By If April Fools has a patron saint in politics, it may be the candidate who promises lower costs and less war, then delivers the reverse on both. Just months into his second administration, the gap between Donald Trump on the campaign trail and Donald Trump in office has already become difficult to ignore. These were not peripheral campaign themes; they were central to the case for Trump’s return. As with so many politicians before him, the promises that helped fuel victory now sit uneasily beside the realities of governing.
The United States today carries more than $39 trillion in federal debt relative to an economy producing about $30 trillion in annual nominal output, while inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s long-run target at 2.4 percent, with core inflation at 2.5 percent. The post-COVID economy has hardly returned to a feeling of normalcy; instead, Americans remain uneasy about prices, growth, and the possibility of a downturn.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised affordability and peace. He argued that domestic mismanagement and global conflict were making life harder at home.
Affordability
“But if I win,” Donald Trump said on October 30, 2024, “We will rapidly defeat inflation and I will make America affordable again.” Yet once back in office, his administration returned to one of Washington’s oldest economic delusions: mercantilism. Tariffs were imposed haphazardly and sold as national strength, even though the costs were always likely to land at home. What was marketed as relief for ordinary Americans instead threatened to make some of the most basic pillars of affordability — housing, groceries, and other everyday goods — even more expensive.
Housing offers one of the clearest examples. The National Association of Home Builders estimates that recent tariff actions add about $10,900 to the cost of a typical new home. That burden lands in a housing market where younger Americans already lag their predecessors in homeownership. Nor was the pass-through effect hard to foresee. Americans had just lived through the inflationary aftermath of COVID-era supply shocks, and IMF research published in February 2026 found that a 100-hour shipping delay can raise consumer inflation by roughly 0.5 percentage points at its five-month peak. In that sense, the idea that tariffs would also raise costs at home was not some arcane theory. It was the plain lesson of recent experience.
Food was hardly spared either: higher steel tariffs raise the cost of tin-coated steel used in food cans, and those costs do not simply disappear inside the supply chain. The Wall Street Journal reported that steel-can prices could rise by 10-15 percent, meaning a $2 can of vegetables could cost 18 to 30 cents more.
A president who campaigned on affordability thus embraced a policy mix that put pressure on two of the most politically sensitive parts of any household budget: shelter and groceries.
The contradiction became even sharper when the tariff strategy began to unravel legally. Reuters reported that the Supreme Court ruled on February 20, 2026, that President Trump had overstepped his authority by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping tariffs, leaving roughly $175 billion potentially subject to refunds. Since then, importers have gone to court seeking recovery. More than 1,000 firms have joined, including FedEx, Hasbro, L’Oréal, Dyson, Bausch + Lomb, Costco, Goodyear, and J. Crew.
That leaves behind an especially perverse result. Consumers absorbed part of the tariff burden through higher prices, yet the legal right to seek reimbursement belongs to the importing firms that remitted the duties at the border. In other words, Americans were asked to pay more under a policy sold as patriotic affordability, while businesses are now forced into court to claw back money collected under tariffs the Supreme Court found illegal. The contradiction is difficult to miss: Trump promised to make America affordable again, but his administration delivered higher costs, legal disorder, and a growing scramble for refunds across corporate America.
Peace
Trump did not present peace merely as a diplomatic aspiration. He framed it as both a humanitarian and economic good. On the campaign trail, he repeatedly claimed he could end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in “24 hours,” said he wanted to “stop the killing,” and also promised to cut energy and electricity prices in half within his first year in office. That pairing mattered because energy markets are acutely sensitive to geopolitical disorder.
When war threatens oil supplies, shipping routes, or regional stability, energy becomes more expensive, and those costs ripple outward into transport, production, and household bills. Peace, then, is not just a diplomatic virtue but an economic good. As the old phrase often attributed to Frédéric Bastiat has it, when goods do not cross borders, soldiers will. An integrated world with free trade means less pressure on oil and gas markets, fewer disruptions to trade, and fewer external shocks passed through to households already strained by inflation.
The promise of quick peace and cheap energy has collided with a much more familiar reality. The administration’s own military posture has remained expensive, not restrained. Congress approved a record $901 billion in military spending for 2026. Trump then said the 2027 budget should rise to $1.5 trillion, and the Pentagon is now seeking more than $200 billion in additional funding for the Iran conflict.
Moody’s has warned that such an expansion would widen deficits, increase the government’s interest burden, and reduce fiscal flexibility, while budget analysts estimate the 2027 proposal alone could add roughly $5.8 trillion to the national debt through 2035 once interest is included.
Even if America’s debt problem cannot be reduced to defense spending alone, that does not make the cost of permanent preparedness any less real. It simply means the country is adding yet another major claim on already strained public finances.
That is the real April Fools joke. Trump returned to office promising to make life cheaper at home and the world calmer abroad, yet both pledges have given way to the opposite. At home, the burden came through tariffs; abroad, it came through the price of instability. What was sold as national renewal has instead come to resemble a costlier version of the status quo, leaving Americans with higher burdens, weaker confidence, and a growing sense that the slogans were always easier to deliver than the results.