The Right’s New Inflation Message: Let Them Eat Ramen

If the GOP gets wiped out in the midterms this fall, the biggest cause will likely be war-induced inflation, a double betrayal of the campaign promises that brought many new voters into the Republican fold in 2024. 

After all, two of Donald Trump’s chief attack lines against Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were that they had let inflation run rampant and that they had plunged the United States into endless conflict in the Middle East and Europe. But with his bungled, inflation-spiking war against Iran, Trump has done exactly what he warned voters his opponents would do—and turned a wide swath of the public against him. According to a late July poll by Marquette University Law School, 76 per cent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation, and 69 per cent disapprove of his handling of the Iran War.

Writing in UnHerd last week, Sohrab Ahmari, a heterodox conservative, noted that the Iran War and the rise in inflation are deeply intertwined:

In June, inflation rose to 4.2%, nearly double where it stood just before Operation Epic Fury. Gas is a fungible global commodity. Thus, even though the United States is the world’s chief net energy exporter, the supply squeeze in the Strait of Hormuz puts inflationary pressure on gas prices in America. And it’s not just gas prices which are affected, but those in many other sectors, too—from transportation to agriculture to restaurants and hospitality.

It’s hardly surprising that affordability is becoming a proxy front in the larger conflict between war hawks and military restrainers on the right. Revealingly, the battle lines in this conflict revolve around whether concerns about war-induced inflation are even legitimate. The most militarist wing of the right is taking the position that inflation either isn’t real or is something the public will just have to live with in order to pay for a necessary war.

On August 3, far-right pundit Matt Walsh (best known for his rabid anti-trans rants) tweeted,

Grocery prices are insane. They’re still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader. End the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue. It’s one of the main reasons socialists are gaining power.

Andrew Kolvet of Talking Points USA responded with an anecdote indicating that Walsh’s concerns were shared by some young right-wingers:

One of our TPUSA college students gave me his take on affordability: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Yeah, a lot of this is a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation, but the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.

Kolvet’s story about a costly burrito might seem innocuous enough, but it provoked a major backlash on the right, with many leading figures adopting the tone of angry old men scolding the young for being soft. Texas Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw, a loud advocate for belligerent imperialism, responded with a snide and supercilious post that called to mind the apocryphal story of Marie Antoinette advising starving peasants to eat cake:

Just hearing about this dumb $20 burrito debate so just thought I’d make the losers on social media angry before going to bed. Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates. The market doesn’t care what you think something “should” cost. Only communists care (they set prices remember? Then everyone starves, remember?) Are you a communist? Or are you an American adult male capable of handling his own shit?

The message of “let them eat Ramen” is surely as toxic as “let them eat cake.” One reason Crenshaw can afford to make it is that he is leaving politics after being soundly defeated in a March primary by an even more far-right candidate. But Crenshaw’s basic dismissal of inflation as a non-problem was echoed by other hawkish Republicans, including Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen who wrote, “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.” Vice President JD Vance, who has been trying to shore up the anti-establishment and anti-interventionist supporters that Trump won in 2024, took a potshot at the columnist by writing, “I’m surprised to hear Mark say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.” Vance’s cruel jibe was personal and also irrelevant since it ignores the fact that the administration Vance serves under has been shaped by pro-war voices such as Thiessen.

Two other pro-war pundits, Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, took the same dismissive attitude as Crenshaw and Thiessen. Adopting the tone of a snotty teacher, Shapiro wrote, “Okay, young people: a burrito does not cost $20. If you’re paying $20 for a burrito and you’re not independently wealthy, you’re doing life wrong.” On his radio program, Levin spoke at enormous grandfatherly length about the suffering of earlier generations of Americans during the Great Depression and World War II to underscore the point that, “young people today do not have it as hard as young people had it 50, 60, 78 years ago.”

Levin’s invocation of World War II underscores the weakness of his own position. In the past, Americans were willing to undergo austerity and suffering for causes they deemed just: the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. These were periods of conscription and rationing, where individual happiness was sacrificed for a collective good. But the Iran War doesn’t have anywhere near the popular support—or the existential stakes—of those earlier conflicts. If people are complaining about the price of gas and of burritos, that is not due to superficiality or softness. Rather, inflation bites even harder if it’s being caused by a war that makes no sense. Lecturing people on the nobility of belt-tightening is obnoxious behavior at the best of times, but even more offensive when done for a bad cause. Trump and allies such as Thiessen and Levin haven’t convinced anyone outside the hard-core MAGA cult that these sacrifices are worth it—and there’s no sign that that’s likely to change.

Otto von Bismarck once offered an unheeded warning against German meddling in other regions by saying the Balkans were “not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” One can update the Iron Chancellor’s sage advice by saying the Iran War is not worth the price of one burrito.