America First Was Supposed to Mean America First

Americans are still waiting for Washington to make life more affordable. And the polls are showing it.

Diesel is $6.51 a gallon.

Gas is $4.48 a gallon.

Inflation is still running hot enough that the Federal Reserve just raised interest rates again.

This was not supposed to be the agenda when Trump was elected two years ago.

America First was at the heart of the New Right's break with the old Republican establishment: focus on Americans at home, exercise restraint abroad and stop treating every foreign crisis as America's war. New Right foreign-policy thought has included competing strands, but strategic restraint and skepticism of post-Cold War interventionism have been recurring themes.

Then came Iran.

The same foreign-policy establishment America First was built to challenge once again made the case for war. What Trump initially said would take four or five weeks has now dragged on for nearly seven months, with shifting objectives and no clear end.

The war has consumed money, attention and political capital, while its costs have reached directly into the American economy.

Now the midterms are just weeks away, and those costs are getting harder to ignore.

Diesel is up 76% from a year ago and that matters because diesel runs America. It fuels the trucks carrying food and goods across the country, the tractors working American farms and the equipment building American homes and businesses.

When the cost of diesel soars, the effects don't stay at the pump. They work their way through the economy.

Housing remains out of reach for millions of families. Grocery bills are still high. Borrowing is expensive.

Last week, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates another quarter point because inflation remains elevated, making mortgages, car loans and business borrowing even more expensive.

This is the problem Washington should have been attacking with urgency. But instead, Iran, Iran, Iran.

We've been here before. Washington identifies an urgent threat abroad. Military action follows. The mission grows, the costs mount, and Americans are eventually told that those costs are simply the price of American leadership.

America First was supposed to challenge that thinking.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday put Trump's overall approval at 32 percent. Just 17 percent approved of his handling of the cost of living. Even among Republicans, 51 percent disapproved of his handling of living costs, compared with 44 percent who approved.

Americans are telling the administration what they care about. The question now is whether Washington is listening.

America First was supposed to mean exactly that.

America first.