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The Republicans swept the elections because of inflation and public disorder.

The year was 1946. The end of wartime price controls had sent prices soaring. Railways, coal mines, and steel mills were shut by strikes. The Republican message was clear and convincing: “Had enough?”

Yes, said the voters, they had. Democrats lost 55 seats in the House, 12 in the Senate. The Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress, after spending the preceding decade and a half as the minority party in both.

All seemed set for a huge GOP win in the 1948 presidential election. A leading candidate for the nomination that year was Robert Alphonso Taft, the eldest son of former President William Howard Taft. Robert Taft represented Ohio in the U.S. Senate, where he’d accumulated a staunchly conservative voting record. He opposed foreign aid, distrusted foreign-military alliances, and championed a high protective tariff for American industries.

[Read: President Taft, the anti-Trump]

In September 1947, Taft toured California. National and local reporters closely followed the probable next president. Some 50 journalists gathered when Taft called a press conference in an auditorium in Santa Cruz. Taft was asked about the cost of living because prices were rising fast, even faster than in the previous year, when voter discontent had already been burning hot.

Seldom has a single answer to a reporter’s question sunk a political career so rapidly and totally. Here’s how Time magazine reported what came next:

Bob Taft was talking matter-of-factly, almost abstractedly, as if he were speaking across a committee table. But for a fraction of a second, every man in the room looked up and stared as if the Senator had just pulled out his penknife, opened it, and absently swallowed it.

Taft had been discussing the high price of food and what he thought should be done to allay it. “Voluntary reduction of consumption,” he said, “is the first step. We should eat less … eat less meat and eat less extravagantly.” He went right on talking. The Chicago Daily News’s Ed Lahey broke in, gave him a chance to get off the hook by asking: “Do you think that would cover the whole populace?”

“Yes,” the Senator said. “Hoover suggested the same thing some time ago. He suggested that we ought to start … a campaign to save food and eat less.”

At Taft’s next appearances, hecklers chanted “Eat less, eat less.” Democrats ridiculed him as “Eat Less Taft.” The following year, Republicans rejected Taft as their nominee in favor of the more progressive and internationalist Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York. The GOP had lost its momentum: At the general election, the Democrats held the presidency and regained control of the House and Senate.

I think of “Eat Less Taft” as I hear President Donald Trump’s appointees defend their administration’s consumer-crushing tariffs. On Meet the Press this past Sunday, the near-billionaire Treasury secretary proclaimed that “the American dream is not ‘Let them eat flat-screens’” and “the American dream is not contingent on cheap baubles from China.”

Scott Bessent’s denigration of affordable televisions was not a one-off gaffe. In a speech to the Economic Club of New York on March 6, he stuck to the script: “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” A few days later, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked on television whether the Trump tariffs were worth the risk of recession. Lutnick delivered an emphatic yes: “These policies are the most important thing America has ever had. It’s worth it.” President Trump alluded to an impending “disturbance” in his March 4 speech to a Joint Session of Congress. Questioned later in the Oval Office about a possible recession, he euphemistically acknowledged a “period of transition” ahead.

[David Frum: The price America will pay for Trump’s tariffs]

So get ready to Eat Less.

At least Taft’s message offered some kind of hope at the end—and, of course, it wasn’t Taft’s personal fault that food prices had risen. But Trump’s tariffs are Trump’s fault, and it’s clear that if he has his way, they will be permanent.

Trump promotes tariffs as a way to shift the costs of financing the U.S. government from Americans to foreigners. His commerce secretary suggests that tariffs might do away with the need for income taxes altogether. Income taxes fall most heavily on the affluent; tariffs fall most heavily on the middle class and poor. Trump has sold his party on tariffs as a way to redistribute the cost of government away from his donors to his voters.

At the same time, Trump’s tariffs are advertised to do a dozen other magical things. They promise to stop Chinese currency manipulation, as well as to stop fentanyl from coming into the United States. They are supposed to compel foreign governments to do more of the government regulation that the United States wants (for example, to police intellectual-property theft) and less of the government regulation that the U.S. does not want. Even with this wish list, the tariffs make no sense. If cheap Chinese goods are your issue, why tax Canadian aluminum and Mexican glass? If your goal is to encourage other countries to increase their defense spending, why start a trade war with Australia after it already made a down payment on three U.S.-made nuclear-powered submarines?

Trump is a flimflam man who will promise anything to anybody and count on the suckers forgetting tomorrow what he said yesterday. His Cabinet officers, however, are gradually revealing the true cost of the Eat Less scam. They do not match Taft’s self-harming candor. But their real message of “Less for you, more for us” is reverberating louder and clearer.

If any House Republican was going to resist President Donald Trump’s effort to unilaterally bulldoze the federal government, Representative Tom Cole would be at the top of the list.

As the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Cole is the keeper of Congress’s purse, which the Trump administration has repeatedly seized for itself. But even Cole, now 75 and in his 12th term representing Oklahoma, is just fine with Trump and Elon Musk slashing the government without approval from Congress. When, during negotiations over federal spending this month, Democrats insisted on restraining Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Cole rejected their demand out of hand. I thought I detected a hint of satisfaction when he recalled his refusal: “I’m sorry, that’s not happening.”

Rather than trying to curb DOGE’s authority, Cole has worked behind the scenes to adjust its targets—in at least one case pushing back on cuts that would have hurt his constituents. Earlier this month, Cole told me, he and Musk sat down over bourbon and cigars to discuss DOGE’s mission. Cole said he gently encouraged Musk to consult members of Congress before making cuts. “I guarantee I know my district better than anybody in DOGE, or anybody in Treasury, or anybody in these departments,” Cole told me, summarizing his message. “So it’s usually wise to talk to me … If I think it’s a wrong move, I’m going to say no, and I’m not going to be part of it.”

Cole said the billionaire acknowledged that DOGE had made mistakes. “When we make them, we’ll fix them,” he recalled Musk saying. “So far,” Cole told me, “I’ve found them to be good to their word.”

[Brian Klaas: DOGE is courting catastrophic risk]

When I asked Cole to explain his support for an agency that clearly encroached on Congress’s prerogatives, he offered a cold political calculus. “A Republican Senate, a Republican House is not going to chain down a Republican president,” he told me last week. Democrats “wouldn’t have done that to Barack Obama or Joe Biden. We’re certainly not going to do that to President Trump.”

Cole is nothing like a typical Trump supporter in Congress. He’s an institutionalist who has been willing to oppose conservative hard-liners, and he owes his position not to Trump or the MAGA base but to years of developing close ties with powerful Republicans inside the Capitol. But Cole’s defense of DOGE is not exactly a shock to those who know him. He’s a staunch ally to party leaders who, earlier in his career, ran the House GOP’s campaign efforts. And Trump and Cole have been on good terms for years. During his first term, the president would sometimes call Cole to praise his TV appearances.

Cole knows where his voters are and where the party is. Sometimes he lets their opinions dictate his own. On January 6, 2021, hours after hundreds of Trump supporters ransacked the Capitol, Cole voted against certifying Biden’s presidential victory in two states—a decision he attributed entirely to respecting the views of his Oklahoma constituents, whose support for Trump reached a nearly two-to-one ratio.

Still, Democrats have long viewed Cole as a Republican they can make deals with—a rarity in today’s GOP. When Republicans were struggling to find a speaker after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy in 2023, some Democrats mentioned Cole as a possible compromise choice. (He did not want the job, he told me at the time.)

So Cole’s support for Musk and DOGE has disappointed Democrats. In a hearing last week, Representative Joe Neguse, a Colorado Democrat, sharply criticized Cole for backing DOGE while also asking the Trump administration to reverse its plan to close federal offices located in and around his district.

In our interview, Cole offered no apologies. “If I think they’re wrong, I’ll bring it to their attention,” he said of DOGE. “I’ll argue my case, and hopefully I’ll be able to persuade them.” But Cole hasn’t objected to Trump and Musk effectively closing USAID on their own, even though he supports foreign aid. “It might need to be shut down,” Cole said, referring to the agency. Isn’t that Congress’s job? “Well, yeah,” he replied, “but Congress doesn’t always do its job. When Congress doesn’t do its job, I’m not going to be mad at an executive [branch] that’s trying to save money.”

We were speaking inside the Capitol, a short walk from the House chamber where Cole was leading the debate over a bill that Republicans soon muscled through to fund the government for the next six months. Democrats argued that the measure would further empower Trump to wage his war on the government, which many of them believe has precipitated a constitutional crisis. Cole, who was a historian before he became a politician, thinks that view is a bit much.

The power struggle between Congress and the president, he said, “is as old as the Constitution. We go back and forth all the time.” He and other Republicans argue that Trump’s efforts to expand presidential power to cut spending is no different from Biden’s repeated attempts to forgive student-loan debt over the objections of both Congress and—in their telling—a Supreme Court ruling. The question of whether Trump has overstepped legal bounds, Cole said, “will be settled in the court.”

[Read: The ultimate Trump story]

I asked Cole if he was worried that Trump would defy judicial orders. “No, I don’t think so,” he replied. And even if Trump did ignore the courts, Cole suggested, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. He noted that past presidents have disregarded rulings without terminating the republic. “I don’t defend that, but it’s not like this is some unprecedented assault on democracy,” Cole said. “I’m not going to worry too much,” he told me, referring to potential constitutional crises. “We’ll deal with them as they come up.”

Cole has a tendency to sound like a mere observer, which he is not: Lawmakers in his position have wielded immense power over funding, which they’ve used to curtail House speakers and even the occasional president. But serving as the appropriations chair matters somewhat less in a party that wants to cut spending, especially when that party is content to let the White House get its way. Cole seems okay with that. “If we ultimately disagree, well, we’ll just fight it out. That’s not unusual,” he told me. “Do I have better success with this administration than the last one? Sure. Welcome to politics.”