Conservative analysts blast 'morons' who put 'economic moron' in the White House

What happened

AlterNet reports that The Bulwark editors Jonathan Last and Jasmine M. Green blame the renewed inflation shown in a New York Fed estimate on Donald Trump’s tariffs. They call it “moronic inflation”: price pressure created by a policy Trump openly campaigned on, voters endorsed, and his administration imposed after the earlier inflation surge had subsided.

Last and Green contrast that increase with inflation following the COVID shock, when disrupted supply chains collided with stimulus-supported demand. They argue that supply-chain normalization, central-bank action, and Biden administration fiscal policy helped bring price growth down before Trump’s tariffs raised costs and weakened economic activity in 2025.

Their fury is aimed not only at Trump but at voters who expected tariffs and lower prices simultaneously despite economists’ warnings. The article does not provide the underlying chart’s figures, methodology, or enough evidence to measure how much of the reported increase tariffs caused.

Power made the policy

Trump held the decisive institutional power. Voters selected his program, but voters did not set tariff rates or administer trade policy. The president did.

That distinction matters because contempt for “morons” can become its own form of misdirection. An electorate can authorize destructive policy, but the officeholder converts campaign rhetoric into government action. Trump advertised tariffs; his administration imposed them; businesses and consumers encountered the resulting costs described by the analysts.

The public bears political responsibility for empowering him. It does not bear equal operational responsibility for every executive decision that followed.

The insult obscures the machinery

Last and Green’s anger is understandable, but their diagnosis is politically thin. Calling voters cognitively deficient may describe their exasperation; it does not explain how a plainly inflationary policy was sold as a cure for high prices.

The more useful question is who benefited from collapsing a complicated economic record into a fraudulent intuition: foreigners pay tariffs, therefore Americans win. According to the account presented here, economists warned that tariffs would raise domestic costs. Trump nevertheless paired them with promises of lower prices. That contradiction was not hidden. It was marketed.

Reducing the outcome to mass stupidity lets political leadership, partisan persuasion, and the authority of the presidency recede behind an insult aimed downward.

Confusion was politically useful

The earlier inflation had multiple reported causes: pandemic disruption, constrained supply, and stimulus-supported demand. By the spring of 2024, The Bulwark says consumer-goods price growth had returned to a better-than-normal pace. Yet the political memory of the price surge remained available for exploitation even after its growth rate eased.

That gap between inflation and the price level is fertile territory for demagoguery. Slower inflation does not restore every old price, while broad deflation would carry severe economic costs. A candidate can therefore blame the incumbent for prices that remain high, promise their reversal, and prescribe tariffs that push costs in the opposite direction.

The resulting confusion is not merely a voter defect. It is an asset for anyone with the power and media reach to substitute grievance for arithmetic.

Accountability must point upward

The article is strongest when it names inflation by choice. On its account, this was not an unforeseen pandemic shock or an unavoidable wartime disruption. A candidate proposed tariffs despite warnings about their effects, won the election, and implemented them.

It is weaker when it treats voter contempt as sufficient analysis. Citizens can make disastrous choices, but the hierarchy remains clear: political leaders design the offer, institutions execute it, and the public absorbs the consequences. The president commands the machinery; ordinary voters encounter it at the checkout counter and in a slowing economy.

The systemic error

The larger pattern is a recurring transfer of blame from powerful actors to the people living with their decisions. Trump’s policy becomes a story about foolish consumers rather than presidential power. Economic pain becomes evidence of public irrationality rather than the foreseeable consequence of a governing choice.

That framing leaves the political operation intact. Leaders can promise mutually incompatible outcomes, weaponize the damage associated with their predecessors, enact policies experts warned would worsen the problem, and then disappear behind contempt for the electorate.

The failure was democratic, but it was not power-neutral. Voters opened the door. Trump controlled what the government carried through it.

Thanks to Alter Net

Source: Conservative analysts blast ‘morons’ who put ‘economic moron’ in the White House