'Get used to it': Economist says Republicans have 'bombed' the economy for years

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he delivers remarks at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York, U.S., May 22, 2026. REUTERS Kylie Cooper

Economist and public policy scholar Justin Wolfers says Republicans and President Donald Trump have not only set themselves up for a brutal midterm, but voters will probably be holding them accountable for high inflation and fuel prices for years.

“There is a bomb that has hit the world economy and to any of us who watch the economy, there's no question that the economy today is different than it was in February,” Wolfers told podcaster Jacqueline Cole.

The damage Trump and the GOP have done doesn’t amount to a dip or a drop. It’s much bigger than that — and more permanent. Wolfers described it more as a “crater” resulting from Trump’s bomb

“Okay, so we'll start with the oil prices. Oil prices today are higher than they were — they’re about $100 a barrel. They were $60, but I can see oil price futures, which tells me how long oil prices will be higher than they would otherwise be and the answer is ‘for several years,’” said Wolfers. “It could be that they think this conflict goes on for longer or they think that this conflict is laying the ground for future conflicts. But get used to it. Energy is more expensive and will be for a while.”

Wolfers was loathe to speak of the costs of Trump’s Iran was in terms of “billions” or “trillions,” because numbers like that sound too general. He prefers to talk in terms of what it will cost the average U.S. family.

And when you pare those numbers down to the impact on individual families things start to sound painful.

People do not measure mass shootings by the number of bullets, he said. They measure it by pain, suffering and the many expensive ancillary costs that come of mass shooting. Similarly, some Fed researchers recently constructed an index of the geopolitical risk of Trump’s war. And when Wolfers applies their unit of measurement it translates into U.S. income and output being $200 billion lower as a result of Trump’s Iran invasion.

“The point that I want to get across though is every way I look at this, the bill ends up being hundreds of billions of dollars. Okay, so if this war ends up costing ... $130 billion dollars and there's 130 million Americans. That means that the average cost per household is … several thousand dollars.”

And these costs aren’t going anywhere due to the lingering effects of geopolitical damage hammering down onto U.S. citizens, in addition to other costs.

But, don’t worry. Trump and the Republicans who made it all happen will still be handing around in office, waiting to for voters to show them how thankful they are for this.

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