Prices are climbing, President Donald Trump has hit a record low in polls, and only 16 percent of Americans think the country is going in the right direction.
So several Republican candidates and office holders are approaching the midterm elections with a most unorthodox message for voters: Quit your bellyaching.
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi kicked things off earlier this year with some advice for people struggling with high beef prices: “You have so many proteins to choose from.”
Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas picked up the theme this month when he recommended this to a college student who had complained online that burritos shouldn’t cost $20: “Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college.” (By then, whiny voters had already dumped Crenshaw in a primary.)
Implied is that Americans have gone soft, that they just need to toughen up and get over it. Maybe lose weight and take some testosterone, like Pete Hegseth says.
“No pain, no gain,” Jim Desmond, the Republican nominee to succeed retiring Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) said of high oil prices in a March interview with Real America’s Voice. The spike is “unfortunate,” he said, but worth it to take out Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York) also has pain on his brain. The long-term benefits of Trump’s tariffs were worth “a little bit of short-term pain,” he told Nexstar’s NewsNation last year. On CNN this July, he determined that “eliminating the threat from Iran is absolutely worth it” — that is, the pain of higher gas prices.
So buck up!
Michele Tafoya, the GOP nominee for Senate from Minnesota, advised Americans they should be “keeping a stiff upper lip.” She also recommended in the March radio interview: “Maybe you take one less trip to Starbucks and so that gas goes a little further. Until this thing is over and these gas prices go back down again, let’s just try to be patriots about this.”
Her anti-latte attitude echoed Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan, who last fall presciently warned about a time “when the Democrats start getting at us, ‘Oh my gosh, coffee went up.’ You know? Horror!” He said higher coffee prices were worth it to have “good manufacturing jobs.” (Under Trump, 62,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost.)
The toughen-up argument is part of a broader response to inflation that also includes a fair measure of denial and dismissal. In fairness, Republicans don’t have many good options to counter the rising-prices complaint, any more than Democrats did when Trump and other Republicans bashed them for high grocery and gas prices under the Biden administration.
Trump, though, has made things worse than they had to be for Republicans. He has personally amassed some $4.2 billion since 2024 — nearly tripling his net worth — by using his office for personal gain, mostly through crypto schemes. This, while Americans have seen their purchasing power diminish for housing, groceries, energy and health care.
The president has made occasional gestures to lower prices (his pre-midterms plan to import cheap, tariff-free ground beef met with hostility from American ranchers) but mostly he has dismissed the affordability issue as a “Democratic hoax.” “I’ve won affordability,” he proclaimed in February, before he started the war in Iran — a war that led him to say, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” Gas prices are “not very high,” he said in April, when the average price was $4.12 a gallon, about the same as today and a dollar higher than when Trump took office.
“I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing,” he said this month about the war-induced spike in fuel costs.
Compared with the Iran war, Trump has said, “I don’t care about the midterms.” And the reluctance of his MAGA Inc. super-PAC to shell out for Republican candidates so far backs that up.
Trump last week told voters to “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot” in November. But with his approval rating mired at 33 percent in this week’s Reuters/Ipsos poll, Republican candidates may not find that reassuring. When Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin, was asked by Newsmax a couple of weeks ago whether Trump would campaign with him, noncommittal Tiffany said “there are a lot of races” and Trump “has got his hands full.”
Some Republicans who are on the ballot this fall have joined Trump in denial. Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin told Fox Business in July that “the Democrats invented this term ‘affordability.’” He added air quotes for emphasis.
On Aug. 6, Laurie Buckhout, who is trying to unseat a Democratic congressman in North Carolina, opined that “the economy is actually doing better than I think the naysayers want to have it do.” She told radio host Hugh Hewitt that the Iran war “is definitely worth it.” (Disclosure: My wife, a Democratic pollster, is a consultant to her opponent and to Tafoya’s, in Minnesota.)
In Politico in May, Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa) expounded that inflation driven by the Iran war is “overhyped, candidly, by the media,” while Marty O’Donnell, who is looking to oust Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nevada), said, “I don’t hear anybody complaining about tariffs.”
And in California, GOP Rep. David Valadao told a local TV station in March that “to pretend that Iran is the first reason why fuel prices are going up is false.”
Other Republicans may find themselves in the delicate position this fall of explaining remarks they made about the economy that didn’t age well.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, America is back on the right track,” Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Republican nominee for Senate in Iowa, wrote in January. “Gas prices are at five-year lows” and “paychecks finally go further at the grocery store.”
Michael Whatley, the GOP nominee for Senate in North Carolina, had this to say last year when he was the Republican National Committee chairman: “Gasoline prices are down 40 percent. Grocery prices are down … and inflation is dramatically down. Everything [Trump] said he was going to do, he has done.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) still thought things were going in the “right direction” in February, though in May he reportedly sent out a fundraising email requesting donations in part to “pay for gas as we visit isolated rural areas of Alaska.” As recently as June, Rep. Mike Collins, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, still believed “the economy is moving.”
Of course, there’s always the option of saying things were worse under the Biden administration (“you had inflation that ran up to nine and a half percent under Joe Biden,” Arizona congressional candidate Jay Feely pointed out in a debate), although that omits the fact that inflation is higher now than when Biden left office.
And there’s the old-school, I-feel-your-pain approach. “I look at the high prices that are hitting our family,” Iowa’s Hinson said. “They’re hitting our family in the same ways they’re hitting hardworking families across Iowa.” Though perhaps not exactly in the same ways, because Hinson’s 2025 financial disclosure listed assets valued between $2 million and $8 million.
But the pervasive argument, it seems, is the tough-it-out approach. Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) has perfected this over the past year, advising people that a key way to improve affordability is to “earn more” and asserting that “people living in poverty are just not very experienced at navigating the real world.”
He also lamented in a radio interview: “Our work ethic is broken. We don’t have the work ethic in this country that we once had.”
Maybe voters will agree with that assessment. More likely, they will send a message on Nov. 3 that something is broken — and it isn’t them.
Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.
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