November 6, 2025

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

 

Cutting Prices Is Job Number One, Mr. President

By Robert Romano

“And I tell Republicans, you want to win elections, you got to talk about these facts. You know, it's really easy to win elections when you talk about the facts.”

That was President Donald Trump reacting on Nov. 5 to the results of the Virginia, New Jersey and New York City off-year elections, and touting his administration’s economic record including softening inflation one year after Republicans won the White House, House and Senate in historic fashion.

President Trump is right about two things: Inflation is definitely improving, particularly as it compares to incomes, and, judging by recent polling, Republicans are definitely doing a poor job of letting the American people know that the worst is long behind them.

A year ago, even with inflation cooling from its June 2022 peak of 9.1 percent, voters consistently rated inflation and the economy as the top issue in the elections, one of the principal reasons President Trump and Republicans defeated former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

First, on the numbers themselves, the past twelve months, personal income has risen about 5 percent, while consumer prices have only risen 3 percent.

In fact, that’s been true since the beginning of 2023, where income would consistently rise faster than inflation as Americans’ household budgets have gradually improved. But for almost the entire year of 2022, it wasn’t true. And around election time in 2024, voters remembered.

Biden’s approval rating on the economy was about 40 percent and disapproval about 55 percent to 60 percent. As you might expect, Democrats fared very poorly as swing voters punished Biden and then Harris who replaced Biden on the ballot.

Now, oil is down at around $60 a barrel, while a year ago it was $72, and with it gas prices are easing. So far, so good.

But today, using the same metrics, even with inflation continuing to cool versus incomes, the President’s approval on the economy today averages 41 percent, and disapproval is about 55 percent.

Every election is a referendum on the incumbents, and now the shoe’s on the other foot with the 2026 Congressional midterms less than a year away. Perception is everything. Inflation is cooling, but are the American people feeling it? And fast enough?

If you look at the last Economist-YouGov poll taken in October 2024, on inflation specifically, 58 percent disapproved of Biden and only 33 percent approved: 93 percent of Republicans as you might guess disapproved, but so did 61 percent of independents and, critically, 23 percent of Democrats disapproved.

Well, now the numbers are completely reversed. In the Oct 19 to Oct. 22 Economist-YouGov poll taken, now 64 percent disapprove of Trump on inflation and only 31 percent approve: 94 percent of Democrats as you might guess disapprove, but so do 72 percent of independents and, critically, 25 percent of Republicans disapprove.

It’s the same poll with the same result, but with a different president. The common thread is a significant percent of the incumbent party registering dissatisfaction plus an overwhelming number of independents. Joe Biden tried to tell his story, too. It didn’t work.

So far, there has been zero improvement on the politics of this. The policies are pretty good: Import eggs, boosting oil production, increasing electricity output, working with OPEC to increase global supplies, supply side tax cuts to boost domestic production and so forth. Interest rates are coming down compared to our peers, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted today on X.com.

But the public is not feeling it enough. Costs went up too high, too fast, and have been too slow to come down while our incomes catch up. Inflation and most importantly independents do not care about party. Economically, Milton Friedman wrote “inflation is the cruelest tax”. And in politics that is doubly true.

Throughout 2024, I warned in this column that inflation is a majority killer, because it is. Whenever inflation specifically outpaced incomes, it took out Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Joe Biden, leading to their party’s defeats. In the 1970s, it took out two presidents in a row!

More broadly, the economy can make any presidency a one-term proposition. When the economy is unstable, so is our politics.

In 2024, inflation — and the memory of it — made it much more likely that President Trump would be reelected to non-consecutive terms and that Republicans would win both chambers of Congress. In 2025, in New York City, it made it possible to elect a Democratic socialist for mayor, and that the Democratic candidates for governor in New Jersey and Virginia would overperform and wind up with unexpected double-digit wins.

And in 2026, if Republicans cannot tell their story on inflation — they have a great story to tell with the worst long behind us but there is still more to do — it will put not only the House but the Senate well into play. If that perception continues, in 2028, the White House will easily be in play again, too.

Here’s the good news: Incomes have been outpacing inflation since 2023 so over the long term the American people will feel relief. The bad news: The American people are still not happy about it. The reality, and more bad news: These episodes usually end with a recession, although some evidence suggests we may have already had one that ended in 2024, for example if you follow the Sahm rule, defined by the Federal Reserve as “when the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate (U3) rises by 0.50 percentage points or more relative to the minimum of the three-month averages from the previous 12 months.” That happened in July, August and September of 2024.   

From a policy perspective there is still a little time, but not a lot, to decisively move the needle on inflation and to alter public perceptions before next fall.

Friedman defined inflation as too much money chasing too few goods. The Fed has been taking care of the too much money part for three years with the increased interest rates (it started too late) but the too few goods part remains a problem following the Covid production lockdowns.

The President has rightly mentioned beef and the possibility of a temporary trade deal with Argentina to get prices down in the short term. Yes, more of that, Mr. President. This is what trade is for: To buy more of what we need. We need your art of the deal.

Long term, Department of Agriculture data show the cow population was decimated during the Biden administration. We need more cows. I’d say to import several herds but it’d probably bring disease and then you’d have a bigger problem.

Either goods will flood into markets and bring the prices down that need to come down fast enough for people to notice, or voters will flood into polls until they find a party that can fix the problem.

This might appear counterintuitive from a trade protection perspective. It is not. The commodities the American people need to get prices down the most are largely coming in energy and agriculture. We need more energy and especially electricity. We need more food. That’s what the American people feel the most when they go shopping every week.

Shelter too but that’s largely impacted locally. Everyone in New York knows the homes are cheaper out of state. During and after Covid the Fed bought mortgage securities for no reason, driving the price of housing to the moon. Maybe keep dumping those, I don’t know why the Fed stopped, it has nothing to do with the unemployment rate. As for overall interest rates, those will be impacted just by moving baseline treasuries and interbank lending rates down.

No majority can survive sustained inflation. However fast the President wants the American people to get relief, it’s still not nearly fast enough with 2026 rapidly looming. It’s time for a course correction. Focus on food. Because, the only thing stickier than incumbency is inflation — and the memory of it.

Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government Foundation.  

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2025/11/cutting-prices-is-job-number-one-mr-president/

 

Two Lessons From The Virginia Massacre

 

By Bill Wilson

For Republicans, the 2025 Virginia elections will leave a scar, mental and physical, for a very long time. Even if, and when, conservatives recover and get back in the fight, the ramifications of the defeats will leave an indelible mark.

To recap, the GOP had the one of the worst showings for Governor in more than a generation, lost the other two statewide offices even when one of the Democrats was clearly undesirable and belonged in jail not in office, and a whopping 13 seats in the State Assembly.

That 13-seat loss reduces the Republican contingent in the Assembly to just 36 of the 100-member body, the lowest number since 1988. The impact of this loss and what looks to be a radical session that will bring Virginia on par with California and Illinois as the most neo-Marxist state in the nation will literally take decades.

So why and how did this happen?

Of course, the mainstream corporate press and the Never Trump zealots on the fringes of the GOP will all point to Trump. But Trump cannot explain this; maybe in the government-controlled region of Northern Virginia where a large number of people are dependent on the government and cannot think about doing anything to reduce or cut their pay and lucre. There are two clear and compelling reasons for the slaughter, and they need to be understood before any chance of recovery in the future can begin.

First, the Democrats employed far superior tactics and implemented their plan near flawlessly. To see how it was done look no further than a small rural state Assembly district down state.  The incumbent was Republican Chris Obenshain. The Obenshain name is close to Republican royalty and he had a district that, while tough, was clearly a winner for him. In 2023, however, he barely won after an aggressive push. His margin of victory that year was a mere 183 votes.

What happened after that close call? It would appear that the Republicans did very little. Registration of new voters in the heavily GOP portion of the district in Roanoke County barely moved. But in Democrat turf in Montgomery County there was a totally different story.  In just five precincts — very heavily Democrat voting areas — new voter registration increased by 25 percent. On Election Day, the turnout in those precincts was through the roof. When the dust settled, the Democrat margin in those 5 precincts went from 1,422 in 2023 to 2,049 in 2025.  That increase in marginal support of 627 may seem small, but it was the difference, it won the election.

Now repeat that highly targeted, micro-registration and turnout operation in more than a dozen districts and it become easy to see how the Democrats scored such gob-smacked results. Nobody apparently saw it coming.

But the second lesson is just that, nobody saw or wanted to see this was happening. The leadership of the Republican effort was totally divorced from and alien to the people who make up the modern GOP, the MAGA voters and apparently had no understanding of what was happening on the ground.

The lead consultant to the GOP candidate for Governor was the Director of Nikki Haley’s Super PAC in 2024. The #2 official at the Republican Party of Virginia was the former Chief of Staff to Representative Eric Cantor. Cantor was joined at the hip to the extremely anti-Trump former Speaker Paul Ryan. And the Executive Director of the Party was a long-time staffer to former Representative Barbara Comstock; the same Comstock who led a No Kings protest in trendy McLean and openly attacks and opposes the President at every opportunity.

How could these people, given their hostility to the voters who elected President Trump and the issues he exposed, ever hope to connect with these people? The short answer, of course, is they couldn’t and probably never intended to. It was a perfect “win-win” for these decaying remnants of uni-party GOP wing. If they win the elections by some miracle, they are heroes who could have claimed their views were vindicated. But if they lost — as they did in the most spectacular way possible — they just blamed it on Trump.

Duplicitous? Of course, but they have contributed a valuable lesson, and hopefully in plenty of time before 2026 Congressional midterm elections. First, in order to win you must do the hard legwork. Think clearly, look at every situation with fresh eyes and act, don’t rely on digital this or AI that. Get off the sofa and do the work. And second, if there is even a hint of a potential staffer or vendor being tied to the ancient regime of the uni-party kick them out the door. Better to have a novice willing to learn and dedicated to the fight than a quisling looking to plunge the knife in your back.

As the President himself has proven, there is no final anything except death. Republicans are still standing and so they have to fight, fight, fight. While the Virginia elections will leave a mark, hopefully the lessons from the defeat will be learned and move on to eventual victory.

Bill Wilson is the former president of Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2025/11/two-lessons-from-the-virginia-massacre/

 

By Robert Romano

 

If Supreme Court Strikes Down Tariffs, Trump Will Need To Embargo China

Nov. 5, 2025, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government Executive Director Robert Romano today issued the following statement warning of the strategic consequences if the Supreme Court strikes down President Donald Trump’s emergency, national security tariffs on China:

“We could be at war with China any moment from now, and the strategic situation particular to rare earth minerals will ultimately demand the United States put an embargo on Chinese exports and to secure sources of rare earths for the war effort and as a part of the national emergency the President has already declared. For now, the President has used national security emergency tariffs on China in order to secure trade agreements to keep rare earths flowing for the entire world and, critically, to prevent a much wider conflict. Short of a full embargo, the tariffs give the President the flexibility to negotiate with Beijing, as he was just able to successfully negotiate with Chinese President Xi to keep global trade moving.

“But if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs because Congress was not explicit enough in the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) — a distinct possibility — then the President will be left with no alternative but to invoke the same act, charge China with using slave labor and other human rights abuses and threatening national security, and just use the explicit embargo and sanction powers that Congress has also  granted under the same law. These authorities have been used to place a variety of trade sanctions including embargos on North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other adversary countries who act against U.S. national security interests and threaten international peace and stability. If the President cannot use tariffs, then he might be left with no choice but to cut off trade completely in order to get China back to the table. China threatening the global supply of rare earths is national security threat, and the President has the power to do use economic sanctions to rein that in.

“The result would be escalation, make resolution of the global supply chain crisis practically impossible via conventional negotiations and ultimately make war more likely. The fact is, Congress has already acted, the President already has all the authority he needs. 50 U.S. Code Sec. 1702 already delegates the power to ‘regulate… importation’ of goods. It’s a political question that the branches have discretion with.

“Besides having to go to embargos and further sanctions, alternately, if the Court forces the issue, then Congress can come back clarify that Presidents have the emergency tariff power when it is needed. Or Congress could act right now, stick clarifying tariff authority in the continuing resolution and make the Supreme Court case moot. Future presidents can thank Trump later.”

To view online: https://getliberty.org/2025/11/if-supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs-trump-will-need-to-embargo-china/