Lest we forget

It's apparently easy to forget lived experience. For example, what life was like in 2020 before Covid vaccines were available. Do you remember? New York led the country with a brutal surge of the disease in the spring of that year, with desperate shortages of ventilators, and deaths overwhelming morgues. (Refrigerated trucks were parked outside hospitals to store all the corpses.) It's easy to shrug now, and somehow forget that 1.2 million Americans died of Covid.

Or how Covid affected the economy. More than 20 million jobs were lost in a single month, April 2025. The unemployment rate shot up to almost 15 percent.

But I'm thinking in particular of the severe supply chain shortages that were the initial instigator of a long run of price inflation around the world. Remember the chip shortage? The car shortage? The two were actually related. A worldwide shortage of microprocessors affected everything from appliances to automobiles. The car shortage lasted a couple of years. Remember?

From the standpoint of current affairs, the most profound economic impact of Covid was that it ushered in a new era of price inflation that's gone on for half a decade. Prior to Covid, inflation had been at historic low levels for a couple of decades, which had been something of an economic marvel.

Covid upended that long run of stable prices. Inflation peaked at a shocking 9.1 percent in June 2022, seventeen months after Biden took office. But it fell quite rapidly over the next year. It was around 3.7 percent in August 2023, and slowly edged lower from there. Inflation was running at around 3 percent when Donald Trump was sworn in, with widespread hopes that it could be nudged down from there to the Fed's 2 percent target.

Instead, Trump commenced a series of polices that reversed the decline and drove prices back up. Shortly after taking office, Trump announced dramatically higher tariffs on pretty much the entire world. Because tariffs are a tax paid mostly by consumers, prices in the economy inevitably rose. Typical estimates of costs to households exceeded $1,000 per year.

But Trump wasn't finished. Less than a year after his major tariff announcement, and all the economic upheaval that resulted from it (it was a hot mess; remember?), Trump began his war with Iran, setting off a series of events that wracked the world's energy economy and caused prices to shoot even higher. Most notable was Iran's shutting down oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, and its attacking energy production and refining facilities across the Middle East, which created worldwide shortages of refined products. The price of diesel rose 70 percent. The economy runs on diesel. Inflation has risen as a consequence. It hit 3.7 percent in September.

Thus through deliberate policy choices did Trump reverse the downward trend in prices that he inherited, and systematically send prices back up. And with higher prices come higher interest rates, which creates its own set of problems.

Do not forget what we've been through. It's crucial to understand what has transpired these past five years. Peak inflation absolutely occurred during Biden's presidency, but it would be wrong to say that Biden caused the inflationary environment we're now experiencing. The initial price surge was the inevitable result of the pandemic and its effect on supply chains, and was a worldwide phenomenon. (Some countries experienced even higher inflation than the U.S.) Don't forget that pandemic experience. We lived through it.

But the current increasing inflation we're now experiencing was not inevitable. It's caused by actual policies—policies that were wrongheaded and misguided for many reasons, including their effect on prices. Presidents are usually blamed for things beyond their control. But in this instance, Trump's actual actions had actual consequences.

Trump was elected to bring prices down, something he promised to do. He immediately proceed to send them higher, almost as if on a mission to do so. Don't blame Biden. This one is all on Trump.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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