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In these last weeks before the midterms, Democratic candidates have been gaining ground by talking about two things: the affordability crisis and political corruption.
If Democrats regain control of Congress and genuinely want to respond to affordability, they’ll need to do everything possible to root out corruption.
Trump’s war on Iran is causing Americans to spend almost 50% more on gas on average. And the diesel fuel needed to transport almost everything else we buy now averages more than $6.00 a gallon, which is also being passed on to consumers.
These price increases due to Trump’s war tell only half the story. The other half is the political corruption at the root of the war – enriching Trump’s friends and family.
The war has been a huge windfall for Big Tech supplying the military – such as Palantir, a core artificial intelligence and data-integration partner for the US Department of Defense, founded by Trump’s and JD Vance’s ally Peter Thiel.
Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump have invested in an array of companies that have business before the Pentagon and have reaped substantial awards. Most of their investments in defense contractors occurred after Trump was elected for a second time.
Trump’s tariffs offer another example of higher prices connected to corruption. The tariffs are import taxes that have increased annual household costs by an estimated $1,100, according to The Budget Lab at Yale.
Again, though, the price increases tell only half the story. The tariffs have enabled Trump to give out tariff waivers and carve-outs to industries and companies that do him favors.
After Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, donated more than $1m to Trump’s inauguration and promised major domestic investments, Apple got tariff exemptions for products produced in China, all of which saved Apple huge amounts of money.
After Elon Musk sank a quarter of a billion dollars into Trump’s 2024 campaign, Tesla got a tariff exemption for electronics.
Reyes Holdings, a bottler and distributor that ranks among the largest privately held companies in the US and is owned by brothers who have donated millions to Republican causes, benefited from a tariff exemption for polyethylene terephthalate, used to make plastic bottles. And so on. (The White House has said no companies have been granted special exemptions.)
A third example linking higher prices to corruption is artificial intelligence. Together with the costs of Trump’s war in Iran, AI’s borrowing of over $500bn so far this year has contributed to sky-high interest rates on mortgages, auto loans, and credit card overdrafts. And AI data centers are raising electricity prices in areas where data centers are sucking up energy.
As with the war and the tariffs, Trump’s support for AI is tied to political payoffs. According to a CNBC analysis of FEC records, megadonor contributions from AI, crypto, and online gambling executives have overwhelmingly favored Republicans, with 14 of the 20 largest donor groups nearly exclusively backing GOP candidates or outside groups.
Under Trump and his Republican enablers, the richest Americans and biggest corporations have made out like bandits.
To see how Trump’s war, his tariffs, and his support for AI interact on prices, consider housing affordability, which is among voters’ top concerns.
While Trump’s war and encouragement of AI have contributed to the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate rising to over 7%, Trump’s tariffs have caused the prices of lumber and building materials to soar. The National Association of Home Builders estimates that tariffs on lumber and building materials have added $10,900 to the cost of constructing a new US single-family home.
The price of copper, a key material for electrical wiring in residential and commercial construction, has risen 40% in the past year due to Trump’s tariffs and the demands of data centers – adding even more cost to building a typical home, which requires hundreds of pounds of copper.
A final illustration of the close connection between rising prices and corruption is Trump’s tax cuts that have mainly benefited America’s wealthiest corporations and individuals, but have come at the expense of healthcare for average Americans.
To pay for the tax cuts demanded by their largest donors, Trump and congressional Republicans have slashed Medicaid and failed to renew healthcare tax credits. As a result, millions of Americans are now forced to spend far more for health insurance coverage or do without it altogether.
If Democrats regain control of Congress, they will need to focus not only on alleviating high prices but also on eliminating the causes of those high prices. It will be impossible to do the former without attacking the latter.
To do this, Democrats will need to do whatever they can to root out corruption. In addition to ending Trump’s war and his arbitrary tariffs, they must reform campaign financing – such as matching public financing with small-dollar donations. They’ll also need to resurrect the systems of accountability Trump has dismantled, such as the independent civil service, independent inspectors general, the Office of Government Ethics, and the Federal Election Commission.
What can you do besides voting to throw the bums out and getting everyone you know to join you? If Democrats regain control of Congress, push them to do whatever they can to tame prices, raise wages and end the corruption of the Trump Republican regime.
Under Trump and his Republican enablers, the richest Americans and biggest corporations have made out like bandits. Average working Americans are paying dearly for what the bandits have stolen. The grift and the graft must end.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK
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