The media and the academics they consult have not reached a perfect consensus on the cause or causes of the recent inflation.  Professor Tarek Hassan of Boston University offers the most straight-forward explanation.  “The pandemic of 2020-2022 causes massive disruptions to supply chains around the world…This caused what we call a cost-push inflation in all major economies,…”[1]  Professor Campbell Harvey of Duke University casts a wider net.  He points first to the Federal Reserve Bank’s purchase of $3 trillion worth of private and public bonds to counter the deflationary effects of lock-downs and lay-offs during 2020.  Second, the Trump administration joined with Congress to spend trillions of dollars on payments to businesses and individuals.  These were financed by expanding the deficit.  Third, says Professor Harvey, housing costs (sale prices and rents) jumped, with the median price of a home rising by 14.6 percent.[2]   

            Foreign policy elites, the people so disdained by President Donald Trump, appear to doubt that his continuation in office after January 2021 would have forestalled either of the current wars that dominate the headlines. 

In the case of Ukraine, it is argued that Vladimir Putin’s drive against an independent Ukraine has deep roots unrelated to who occupied the White House.  These range from his belief that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a world catastrophe, to his belief that Ukraine formed a part of historical Russia, to his resentment against the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) toward the steppe region of Western Asia.  Putin clearly rejected the Ukrainians’ own sense that they belonged to the “West.”  As circumstances have shown, Ukrainians have no desire to return to close links with Russia.  An earlier attempt to short-circuit movement toward the European Union had ended in a Ukrainian revolt against a pro-Russian government.[3]  The same scholars and diplomats argue that a President Trump might have urged Ukraine to surrender and certainly could not have mobilized a coherent response from the NATO countries.[4] 

In the case of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, it is argued that Trump’s Middle East policy marginalized, rather than attempted to solve, the Palestinians question.[5]  Furthermore, Trump’s policies did not stop Iran from continuing to aid and arm Hamas. 

“The ball is round and the game lasts ninety minutes.  All else is theory.”—Sepp Herbeger, coach of the West German national soccer team, 1954. 

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[1] Quoted in Angelo Fichera, “Trump Imagines Alternate Reality of World Where He Didn’t Lose,” NYT, 18 March 2024. 

[2] It may be difficult to tease-out the causes of rising home prices and rents.  The substantial creation of money could have contributed to this rise in addition to the displacement of many people that followed from work-from-home policies.  Then, these analyses focus on the Trump administration and say nothing about the further increase in the deficit from spending in the early Biden administration. 

[3] See the moving documentary “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom.” Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom | Full Feature | Netflix (youtube.com) 

[4] A 2022 poll reported that 62 percent of respondents believed that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump had been president.  This may be more of a commentary of a commentary on President Joe Biden in the aftermath of the widely misunderstood withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

[5] By inference, this may have given Hamas a greater motivation to attack Israel on a scale that would compel the world to re-engage.