Woe to the American consumer. The price of groceries, gas, housing, and other goods and services jumped 0.5 percent from December to January; the cost of car insurance is up 12 percent year over year and the price of eggs is up 53 percent. “On day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail. That is not happening. Worse, the White House’s early policies are making it more likely that the country’s cost-of-living crisis will endure for years to come.

Voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation delivered the White House to Trump; Americans cited the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as their No. 1 economic concern, and Trump as their preferred candidate to handle it. On his first day in office, Trump ordered the government to deliver “emergency price relief” by figuring out ways to expand the housing supply, streamline the health-care system, eliminate climate rules on home appliances, and expand energy production.

Each of those policies would bring down costs, if enacted, as would Trump’s deregulatory agenda. But as a general point, the White House has fewer ways to quickly temper consumer prices than it does to, say, bolster or lower demand—a problem that bedeviled the Biden administration too. The Federal Reserve controls borrowing rates. The housing and child-care shortages are the products of decades of underinvestment, the former also heavily influenced by municipal policies that Washington has no say in. The trillions of dollars spent by billions of consumers on billions of products generated by millions of firms—the gravitational forces of supply and demand, settled on liquid international markets and affected by government policies only on the margin—are what determine how much people pay at big-box stores and the gas station.

The policies the Trump White House has enacted are likely to make the cost crisis worse. Trump has described the word tariff as “the most beautiful” one to appear in the dictionary. He insists that adding levies to the goods produced by foreign companies will boost national industry and keep American households from getting ripped off. But economists from across the political spectrum agree that tariffs are taxes paid by domestic consumers. They increase prices.

Trump has backed away from the tariffs he proposed on Mexico and Canada in his first weeks in office. Yet he has implemented new levies on Chinese goods, spurring Beijing to retaliate with levies on American natural gas, oil, and farm machinery. This week, Trump also announced new steel and aluminum tariffs, raising costs for American automakers, energy companies, construction firms, and other businesses working in heavy industry. If Trump ends up implementing trade restrictions on Canada and Mexico as originally proposed, or ones of similar scale, the effective tariff rate on American imports would increase from 3 percent to 10 percent—the highest in seven decades.

Studies of the tariffs Trump implemented in his first term demonstrate what will happen. By the end of 2018, Trump’s trade policies were costing Americans an additional $3.2 billion a month at grocery stores and malls, while also reducing the variety of goods American consumers could purchase. And those tariffs were far more limited than the ones he has promised to impose this time.

On top of making imports more expensive, Trump is raising the cost of hiring workers and doing business in the United States by cracking down on the flow of migrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has amped up its raids; Trump is also attempting to end birthright citizenship and close the borders. Fewer undocumented workers will enter the country, and fewer will remain.

Undocumented workers, and immigrants in general, are crucial to millions of American businesses, particularly farms, construction firms, child-care providers, and delivery services. If you get rid of workers, production will go down and prices will spike. One new study found that the increase in deportations during the Obama administration led each average-size county in the country to forgo “the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of additional residential construction”—meaning 1,994 new homes—over three years. As a result, home prices jumped 10 percent.

At the same time, Trump is silencing the country’s contagion-monitoring system during a bird-flu outbreak, meaning farmers might end up culling millions more chickens and dairy cows. (Bird flu is the reason egg prices are up so much to begin with.) He is also rattling the markets, leading companies to pull back on the kind of investments that would increase domestic production—presenting “a compelling case for taking some chips off the table,” as Tiffany Wilding and Andrew Balls of Pimco put it in a note to investors.

All in all, Trump’s policies should add 0.5 percent to consumer costs this year, Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics told me, slowing GDP growth by 0.2 percent this year and 0.5 percent next year. He said he did not expect the country’s growth to be “derailed, given the economy’s strong underlying fundamentals and Trump’s willingness and ability to pivot on policy.” But it “will be meaningfully diminished.”

America is lucky that its underlying fundamentals are strong. The stock market is high; unemployment is low; wages are going up; businesses are generating big profits. Still, people are struggling with a dire housing shortage, bruising out-of-pocket medical costs, and a severe undersupply of early-childhood-education options—as well as expensive eggs and unaffordable car and home insurance. Trump has yet to put out a policy agenda that would tackle those problems in the long term, and is backing away from his campaign promise to make America affordable again in the near term too.

He seems to be betting that voters don’t care as much about the economy as they said they did. “They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue,” Trump said after his inauguration. “I said, I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue.” He added: “How many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”

Donald Trump campaigned, in part, on returning political power to American Christians. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump promised a room full of religious news broadcasters in February 2024. “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5.” At different campaign events, he vowed both that Christian leaders would have a line “directly into the Oval Office—and me” and that he would create a federal task force to “stop the weaponization of our government against Christians.” Now, not even three weeks into his new term, he has begun down quite the opposite path.

Among the Trump administration’s first efforts were orders that delivered a stunning blow to humanitarian organizations, including the suspension of foreign aid pending review, the halting of refugee-resettlement programs, the dismantling of USAID, and the freezing of all federal grants that normally flow to nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, the official domestic relief agency of the Catholic Church. Catholic Charities represents a network of 168 local groups nationwide offering disaster assistance, meals, and housing for people in need, and refugee services and programs for migrants. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the freeze was part of a broader effort to root out “wokeness,” though it’s difficult to match that descriptor to this particular organization. And although the freeze on federal grants and loans was paused two days after Trump signed the order, many organizations are still unable to access funds.

[Read: You can’t just unpause USAID]

Late last month, hundreds of leaders from Catholic relief and aid organizations met for the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, D.C. What ensued was “a scene of real panic,” Stephen Schneck, the chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me. “They were in shock, and they were disturbed, and they were feeling really panicky about the situation and wondering what to do.” Schneck recalled speaking with an attendee from El Paso, Texas, who was suddenly unable to buy diapers for babies in his charity’s care. “And this happened with no warning, no extensions,” Schneck said. “It just happened overnight.” Catholic agencies providing relief overseas were also affected by the freeze on foreign aid, which came with a stop-work order that suspended operations.

Along with the shutdown of federal funding for so many Catholic charitable organizations, Trump also revoked a Joe Biden–era policy that prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending people in or near “sensitive locations” such as churches and schools. The change elicited a statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which registered its dismay at the transformation of places for “care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need,” and called for “a better path forward that protects the dignity of all those we serve, upholds the sacred duty of our providers, and ensures our borders and immigration system are governed with mercy and justice.”

The statement set off a back-and-forth between the bishops and Vice President J. D. Vance, who responded to the bishops on Face the Nation late last month, saying that “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” The USCCB followed up with another statement, saying that “faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving refugees … In our agreements with the government, the USCCB receives funds to do this work; however, these funds are not sufficient to cover the entire cost of these programs. Nonetheless, this remains a work of mercy and ministry of the Church.”

[Read: Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message]

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

Catholic politicians disputing the bishops’ witness to the faith is nothing new, though the allegations of avarice and corruption are somewhat surprising, and presage bitter conflict ahead. Perhaps that could be helpful, insofar as it would sharply distinguish the teaching of the Church from certain politicized versions of Catholicism tailored to the ideological preferences of their confessors. The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

Dollar General (DG) is preparing employees for the increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, activity authorized by President Donald Trump.

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