One Party Can’t Govern, One Shouldn’t: Part 3
The Inflation Gamble - How Democrats Paved Trump’s Path Back to Power
Democrats will spend years asking “how did this happen?”
Here’s how: incompetence, insensitivity, and arrogance.
You bungled basic economic management. You showed callous disregard for working families. You were absolutely certain you knew better than anyone who warned you.
Voters chose the chaos they knew over the expert-managed disaster you created.
There Was No Crisis
In March 2021, when the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed:
Unemployment: 6.2% (near historical average of 5.8%)
Job gains: 379,000
Trajectory: rapidly improving from April 2020 peak of 14.8%
This was not an emergency. This was a recovery already underway. Weeks later, the March jobs report confirmed it: unemployment fell to 6.0% and the economy added 916,000 jobs.
But the Federal Reserve’s tools were maxed out. Interest rates sat at 0-0.25%, with the Fed promising to keep them there through 2023. There was no monetary safety net left.
It didn’t take an economics PhD to see what was coming. Pile trillions in fiscal stimulus on top of exhausted monetary policy, and the outcome was Inflation 101. The inflationary surge wasn’t some unforeseeable consequence; it was predictable.
Larry Summers knew. He warned in February 2021 that the American Rescue Plan was “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years.”
Read that again. Not “risky.” Not “concerning.” The least responsible in 40 years. That’s the language of catastrophe. The same level of alarm Democrats now reserve for Trump—”unprecedented threat,” “existential crisis,” “assault on democracy.”
But when that catastrophic warning came from inside their own expert class? Summers was dismissed, mocked, told to stand down. Too conservative. Yesterday’s thinking. Didn’t understand the moment.
Democrats demand everyone take their warnings seriously. But they refused to take warnings about themselves seriously.
Why They Did It
Why did they take such an obvious risk with such predictable consequences? Because they were absolutely certain they were right.
Democrats were haunted by 2008. Obama’s stimulus was “too small,” the recovery “too slow.” By 2020, the gospel became: “We went too small in 2009, and it cost us everything.” Biden had one narrow window for transformational legacy. The calculation: go historic NOW, or never. Everyone with credentials agreed: inflation risk is low, the Fed can handle it, better to overshoot.
One voice said no: Larry Summers. And he was dismissed.
This is the essence of arrogance: being so certain you’re right that warnings become invisible. Not stupidity. Not malice. The arrogance of the best degrees, prestigious positions, and a bubble of similarly credentialed people confirming your brilliance.
They knew it was a gamble. They saw two risks:
Risk A: Go too big, trigger inflation, devastate working families living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Risk B: Go too small, risk sluggish recovery, repeat 2008’s “lost decade.”
They chose to risk catastrophic inflation because they were certain they could manage it. The Fed could handle problems. Their models would let them thread the needle. They were smart enough to go big without disaster.
They chose wrong. And when inflation hit 9% and working families were drowning, they didn’t say “We were wrong.” They said “You don’t understand economics.”
Summers warned them of a catastrophe. It happened. And to this day, they won’t admit he was right. Instead, they spend their time warning the country about other catastrophes—while maintaining they committed no catastrophe of their own.
Who Bears the Cost
The people making the gamble weren’t the ones who would pay if they lost.
The decision-makers: six-figure salaries, savings that hedge against inflation, flexibility to negotiate raises. For them, 9% inflation meant adjusting portfolios.
Working families: living paycheck-to-paycheck even at $50-75k, no savings buffer, no negotiating power. By mid-2022, household savings had plummeted while credit card debt surged. For them, 9% inflation meant catastrophe. Every grocery trip: anxiety, trade-offs, sacrifice. They experienced inflation as a daily emergency.
When working families said “inflation is killing us,” the response was: “But unemployment is low! Wages are rising! GDP is growing!” They wanted acknowledgment of pain. They got economic lectures from people who’d never had to choose between rent and groceries.
Stop Blaming Voters
The party’s response since the election has been predictable: warnings about Trump, hand-wringing about authoritarianism, lectures about how voters don’t understand what they’ve done.
And the dominant excuse? “It was a messaging problem.”
This might be the most damning evidence of ongoing arrogance. “We did a good job but people didn’t understand” means: our policies were right, the problem was your comprehension. When someone says “I can’t afford groceries” and you respond with “let me explain the economic data,” that’s not a communication failure—that’s an empathy failure. The “messaging” frame treats voter pain as a perception problem to be solved with better rhetoric, rather than legitimate feedback about actual harm. The problem isn’t what we did to you. The problem is you’re not smart enough to appreciate what we did for you.
Here’s what voters understood perfectly:
Democrats in power meant inflation that destroyed purchasing power, being told the economy was fine, your pain isn’t real. Trump meant chaos, yes - but honest acknowledgment that things weren’t fine, and clear identification of who was to blame.
You want to know how we got a king? You were too incompetent to prevent it, too insensitive to see it coming, and too arrogant to learn from it. Through concrete governance failures you made working people’s lives measurably worse, while maintaining you were helping them, while dismissing their complaints as ignorance, while refusing to even consider you might have been wrong.
Try looking in the mirror if you want to know how we got Trump again.