Money

THE BLAME ROTATION

White House blames Biden, then Iran, then Iran again, one day apart, as prices keep climbing

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 13 November 2026

On the night the returns came in, the White House picked its first author for the loss: bad candidates. The explanation lasted about as long as the counting did. One day later, Vance put his name directly on it, posting that the war cost Republicans the midterms. Trump agreed the same day, with a caveat — Iran, he said, could not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Two excuses, filed one day apart, by the same two men.

The war carrying all that blame has a price tag of its own. By mid-September the Congressional Budget Office had priced it at nearly $40 billion and called that estimate conservative. The number that explains the war does not explain the election.

The war that was supposed to explain the Republican loss was, by that reading, explaining something else — the bill at the register.

Three names are now on three excuses: bad candidates, the war, the war again. The inflation and producer-price numbers that actually track with a midterm loss carry no name at all; they just kept climbing. On Thursday, Senator John Kennedy declined to sign any of the three. He told the Washington Examiner the economy "belongs to President Trump," rejecting the Biden excuse outright. In the same day's Hill interview he rejected the second one too, telling Vance to "put down the crack pipe" over the Iran explanation, and said the real reason "is a lot deeper than that."

The numbers Kennedy was pointing to without naming arrived on schedule. The Daily Caller ran the headline "Major Inflation Indicator Hits Highest Rate Since Biden Era," with the line underneath reading simply "the wrong way." Hours later, the Washington Examiner reported the producer price index rose two-tenths of a point to 6.5 percent for the year ending in October — not the Biden-era high the White House keeps citing as someone else's problem, but a new one, logged on Trump's own ledger. The Hill, the same day, ran the gala at Mar-a-Lago beside the grocery line: a jungle theme, a cost of living, and a tale of two Americas that didn't need the metaphor.

Three excuses changed hands in nine days. The two numbers that didn't move in anyone's favor are the ones nobody in the briefing room claimed credit for.

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