Nick Allison

Donald Trump has this shtick he’s been running for the past few months, where he brags about all the money the country is making off his unauthorized war with Iran while flippantly brushing off what it’s costing hardworking American taxpayers at the pump. He mockingly calls higher gas prices “a very inexpensive price to pay,” and waves them off as “a little glitch.” The message to working people is pretty clear: suck it up and stop your bitching. That’s an easy thing to say for a guy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has never had to pump his own gas, let alone check the price first.

By most accounts, Trump won in 2024 largely on two big promises he repeatedly made, that he would bring down prices and stay out of new wars in the Middle East. Nearly two years later he’s predictably broken both of those promises, and the working-class people who helped put him in office are the ones paying for it. Gas is over four bucks a gallon and diesel hit a record $5.85 in September. Inflation climbed to 3.7% that same month. Groceries and everyday goods keep going up, thanks in large part to his beloved tariffs, which are costing the average household more than $1,000 a year. That’s a new tax that most families can’t afford, and people are digging themselves deeper in the hole just to make ends meet. Credit card debt hit $1.26 trillion this summer, and total household debt is sitting at $18.8 trillion, just off its record high. But you don’t need me to tell you any of that, because if you’re like most Americans who aren’t in Donald Trump’s privileged class, you already feel it every time you fill up the tank or check out at the supermarket.

At a rally in Georgia last Saturday, Trump delivered a line that sums up how much he thinks about the average American: “I don’t give a damn. We’re making a freaking fortune!” He was referring to the massive windfall U.S. oil companies and their executives are pulling in from the war, which he likes to talk about as if it’s money the whole country is making, even though none of it is showing up in our bank accounts. But “we” could just as easily mean Trump and his family, and everything he’s said and done over the past couple of years makes it pretty clear that the financial welfare of the people who sent him back to the White House (at least the people who don’t own private jets) ranks somewhere below interior decorating and renaming bodies of water.

I do my best to understand why people make choices that seem obviously disastrous to plenty of other folks. Take, for example, electing an arrogant, narcissistic, famously greedy and corrupt reality TV host to the highest office in the country. Twice. Perhaps the voters who supported him in 2016 should be forgiven for thinking a guy born rich, with a notoriously crooked business career, might somehow become the voice of the common working man. If I’m feeling extra charitable, I can even pretend to understand the votes he got in 2020. By 2024, I had to squint pretty hard to see how anyone thought this guy was still a good idea, though a Democratic Party that at times seemed to completely forget about the working class base that put them there, and then swapped nominees a hundred days out without a primary election, certainly didn’t help.

As best as I can tell, most folks who supported him in ’24 weren’t blind to Trump’s grift and depravity. They maybe didn’t like it, but they looked at their bank accounts and chose to ignore the blatant corruption and bigotry because they sincerely convinced themselves they’d be better off, financially or otherwise. The polling mostly backs that up, but two years into this term, with the midterms fast approaching, it’s hard to imagine anybody’s bank account still makes that look like a good bet… at least not anybody with fewer than six zeros in theirs.

One thing is certain: as he put it himself, Trump doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t give a damn about the truth. He doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution, due process, the rule of law, a free press, or congressional authorization. He doesn’t give a damn about the deficit he promised to cut or the wars he promised to end. He doesn’t give a damn about America’s standing in the world. He doesn’t give a damn about the Epstein victims. He doesn’t give a damn about your health care. He doesn’t give a damn about farmers, teachers, soldiers, construction workers or anybody else who does the kind of work that he thinks exists to serve people like him. And he doesn’t give a damn about you.

What he clearly does give a damn about is power and money. His money, specifically. While the rest of us have to pay more for pretty much everything, the Trump family just keeps getting wealthier. The Trumps have already made over two billion dollars from their crypto schemes alone, while roughly a million regular investors lost about that same amount. Foreign governments, billionaires, and corporations just keep finding new ways to put money in his pockets, and he keeps taking it. And the spineless, feckless, sycophantic Republicans in Congress just keep dropping to their already bruised knees to kiss the ring.

Trump likes to tell people to pretend he’s on the ballot when they go to vote in the midterm elections. While I don’t agree with the man on much, this is the best advice he’s given in years. On November 3, we absolutely should think about the cost of living and the lies and the corruption, and then vote like Donald Trump is on the ballot. Because the politicians who rubber-stamped all of it are.

Sources for the info graphic here. Featured image: Collage by N. Allison. Photo of Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore, cropped and edited, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Nick Allison is a writer and editor based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in Slate, HuffPost, The Fulcrum, and elsewhere. He does his level best to avoid all things social media, but you can follow him on Substack, where his writing mostly steers clear of politics, if you’re into that sort of thing. As a lowly Army infantry combat veteran, college dropout, and working-class American, he has never once been handed a billion dollars by a foreign government or tech CEO, though he’s open to offers.

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