As the 2026 midterm elections near, polls show American voters’ top priority is the economy, including concerns that the unpopular U.S. war in Iran appears to be driving up prices at home .
Might these voter concerns give Republican hawks pause?
Apparently not.
" If we can't handle four dollar oil for a period of months in order to disarm Iran of a nuclear weapon then we are not a superpower anymore,” former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen told Fox News last week.
One of the biggest pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress had a similar message. " As much as it stinks to pay an extra dollar for a gallon of gas… think about the damage of a nuclear bomb going off in Washington, or New York, or Miami,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said Monday on News Nation.
Surely some of these Republicans would recognize that fear of inflation combined with growing opposition to the war could hurt their party come November — that maybe an adjustment in language and tone is in order?
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) gets it. Sort of. He wants to keep prices down for Americans but thinks the only way to do that is to bomb the hell out of Iran for “two to three weeks” to get the Hormuz Strait open. He says the Iranians cannot be trusted to broker a deal without military force, so why not keep doing what hasn’t worked yet over the last five months?
Others are leaning hard into the notion that higher prices are just “fake news” — no doubt in hopes that repeating that enough will just make the problem go away.
The Iran war "has had basically no impact on food prices in the US,” declared The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro on Wednesday, seemingly responding to what writer Sohrab Ahmari is calling the “great American burrito debate” on social media over the current cost of food and how that might relate to the current cost of war.
Ahmari’s essay notes that, to Cotton’s point about Hormuz and prices, “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.”
In addition to rising prices, new data released Friday showed that 23,000 jobs were lost in July, an unexpected number for economists. All eyes are on the new inflation figures to be released this upcoming week. In May, it rose to 4.2%, the highest since 2023 and relaxed in June to 3.5% .
Never to be left out, regime change maven and Fox News host Mark Levin on Sunday urged Donald Trump to attack Kharg Island to bring Iranians “to their knees” and not to worry about sparking "a worldwide depression and so on. It won't happen!"
Trump seemed to share the same reality-detached hopefulness, proclaiming on Monday that, "Now, US is the King of OIL!" The president shared a chart showing U.S. “oil exports [surging] to historic high!” He is likely hoping that his audience won’t read up on the subject and find that it doesn’t matter how much the U.S. produces; it won’t affect current gas prices at the pump today.
One time MAGA-darling turned Trump critic, former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, wasn’t having it. She called out the president on what Americans are actually experiencing.
"The national price of gas is $4.10 and diesel is $5.36. Your illegal senseless war on Iran is crushing the very people that voted to end foreign wars, lower inflation, and lower the price of gas,” Greene said on X.
Trump even went so far as to suggest that greedy energy companies might be to blame, saying at the Oval Office this week that Chevron and Exxon Mobil are making "too much money,” amid the war. "I don't like it... They ought to give some of that back to the public,” he said, according to C-SPAN.
The Independent’s Eric Garcia couldn’t help but notice that Trump sounded like Democrats complaining about "greedflation" under President Joe Biden.
None of this appears to be fooling voters, including Republicans.
On Tuesday, CNN pollster Harry Enten rattled off some of Donald Trump’s approval numbers among moderate Republicans. “On Iran, he's six points underwater within his own party. Within his own party! You think that's low? (He’s) about 17 points underwater on inflation.”
“Inflation was the name of the game with the economy back in 2024,” Enten noted. “If I am a Republican running for Congress in those swing districts, I need those moderate Republicans, and they are leaving Donald Trump, and they may be leaving those Republican candidates as well.”
The New York Times suggested on Tuesday that the war was undermining Trump’s presidency. "The war in Iran, along with a cycle of threats and walk-backs, has upended President Trump’s domestic agenda at a dire political moment. Americans are facing rising gas prices."
It went on to cite the most recent Quinnipiac University poll, which found that 60% of voters opposed military action against Iran, “a slight uptick since May.” Furthermore, a recent CNN/SSRS poll found that 74% of Americans — including about 43% of Republicans — said the war was not “worth the cost in terms of the financial burden or American casualties," the paper noted.
While some hawks are doing mental gymnastics to say war costs and domestic affordability are unrelated, other conservatives have told them to knock it off and course correct.
The Daily’s Wire’s Matt Walsh shared an X post on Monday that at the time of this writing had 4.4 million views and climbing.
“Grocery prices are insane. They’re still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader,” Walsh wrote . “End the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue.”
In response, Charlie Kirk Show producer Andrew Kolvet tried to downplay current inflation as "hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation," but also quoted one of his TPUSA college students bemoaning that, "a burrito shouldn't cost $20."
The forever-hawkish Marc Thiessen was back again, completely dismissive . "Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”
Add to that Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) who recently lost his primary by double digits. "Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates. The market does not care what you think something should cost," he posted . To which conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky responded: "Can't understand why you lost your re-election."
Hence the foreign policy-inflation-driven-burrito-cost debate that is probably still raging on X and that Ahmari insists “the neocons are losing.” He might be right .
No matter how much hawks doth protest, there are costs to any war, often including affordability .
Iran war defenders pretending otherwise is just something reality won’t afford them.
Let them eat burritos: Out of touch influencers risk all for Trump war
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at ResponsibleStatecraft.