, and Jolie Myers is our editor. David Tadishore and Patrick Boyd engineered and Gabriel Dunantov check the facts.

I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.