politics

The Normies Care About Inflation More Than You Know

The Trump regime's fake populism has been exposed and people are looking elsewhere for help

I’ve been an anxiety-ridden, bleary-eyed American consumer for long enough to know when something about our habitual consumption feels new and weird and abnormal.

There’s lots of data and charts and graphs and polling that quantifies the low-simmering recognition that something about the American economy is fucked, of course, but there are also anecdotes that make the problems real among real people who trade their labor for a little money and hope it will be enough for them and their loved ones.

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Last August in Ocean City, Maryland, I witnessed three separate people cancel their food orders on the boardwalk over a 24-hour stretch. It was jarring and a little surreal to see it happen once. Three times felt like a call to get out of my head and pay attention to things happening around me during these unprecedented times (I would very much like to live in precedented times one day).

One morning as I was being baked in the sort of humidity Maryland does best, I watched as a guy order four bagels and four orange juices from a breakfast joint on the boardwalk. The total came out to $68.88 – I remember the exact amount because it knocked me back – and the guy sighed and said never mind, I can’t pay that for four bagels and some orange juice. I had never seen a consumer decide not to consume. An hour later, cooling off under an air conditioning unit pumping out arctic air, I saw a college-aged woman ready to buy some trinkets and a beach towel before laughing at the cashier when she announced the total.

The consumer, choosing not the consume, shook her head and smirked on the way out of the store. She was in disbelief.

Later that day at a pizza place on the boardwalk I watched – wiping sheets of sweat from my disgusting face – as an older woman ordered a single piece of pepperoni pizza and a bottle of water. The pizza was $14 and the water was $5. Nineteen bucks for a slice and some water. The lady made sure her order had been taken correctly – “I didn’t order a whole pizza” – before saying no thanks, please cancel my order. Again, a consumer made the on-the-spot judgment call that she would not consume.

I stepped up to that same pizza place counter and ordered two lemonades for my kids, both of whom acted as if we had just crawled through the Sahara. The cashier rang me up and told me it would be $18. I tried to force myself to hand over my credit card and just tear off this inflationary band-aid. I could not. I said forget it, we’ll go somewhere else. I found a nearby store that sold bottles of water for $3. It felt like stealing.

Something feels economically wrong right now, and that feeling is driving Democratic Party messaging that is slowly driving the party’s base insane during the most acute constitutional crisis in the nation’s history. The president’s personal police force has occupied opposition cities, his armed, untrained goons are kicking down the doors of U.S. citizens and murdering those citizens on camera, the military is kidnapping heads of state because it looks cool online, we're doing the impolite sort of imperialism, and elected Democrats are posting social media missives on the price of milk and beef and eggs.

Americans don’t want Canada, Venezuela, or Greenland. They want to be able to afford groceries and have lower health care costs.
— Senator Tammy Baldwin (@baldwin.senate.gov) 2026-01-13T01:09:01.667Z

It reeks of the kind of weak, focus-group tested politicking that has been beaten to hell by a rising international fascist movement that sells itself in bad-faith as populist in nature. They pretend to care about the exploding cost of living because they know it will get them elected over the feckless centrists whose skulls they want to stomp, with no intention of ever doing anything to lower costs – assuming there is something that can be done.

The fake populism of the far right, naturally, is never called out for what it is by the institutions and media outlets that need to call out the movement's weaponized bad faith, so we get right-wing populists like Trump equated to left-wing populists like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who acts in good faith and means what he says about using government to improve and enrich the lives of working people.

If you, like me, spend entirely too much of your finite time on earth scrolling the internet and reading news and conjecture and the opinions of everyone with a WiFi connection, Democrats' unshakable focus on so-called kitchen table issues – namely, that everything is so goddamn expensive today – makes you mad enough to occasionally step away from the computer as to not post something you will regret personally or professionally or legally, or maybe all three. Stop talking about the price of milk, you scream internally, when the president's paramilitary force is occupying and systematically terrorizing cities run by Democrats and defying court orders and arresting the president's perceived enemies.

Who cares, you think, about the fucking price of milk right now?

The Data Isn't Kind To The Terminally Online

The answer is everyone, or almost everyone. The terminally online mind cannot comprehend the mind of the normie, someone who does not spend inordinate amounts of time sucking up the pain and sorrow of the entire world as it is portrayed on their various social media timelines. Probably the normie is aware that an ICE agent shot and killed some lady in Minnesota. The normie does not know ICE agents in Minnesota are raiding school buses and playgrounds and kicking down the doors of daycares and telling pro-democracy protesters that they too will be executed unless they stay out of the way of the president's paramilitary force.

Here's what the normie mind does know: That their grocery bill is outrageously high, that every single item they used to buy without a second thought now makes them wince. Though normie does not expect the cost of living to remain frozen in time, they are appalled at the price increases for everything, everywhere, all the time. The normie might not even care if the Trump Justice Department prosecutes Fed Chair Jerome Powell as long as it brings down the price of the stuff on their grocery list.

A Democratic senator posting about the price of bread while imperialists within the Trump regime plan a NATO-ending invasion of Greenland strikes you (and me) as painfully out of touch, the sort of political miscalculation that is impossible to quantify. It is anything but out of touch for the normie going about their everyday lives, hearing about the collapse of the international order and the occupation of American cities somewhere in the background, droning on and on. A politician talking about the need to lower prices could not be more relevant to the normie.

Recent polling on what matters to folks, unfortunately, vindicates spineless elected Democrats who relentlessly post online and talk on cable news about eye-watering inflationary shit. It's what people care about right now, for better or worse.

No one really cares about immigration, which is interesting considering it was the central theme of the 2024 election.

Three in ten Americans say the price of shit is their most pressing issue, the highest since the option was added to the near-weekly polling question in July 2022. Inflation has been so bad for so long that the Big Boy is now bleeding significant Republican support after being greeted as a god-king last January.

One-third of respondents to an October poll said they were worse off economically than they were a year earlier; 20 percent said they were better off. That poll's tracking data does a lot to support the theory that the inflationary stuff was always going wipe out the incumbent in 2024: Nearly half of Americans polled in July 2023 said they were worse off than they had been a year earlier. Whether that belief had been egged on by powerful social media algorithms controlled by Trump allies is another question entirely.

There was clear evidence – hard data – as recently as 2023 showing inflation in the United States was mostly a product of undiluted capitalist greed. Corporate profits in 2023 drove 53 percent of the inflation that doomed Joe Biden's presidency. Traditionally – as in over the previous four decades – corporate profits explained about 10 percent of inflation. Corporate operating costs actually plunged during Biden's term while prices skyrocketed to levels that all but ensured an insurrectionist would seize the White House. Whether or not this was an intentional ratfucking situation among corporate overlords who were out-of-their-minds furious that a Democrat had dared to win the presidency, it was a non-issue in a 2024 campaign in which Americans named the Price of Shit as their top issue again and again.

That Kamala Harris' 2024 platform included a detailed plan to monitor corporate-driven inflation and punish egregious offenders didn't seem to matter to voters or the political press. That Trump had no plan to address inflation didn't matter either. Because, as Bad Faith Times readers know, plans don't matter. Policy doesn't matter. Only vibes matter. So if Harris wasn't going to get up on stage and pledge to bring the fucking pain for any corporate entity that raised your grocery bill, she might as well have said nothing at all.

The desperation of an American populace ravaged by crushing inflation has (seemingly) caught the attention of some high-profile congressional Democrats who are now urging fellow Dems to reject the guaranteed political loser that is popularism (not populism) and embrace an economic platform that can function as an off-ramp to the feigned fascist populism they chose in 2024.

The country's frothing billionaire class, Senator Elizabeth Warren said recently, senses the party's desperation in this second Trump term and has demanded that Democrats "respond to the 2024 losses by watering down our economic agenda and sucking up to the rich and powerful, claiming that a less progressive Democratic Party will win more elections." This, as Warren said, is being pushed via the billionaire-backed Abundance Agenda, favored by wealthy liberal pundits who pretend to believe we can one day return to Normal Politics, whatever that might mean.

"They are wrong," Warren said during a January 12 National Press Club speech. "Americans are stretched to the breaking point financially, and they will vote for candidates who name what is wrong and who credibly demonstrate that they will take on a rigged system in order to fix it. Revising our economic agenda to tiptoe around that conclusion might appeal to the wealthy, but it will not help Democrats build a bigger tent, and it definitely will not help Democrats win elections. A Democratic Party that worries more about offending big donors than delivering for working people is a party that is doomed to fail — in 2026, 2028, and beyond."

As a somewhat comfortable suburban-dwelling white guy in his early forties I’ve been buying shit for a long time now, grumbling about prices while sliding or scanning one of my four credit cards, trying to pretend it doesn’t count if I don’t fork over cash for whatever stupid thing I’m buying (this is where I tell you I once wrote a zombie-centric novella about consumer culture, an extremely original idea no one else has ever had in the history of capitalism). Lately I've been unable to justify some everyday expenses, the kind of purchases that used to not even register on a conscious level.

I'm sure there are ways I could pay a reasonable price for donuts, but a new Dunkin opened up across the street last week and my kids wanted to go check it out and, yes, eat a donut or six. So I walked over one evening and ordered a dozen: Six glazed, six chocolate with sprinkles. The total? Twenty-two bucks. I looked at the cashier as if to ask if she were serious about the total. Her look said: Look, I know, this is fucking crazy. Bewildered and amazed in the worst way, I looked up what a dozen donuts at Dunkin would have cost a decade ago, in 2016. The internet told me nine bucks.

Maybe you or someone in the donut industry can explain with graphs and charts why a dozen donuts costs more than twice what it did ten years ago: The ingredients are more expensive, overhead this-and-that. That's fine. I'd listen. It feels wrong though. And that's what matters to people who don't torture themselves with every horrific news item in this era of competitive authoritarianism. Inflation is going to keep people looking for leaders who can offer solutions. In 2024 that meant electing a shockingly open fascist presidential candidate who promised ethnic cleansing and lower prices.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social