Donald Trump supporter attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) USA 2026 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, in Grapevine, Texas, U.S. March 28, 2026. REUTERS
Economists make distinctions between kinds of inflation, reports conservative news site The Bulwark.
“There’s demand-pull and cost-push inflation. There’s walking and galloping inflation. There’s transitory inflation,” said editors Jonathan Last and Jasmine M. Green. “Today we have what I’m going to call ‘moronic inflation.’”
That’s the kind of inflation that can be explained with a single chart, said Last and Green, who then included a New York Fed Estimate chart of tariff-related inflation — with an undeniable drop directly preceding the year 2025.
That same chart revealed a discouraging hike in inflation costs in the early months of 2025.
“This chart shows two of those flavors of inflation, separated by that vertical red line I added,” reports Last and Green, describing the demand-pull inflation resulting from COVID on the left side shocked global supply chains. These combined with the influx of stimulus dollars designed to keep households above water during shutdowns.
All that caused a spike in prices as a glut of money chased too few goods, and it peaked around September 2022, before quickly abating. Last and Green cite central bankers and smart fiscal policy from the Biden administration for much of the drop, but the biggest driver was the reset of global supply chains.
“By the spring of 2024, the growth rate of consumer goods prices was a better than back to par,” reports Bulwark, adding: “Then we have our red line. This line marks — surprise! — the second election of Donald Trump.”
In the months leading up to his election, Last and Green point out that Trump outright campaigned on a promise to impose painful new tariffs.
“This was moronic on several levels,” they write. “Inflation had already abated and real wages were already positive. Tariffs increase costs and raise inflationary pressure. [And] deflation — the across-the-board reduction in prices — is not a good outcome. Deflation is always accompanied by economic calamity. No one with an IQ over 80 would ever want deflation.”
“But morons/American voters heard Donald Trump’s pitch and thought, What the hell do all those pointy-headed ‘experts’ know? They wanted tariffs and lower prices and the guy who [messed] … up the pandemic response and attempted a coup,” Bulwark reports. “And they got what they wanted, which is the inflation on the right side of the graph.
After getting handed a healthy and rising economy, Trump imposed his tariffs and those tariffs did exactly what the so-called ‘experts’ said they would: whacked economic activity and increased prices. The result: inflation caused not by either a supply shock or a demand shock and not by war. And it also wasn’t the result of a COVID-style pestilence, or collapse. It was inflation caused by choice.
“A political candidate promised to do things that would create inflation; voters chose his program against the warnings of “experts”; inflation resumed. Moronic inflation,” report Last and Green.”
American voters, they say, were incapable of remembering the cause of the 2022 inflation and envisioning inflation that could be worse. They were also apparently unable to discriminate between the promises of a “former game show host and convicted felon and the warnings of economists.”
“The only explanations I can think of for these failings are (a) a pure deficiency of cognitive ability; (b) a pathological drive for self-mutilation; or (c) a pervasive decadence/nihilism in which American society either believed itself immune from consequences or was uninterested in them,” write Last and Green.
It’s the “exciting new phenomenon” of economic moronity, say the authors, and “someday econ textbooks will include a chapter on the inflation of 2025/26 examining” it.
