Goods and energy cost thousands more as a result of the president’s policies. By Wes Kosova Donald Trump has been racing across the country in the final days before the US midterm elections trying to do the politically impossible: convince Republican voters who are fed up with the high price of gas, groceries and everything else that they’re wrong about the economy. In his telling, Americans have never been happier or better off, and anyone who says his policies are making their lives harder is lying to them.

In speech after speech, he says complaints about affordability are “fake.”Even some of the president’s supporters aren’t buying it. Dozens of Republican congressional candidates running in conservative states that Trump easily carried two years ago are now fighting to fend off strong Democratic challengers, and Democrats are widely favored to win control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. Republican Party officials worry that some Trump voters will switch sides — but they’re more fearful that many MAGA diehards will their unhappiness by not voting at all.

If that happens, discontent over the economy will be a main reason. Trump frequently claims his economic policies have made America the “hottest” country on Earth. For millions of US households, though, the numbers tell a different story.

Since he returned to the White House last year on a promise to lower the cost of living and increase job growth, consumer prices have risen about 6% overall. Gasoline is up about 39%, largely driven by Trump’s unpopular war against Iran. Inflation-adjusted wages grew slightly in 2025 but have fallen this year. Consumer sentiment is sharply lower than it was before Trump’s inauguration. And despite the president’s vow to bring factories home, there are fewer manufacturing jobs in the US today than when he retook office.

It’s a truism in Washington that presidents get credit even when they don’t deserve it and blame even when it’s not their fault. In Trump’s case, voters can draw a straight line from some of his policies to the economic pain they feel. He said his tariffs would usher in a new golden age in America. Mostly they’ve just made things more expensive. The Budget Lab at Yale University calculated in August that Trump’s current tariffs on foreign goods cost each US household about $1,100 a year.

Those import taxes have also led to higher prices on American-made products. US producers “raise their markups because they face less competition from higher-priced imports,” the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported in September. “As a result, tariffs have a larger and more drawn-out impact on consumer prices than the direct effect alone would suggest.”Trump’s war against Iran is reaching even deeper into Americans’ pockets. A Brown University energy tracker calculates that inflated gasoline and diesel prices resulting from the conflict have so far cost each US household more than $1,120.

Add to that the price tag of the war itself. The Defense Department estimates that the conflict has cost at least $47.1 billion since it began in February.

These bills will keep piling up. In September the Congressional Budget Office estimated the ongoing cost of the war at $2 billion to $3 billion a month. The Dallas Fed in its September economic assessment highlighted the costs of Middle East conflict, saying it “continues to impact fuel, petrochemical products, fertilizer and transport prices, all of which are elevated compared to before the crisis.”On top of that, taxpayers will ultimately foot the bill for the billions of dollars needed to replenish the US military’s depleted weapons stockpiles.

Millions of US households also now face paying hundreds or thousands of dollars more for health insurance after Trump and Republicans in Congress blocked Democrats’ efforts to extend Obamacare subsidies that expired at the start of the year. Farmers, who are among Trump’s strongest supporters, are paying the price of retaliatory Chinese tariffs on soybeans and other agricultural products.

In his recent speeches the president has disputed that his tariffs have raised the cost of living. “They go, ‘Oh, tariffs, tariffs,’” Trump said on Monday in Corinth, Mississippi. “They don’t cause inflation. You know what they cause? Success. They cause growth. They cause jobs.”Trump has called high gas and diesel prices “short-term pain for long-term gain” and says they will come “plummeting down” once the war with Iran is over.

Administration officials point to strong consumer spending and a rising stock market as signs that the economy is robust and that Trump’s policies are working. “The amount of consumption per household has gone up maybe around $5,000 per household,” Kevin Hassett, Trump’s top economic adviser, told Fox Business this week. “Because of the income boom, the capital-spending boom, the fact that people aren’t losing their jobs. All the things that have made the economy great means that ‘affordability crisis’ — it’s a myth!”Yet retail spending growth has disproportionately been driven by upper-income Americans, who haven’t felt the pinch of high prices and rising costs as acutely as middle- and low-income earners have.

Voters rank the cost of living as a top election-year concern. They largely put the blame for the persistence of the so-called K-shaped economy — in which the rich get richer and everyone else gets squeezed — on Trump and his party. Americans who responded to a /Siena poll conducted in September said they now trust Democrats more than Republicans to do a better job handling the economy, by a wide margin, 51% to 45%. That’s a reversal from the recent past, when more people saw Republicans as the party of economic stability and growth.

Even Trump appears to recognize the problem. In the same speeches where he dismisses voters’ concerns about the costs of his policies, he dangles the promise of free money to compensate for them. “I am going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000,” Trump said at an Oct. 19 rally in Park City, Kansas. The president has been promising this so-called Trump dividend for months, but there’s a big asterisk attached: He says he’ll pay up only if Republicans keep control of the House and Senate in next week’s vote.

This improbable, conditional IOU isn’t the only preelection payout Trump has promised. At the Park City rally he announced an $8 billion federal relief fund to help farmers burdened with high diesel costs. The administration hasn’t offered many details about how either of these payments would work or where the money would come from. Trump concedes that the $5,000 checks alone would cost upwards of $1 trillion. “A pittance,” he calls it. On Tuesday voters will decide if it’s one they’re willing to pay.