On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump responded to Iran downing a US Army Apache helicopter during a ceasefire by telling the Wall Street Journal that it “wasn’t a big deal.” About 24 hours later, he responded to inflation surging above 4% for the first time in three years by saying, “I love the inflation.”
The one-two punch of flippant comments epitomizes Trump’s increasingly tone-deaf approach to addressing Americans’ concerns about the Iran war and the economy.
Repeatedly in recent months, Trump has responded to Americans’ growing concerns not with empathy, but by pretending their pain didn’t exist — or that it was actually good.
And he’s now assembled a remarkable list of ham-fisted comments.
Below are some of the most prominent examples, ranked by how insensitive they were and how politically troubling they could be for Trump’s party ahead of November’s midterms.
9. His comments about troop deaths
Trump has often struggled to speak tactfully about the sacrifices of American troops, and that’s surely the case now that he’s personally sent them to war.
After the first three deaths in the Iran war were reported, Trump immediately seemed to insert the deaths into a cost-benefit analysis.
“We have three, but we expect casualties,” Trump told NBC News. “But in the end, it’s going to be a great deal for the world.”
In a later video, Trump seemed to ad-lib while talking about the deaths, saying, “That’s the way it is,” and wagering there would be more deaths.
Democrats quickly pilloried him for the quote.
8. Saying rising oil prices are kind of a good thing
Trump has occasionally suggested that rising oil prices are actually good because the US is producing more of it.
“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump said on social media back in March.
Of course, certain people will benefit. But the vast majority of Americans don’t work in the oil industry, and thus the rising prices are a burden.
7. His weird comments about dolls and pencils
Trump last year repeatedly suggested that Americans dealing with rising prices in part due to tariffs could simply buy their children fewer dolls and/or pencils.
“Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know,” he said in April 2025.
Trump later made a similar argument about pencils.
“You know, you can give up certain products,” he said. “You can give up pencils, because under the China policy, you know every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two.”
6. Telling rich people in Davos he was making them lots of money
Trump’s populist political movement is supposed to be about helping the working class and pushing back on the moneyed interests, the fat cats and the globalist crowd that gathers for an annual economic conference in Davos, Switzerland.
But there he was in Davos in January, amid significant economic pains back home, bragging about his policies were enriching those assembled.
“I don’t even ask anybody how you’re doing now,” Trump told a gathering of CEOs. “It’s like everybody is making so much money.”
He added that “we’ve given you a platform where you can really put your genius to work.”
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