Historical analogies are always risky, but between a strained economy, record fuel prices and a brutal new round of polling, President Donald Trump is giving off unmistakable Jimmy Carter vibes — at least when it comes to the political cost of inflation.

Carter, in this telling, was a capable president undone by forces beyond his control, above all inflation. By the end of his term it exceeded 10 percent, after peaking at 13 percent in 1979. Rightly or wrongly, fairly or not, he became defined by his inability to tame it.

Inflation currently stands at just 3.4 percent — a long way from Carter-era levels. But the author argues Trump is on a similar course, with one crucial difference: rather than merely failing to contain rising prices, he is actively pushing them up through a trio of choices the columnist characterizes as illegal deportations, illegal taxes and, above all, an illegal war.

Carter confronted oil shocks that drove prices higher; in this reading, Trump is generating them. Diesel prices broke records four days in a row, with gasoline following suit. Because fuel costs feed into nearly everything else, food prices are feeling the squeeze. And just as the public turned on Carter, it appears to be turning on Trump, with disapproval of his handling of inflation now widespread.

A new Fox poll puts Trump 50 points underwater on the issue; a new Marquette University survey puts the figure at 61 points. Not even Carter, whose presidency was effectively ended by inflation, fared that badly.

"Worse than Carter, worse than Reagan, worse than Biden," CNN's Harry Enten said. "He is worse than all three of those, and he is worse than any poll himself with this minus 61 points. Literally, the worst of all time."

The stakes extend beyond a single presidency. Inflation did not merely confine Carter to one term; it discredited liberalism as a legitimate school of thought. That verdict was unfair — Carter was not economically liberal — but was how Ronald Reagan and his allies portrayed him, and Reagan rode the framing to dominance in 1980, winning all but six states.

A lasting consequence was the public perception that the New Deal and Great Society — federal programs that advanced liberty, equality and justice for all — were simply too expensive. They were abandoned or hollowed out over time. The result, in the author's words, is a world of Reagan's making, in which ordinary Americans wade through thickets of red tape to obtain public assistance while the obscenely rich receive handouts with no strings attached.

In that sense, Carter's term was the hinge of history: the end of an epoch running from the Great Depression through stagflation — the era when high inflation and stagnant growth coexisted — and the beginning of another that started with "supply-side economics," the school holding that tax cuts and deregulation drive growth, and has arrived at what the author calls an age of impunity and corruption. It has the feel of an end-stage development. Something is going to break in this decade the way it broke in the 1970s.

The question is whether Trump will be identified with that break the way Carter was with his.

Much will depend on Trump himself. It is widely understood that he defeated Kamala Harris because the electorate trusted him on inflation — even though inflation was in fact falling in 2024, just not fast enough to catch up with a public opinion shaped during the pandemic. He promised to bring prices down on Day One. He did not.

Not only has the president accelerated an already high cost of living with what the author deems terrible choices; he refuses to take responsibility for them. Instead, he badgers voters into accepting inflation as the cost of — well, no one is quite sure what. His stated reasons for attacking Iran have shifted, but the most often cited is preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. The column notes Iran was not close to reaching that stage of development. Even that goal has not satisfied his fiercest supporters, some of whom have taken to begging him on social media to end the war and bring diesel prices back to normal.

Carter has clearly been on Trump's mind. In June, the Associated Press asked why he had not dispatched US Special Forces to remove Iran's uranium. "I didn't feel like being Jimmy Carter," he replied.

"That recalled the failed 1980 raid to free US hostages that killed eight American servicemen," the Associated Press reported in July. "Trump also said in March that the unsuccessful mission 'cost them the election' against Ronald Reagan in 1980, sounding cognizant of political realities in a way he didn't when using Carter as a punchline."

Now Trump faces a hostage crisis of his own — except that, as the column puts it, he is the hostage. CBS News reported that an adviser to Iran's supreme leadership said the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow Persian Gulf chokepoint for global oil shipments, will remain closed until Trump and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu are "removed from power."

"Our fighters will not open the Strait of Hormuz until they bring the criminal Trump and thethirsty Netanyahu down from the seat of power," said Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, the leading adviser to Mojtaba Khamenei, according to Iranian state television.

There is a crucial difference between the two presidents' situations. Carter's choices did not cause inflation, yet he was blamed for it. Trump's choices, the author argues, did cause it — and voters appear ready to blame him in numbers large enough to put even Texas in play.

A new Sienna poll suggests Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton by six points (49-43 percent), Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa leads Republican Governor Greg Abbott by four (49-45 percent), and Democrats are nearly even on the generic ballot, with Republicans at 47 percent and Democrats at 46 percent — a pattern that would amount to an earthquake in the Texas legislature.

If that pattern held for two more years and Democrats continued to make inroads, it would suggest a national earthquake as well: in the author's assessment, there is no path to victory for a Republican presidential candidate without the 40 electoral votes of the Lone Star State.

Whatever happens in November's congressional elections, Trump will still be president. He will still make choices the author considers terrible, and those choices will keep pushing inflation upward. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates Wednesday — its principal tool for restraining rising prices — and is expected to raise them again by year's end, but that may prove too little, too late.

Two years is a very long time — long enough for Trump-blaming to become permanent, and long enough, perhaps, to discredit the MAGA movement and the ideological underpinnings of the last 45 years. The mainstream once called "supply-side economics" a policy. By 2028, the column suggests, the mainstream might be calling it theft.

Trump's MAGA, in this framing, is the end stage of Reagan's conservatism. If Texas is lost, that might be the end of both.

The author concedes the limits of the exercise: these historical analogies have been made before, and proved wrong too many times to inspire much confidence. Still, the moment has a familiar ring. The politics of the late 2020s may prove as pivotal as those of the late 1970s. Epochal transitions are usually triggered by crisis. The pandemic once seemed the obvious candidate, and Trump's first term was once compared to Carter's. But perhaps the real crisis has always been covid's long tail of inflation. History, it seems, is rhyming.