WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s war in Iran increasingly looks like political poison for Republicans, giving Democrats more evidence to show voters the president’s party doesn’t care about the cost-of-living concerns that got him elected.

While the White House had hoped Trump’s speech Wednesday night justifying the war could alleviate an ongoing slide in his approval ratings, the most politically relevant comments from the president were made earlier in the day at an Easter luncheon.

“We’re fighting wars,” Trump said at the closed event, video of which has since been removed from the White House website. “We can’t take care of day care.”

He continued: “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”

Trump’s comments prioritizing a war most Americans see as unnecessary while dismissing any obligation to help families afford child care seem almost designed for Democratic attack ads. Republicans may drive the message further with the release of a White House budget supersizing defense spending while cutting the social safety net on Friday. Already, some Republicans in Congress have been talking about paying for the Iran war with cuts to social service programs.

“This is really, really bad for the midterms for Republicans,” former Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.) told HuffPost.

Ribble, who served in the House from 2011 to 2017 and was one of the few Republicans to take an early stand against Trump, said Republicans with traditional foreign policy views, such as himself, favored military intervention against Iran (albeit with congressional approval). But the public cares much more about their own pocketbooks, and the war will hurt them.

“This is going to impact pricing everywhere. And people already feel like they’re stretched thin. They already feel like Washington isn’t listening to them. They already feel like health care costs too much, and groceries cost too much, and now gas costs too much,” Ribble said.

Trump’s war has pushed the average cost of a gallon of gas above $4 for the first time in four years, AAA announced Thursday. It’s the fastest increase in gas prices in decades, and Democrats have already begun airing ads blaming it on Trump.

Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress and former top economic advisor to President Joe Biden, said the higher fuel prices will lead to even higher food prices.

“Food inflation was already elevated. Now we have higher diesel prices, with 80% of our food moved in trucks,” Bernstein said during a conference call with reporters on Thursday. “We’re already seeing big food distributors adding surcharges… which then get passed on to the retailers and the consumer.”

Trump and his allies have said high fuel prices will come down as soon as the Iran conflict winds down, which Trump suggested during Wednesday’s speech could happen in two or three weeks. But both experts and the markets expect prices to remain elevated for months at a minimum.

A senior Democratic House aide said she’s been having flashbacks to 2024 focus groups in which voters said they didn’t understand why the U.S. was sending money to Ukraine when they couldn’t make rent. Trump and his allies cast Biden’s support for Ukraine as a blunder that risked a world war.

“Republicans and Trump have managed not only to brand themselves with two of the most unpopular positions possible ― pro-foreign war and not doing shit to help people get by at home ― these two dynamics are completely reinforcing of one another,” the aide said. “Every day, Republicans are making Democrats’ arguments more credible, real and believable.”

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