Donald Trump, probably by mistake, said something honest the other day.Appearing on the White House lawn Tuesday afternoon, Trump was asked by a reporter to what extent Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to make a deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” Trump replied, before elaborating, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”Trump was probably trying to lie here—he likely wanted to reject the premise that the economic pain caused by his war of choice is putting pressure on him to end it. The premise is obvious, but he has fervently denied it, in part to retain some leverage over Iran.But his denial revealed a deeper truth: Trump has treated the public’s economic well-being as an afterthought. The thing he admitted so casually is the primary reason his popularity has cratered. Trump was elected to tackle inflation, and instead has made it worse.[Rogé Karma: The one tiny problem with Trump’s affordability agenda]Trump won the 2024 election in large part because the post-pandemic inflation shock doomed both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and Trump promised, “We’re going to bring those costs way down.” This goal was never realistic—reducing the nominal price level would have been virtually impossible without a recession. What many Democrats glumly assumed would happen, rather, was that Trump would change the definition of success from lower prices to a lower inflation level. And because the inflation rate had been slowly returning to normal since 2023, Trump didn’t need to do much to achieve this goal.The factors that determine inflation often lie outside elected officials’ control. The Biden-era inflation surge occurred mostly due to the disruptive effects of reopening the global economy after the coronavirus pandemic, though the large fiscal stimulus he signed also contributed.The rise in inflation under Trump, by contrast, is almost entirely a result of his administration’s policy choices. Every time he has faced a choice between price stability and advancing one of his priorities, he has picked Door No. 2. Some of the effects have been small. Trump’s legislative centerpiece, a huge tax cut, increases the budget deficit by more than $4 trillion over the next decade, putting additional money into the pockets of consumers, which tends to nudge prices higher. Likewise, his restrictionist immigration policy has caused labor shortages in concentrated sectors. Last June, Adriana Kugler, the former governor of the Federal Reserve, warned that cutting off immigrant workers “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.”On tariffs, higher costs are not a side effect but the mechanism by which the policy works. The goal is to encourage domestic production by raising the price of goods to the point where it becomes more cost-effective to make or grow something domestically than to import it. Goldman Sachs estimated last year that Trump’s tariffs would add a point to the inflation level during the second half of 2025 and the first half of 2026. Because the Supreme Court subsequently curtailed Trump’s ability to levy tariffs, the actual effect is almost surely lower—but inflation would be even higher if Trump had his way.The Iran war is the culprit behind the recent inflation spike. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has prevented oil, gas, and fertilizer from reaching global markets, driving up the cost of food, transportation, and goods. The April data show that inflation has now risen 3.8 percent over the past year. Producer prices, a more direct measure of the costs of economic inputs, shot up 6 percent.Trump may not have expected the war to take this long, or for it to throw off such a large inflationary shock. But a drawn-out conflict that led to an oil crisis was always a risk. Trump was willing to take the risk because he simply doesn’t seem to care enough about inflation to prioritize it over any other goal of his.The problem is that voters do care more about inflation than any of Trump’s other goals. His approval on inflation is now lower than any American president in the history of polling. A new paper by the economists Jared Bernstein and Daniel Posthumus finds that people have remained sour on the economy because of the post-pandemic price shock, which ended a long era of price stability. Anger over prices is key to understanding public opinion during the past four years.The remarkable thing is that while the surge in inflation (and the public’s fixation on prices over other measures of economic well-being) took Biden by surprise, Trump knew when he ran that inflation was voters’ highest-priority issue.Or, at least, he was told this repeatedly. During the campaign, Trump appeared to resist pleas by his advisers to focus on bringing down prices. He marveled at the language they had apparently suggested he use—“They call it ‘groceries,’” he said, bemusedly.[Robert Kagan: Checkmate in Iran]At one rally in August 2024, he held a kind of debate with his own speechwriters when he told the audience that he was following orders to focus on inflation. “They wanted to do a speech on the economy,” he said mockingly, casting his advisers in the role of schoolmarms. “So, we’re doing this as a intellectual speech. You’re all intellectuals today.” After wandering off and then back on topic, he broke the fourth wall again to reveal his misgivings: “Today, we’re going to talk about one subject, and then we’ll start going back to the other because we sort of love that, don’t we? But it’s an important—no, it’s an important—they say it’s the most important subject. I’m not sure it is, but they say it’s the most important. ‘Sir, inflation is the most important.’ But that’s part of economy.”After he won, Trump continued to publicly question whether inflation was crucial to his victory. “They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue,” Trump told supporters in January 2025. “I said, ‘I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue for the people that I know.’ And I made it my No. 1. I talked about inflation, too, but, you know, how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”Trump clearly didn’t want to believe he won the election because global prices spiked in 2022. And one consistent feature of Trump’s mental style is that if he does not wish to believe something, he won’t.