As Donald Trump’s trade war kicks into high gear, consumers are already reporting that they are feeling it in their pocketbooks — and that is going to come back to haunt Republican lawmakers.

According to a Friday afternoon editorial from the conservative Wall Street Journal, if GOP lawmakers lose their seats in next year's midterms, they can look back ruefully to the time when they let the president go wild with tariffs.

The editors wrote that Trump has tried to convince consumers that others will pay for the tariffs, but the prices they are paying tell a different story.

Noting that some companies are absorbing the price increases at the moment, they suggested, “But these companies can’t do this forever. Meanwhile, cash lost to paying tariffs or paying tariff-induced higher prices isn’t available for reinvestment in the business, or to return to shareholders.”

“All of this poses a political problem for Mr. Trump and Republicans,” the editors predicted. “The President promises voters that foreigners will pay for his tariff policies. These price data caution that the economy may have other ideas. Americans will pay a big chunk of the tariff bill, either directly via higher consumer prices or indirectly via less business investment in productivity growth to increase wages.”

Noting that growing inflation is also having an impact on consumer wallets, they pointed out, “Inflation is a broad-based, persistent increase in the general price level. Tariffs in that sense aren’t inflationary unless the Fed accommodates them with over-easy monetary policy. But tariffs do raise prices on tariffed goods, which can mean a one-time surge with some potential downstream effects.”

That, in the long run, will be a problem for Republicans after Trump ran in 2024 on keeping prices and inflation down, the board wrote.

“Republicans are in the political danger zone if tariffs cause price increases—one-off or persistent—that aren’t offset by bigger wage gains,” they wrote before predicting, “Republicans will make the same mistake as the Biden Administration if they keep telling voters everything is fabulous but the evidence at the grocery store or Applebee’s tells them something different.”

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