The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its July Consumer Price Index data this morning, showing that inflation rose 2.7 percent on an annual basis—lower than the 2.8 percent economists had anticipated.
Monthly prices ticked up by just 0.2 percent, holding steady amid ongoing economic pressures. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, came in at 3.1 percent annually, a touch higher than expected, but the headline number tells a clearer story: despite months of dire warnings from the left about President Trump’s tariffs igniting runaway inflation, the figures simply didn’t deliver the catastrophe they predicted.
Critics in the media and Democratic circles have spent the better part of 2025 hammering away at Trump’s trade policies, claiming that tariffs on imports from China, Canada, and other nations would slam American consumers with higher costs across the board. They’ve painted pictures of skyrocketing prices for everything from appliances to apparel, insisting that these measures would undo years of progress on taming inflation. Yet here we are, with the latest report showing inflation not only below forecasts but also cooling slightly from prior trends in key areas. Energy prices dropped 1.1 percent in July, and food costs remained flat, providing real relief to working families.
Even some economists who have been skeptical of tariffs are admitting the impact hasn’t been as severe as feared. Jared Bernstein, a former White House economist under Joe Biden, noted, “The tariffs are in the numbers, but they’re certainly not jumping out hair on fire at this point.”
Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, added, “Inflation is on the rise, but it didn’t increase as much as some people feared. In the short term, markets will likely embrace these numbers because they should allow the Fed to focus on labor-market weakness and keep a September rate cut on the table. Longer term, we likely haven’t seen the end of rising prices as tariffs continue to work their way through the economy.”
Ajay Rajadhyaksha, global chairman of research at Barclays, echoed this sentiment: “You are starting to see tariff impact on the goods side, but it is also true that so far the impact every month has been a little bit less than you would expect. It is very much an inexact science.”
These admissions from experts highlight how the alarmist rhetoric has outpaced reality. Tariffs have indeed affected certain categories—like household furnishings, which rose 0.7 percent—but others, such as apparel and vehicles, showed minimal or no change. Businesses have adapted by stockpiling goods or absorbing costs temporarily, preventing the widespread price hikes that doomsayers promised.
From the White House, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran put it plainly: “What we’ve seen time and again is President Trump has a great track record on these calls. What we’re seeing now, in real time, is a repetition once again of this pattern, where the president will end up having been proven right, and the Fed will, with a lag and probably quite too late, eventually catch up to the president’s view.”
Trump’s tariffs aren’t just about short-term prices; they’re about long-term fairness in trade, protecting American jobs from unfair foreign competition, and bringing manufacturing back home. Studies show that while tariffs may raise some costs initially, they also boost domestic production in protected industries, adding billions in output that benefits U.S. workers.
The left’s fearmongering ignores these benefits, focusing instead on hypothetical disasters that keep failing to materialize. Remember the hysteria over the 2018-2019 trade actions? Economists now acknowledge that those tariffs didn’t derail the economy as predicted, and today’s data suggests history is repeating itself. Inflation remains well below the peaks we saw under the previous administration, and with the Federal Reserve eyeing rate cuts, markets are responding positively—futures rose after the report, signaling confidence in Trump’s economic stewardship.
Many economists have long argued that strong trade policies strengthen America, not weaken it. Today’s numbers prove that point once more, exposing the tariff scaremongers for what they are: partisans more interested in undermining the president than in acknowledging economic resilience. As tariffs continue to level the playing field, expect more good news for American families and fewer excuses from the critics.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
