Conservative news site The Bulwark argues that the inflation which resurfaced in the United States in early 2025 was not the product of war, a supply shock, or a pandemic, but of a deliberate policy choice. Editors Jonathan Last and Jasmine M. Green contend the price increases followed directly from the tariffs President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail and imposed after returning to office, and they have coined a name for the phenomenon: "moronic inflation." The Bulwark itself was founded in 2018 by conservatives who broke with Trump's Republican Party, and its commentary has been sharply critical of him ever since.

Economists traditionally distinguish between varieties of inflation. "There's demand-pull and cost-push inflation. There's walking and galloping inflation. There's transitory inflation," Last and Green wrote in The Bulwark. "Today we have what I'm going to call 'moronic inflation.'" That, they explained, is the kind of inflation that can be illustrated with a single chart.

The editors cited a New York Fed estimate chart of tariff-related inflation showing an unmistakable decline in the period directly preceding 2025, followed by a discouraging climb in inflation costs in the early months of that year. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is one of the twelve regional banks in the U.S. central banking system, and its economists regularly publish research tracking price pressures.

According to the pair, the left side of the chart depicts the demand-pull inflation that followed COVID-19, when shocks to global supply chains combined with an influx of stimulus dollars designed to keep households afloat during shutdowns. Prices spiked as a glut of money chased too few goods, peaking around September 2022 before quickly subsiding. Last and Green credit central bankers and fiscal policy under the Biden administration for much of the subsequent drop, though they identify the reset of global supply chains as the biggest driver.

"By the spring of 2024, the growth rate of consumer goods prices was better than back to par," they wrote. "Then we have our red line. This line marks — surprise! — the second election of Donald Trump."

In the months before that election, the editors note, Trump campaigned openly on a promise to impose painful new tariffs. Tariffs are taxes levied on imported goods, and how much of their cost lands on domestic buyers — rather than foreign exporters — has long been an empirical question in economics, studied extensively during the steel, aluminum, and China duties of Trump's first term. "This was moronic on several levels," they argued. "Inflation had already abated and real wages were already positive. Tariffs increase costs and raise inflationary pressure. [And] deflation — the across-the-board reduction in prices — is not a good outcome. Deflation is always accompanied by economic calamity. No one with an IQ over 80 would ever want deflation."

The Bulwark editors were equally blunt about the electorate. "But morons/American voters heard Donald Trump's pitch and thought, What the hell do all those pointy-headed 'experts' know? They wanted tariffs and lower prices and the guy who [messed] … up the pandemic response and attempted a coup," they wrote. "And they got what wanted, which is the inflation on the right side of the graph."

In their account, Trump was handed a healthy and rising economy, imposed his tariffs, and those tariffs did exactly what the so-called "experts" said they would: they whacked economic activity and increased prices. The resulting inflation, they write, was caused by neither a supply shock nor a demand shock, and not by war, a COVID-style pestilence, or a collapse. "It was inflation caused by choice." The argument has stakes beyond the commentary page: tariffs remain a central instrument of the administration's economic agenda, keeping the question of their price effects at the center of policy debate.

"A political candidate promised to do things that would create inflation; voters chose his program against the warnings of 'experts'; inflation resumed. Moronic inflation," Last and Green concluded.

American voters, they argued, were incapable of remembering the cause of the 2022 inflation or of envisioning inflation that could be worse, and were unable to weigh the promises of a "former game show host and convicted felon" against the warnings of economists. "The only explanations I can think of for these failings are (a) a pure deficiency of cognitive ability; (b) a pathological drive for self-mutilation; or (c) a pervasive decadence/nihilism in which American society either believed itself immune from consequences or was uninterested in them," the editors wrote.

They called the situation the "exciting new phenomenon" of economic moronity, suggesting that "someday econ textbooks will include a chapter on the inflation of 2025/26 examining" it — a case whose arc will be tracked in the same New York Fed series the editors relied on.