On Monday, August 10, 2026, Rudy Yakym went on NewsNation's Morning in America and got asked the question his party has been dodging for a year.

The setup: the day before, RNC chairman Joe Gruters had told NewsNation, "This is Biden's prices that we're still dealing with, and we're still getting under control."

Host Markie Martin put it to Yakym directly:

"Congressman, do you think that's a winning message to just say it's not our fault? And 18 months in, is it not Trump's economy yet?"

Yakym's answer:

"You know, President Trump was certainly left with a mess to clean up. But when you're left with a mess, what you do is you roll up your sleeves and you go to work. That's what President Trump has been doing since day one."

He came back to it a moment later: "We just do what we do in the Hoosier State. We roll up our sleeves, we go to work, and you'll find me and the Hoosiers that I serve to be happy warriors in that endeavor."

Eighteen months into the term. Still the last guy's fault.

What Yakym said when the tariffs started

The thing that makes this one worth writing down isn't the dodge itself. It's that Yakym has a record on exactly the policy driving the prices — and he was proud of it.

On February 20, 2025, he toured a manufacturing plant south of Nappanee and defended the administration's tariff threats to the RV trade press. His argument was that tariffs are leverage and Trump is good at using them:

"Look at the way he leveraged tariffs back in his first administration, look at how he's leveraging tariffs today."

A co-owner of the plant, Darren Miller, told him what business people actually needed to know: "If it's Trump just using it as a leverage tool, a temporary leverage tool, it's whatever. If it's a two-year thing, it's a big deal."

His brother asked Yakym straight out whether companies should start moving their supply chains. Yakym's answer was that he was hearing a lot of that: "We're getting a lot of incoming feedback on that right now."

A month later, on March 20, 2025, he told ABC57 that the RV industry was raising "tariff issues, which we are certainly being their voice inside the administration on," and that he'd gotten "loud and clear feedback" about the Canada and Mexico tariffs.

Being their voice inside the administration. That was the promise. It's now been a two-year thing.

What it did to Indiana

On August 5, 2026, the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois published the arithmetic. As Indiana Legislative Insight summarized the findings:

• The average Hoosier household paid $2,600 more because of the 2025 tariffs alone — $3,600 counting the earlier rounds
• Indiana's economy shrank by $2.65 billion
• 9,148 Indiana manufacturing jobs were eliminated
• Hoosier small-business importers paid an average of $586,000 more

Indiana came out second-worst of the six Midwest states studied, behind only Michigan. Low-income households took it hardest.

That is not a mess anyone inherited. That is the bill for a policy Yakym publicly defended while it was being written.

And it landed on his district hardest of all

Yakym represents Elkhart County. More than 80% of all RVs in the United States are built there and in the surrounding area, and those companies and their suppliers support 126,000 jobs across Indiana. It is the single most tariff-exposed industry in the state, and it sits in his district.

Since April 2025, RV manufacturers have been paying a 19% import tax on Luan — the lightweight plywood used to build motorhomes, which comes almost entirely from Indonesia.

Then the layoffs came. In May 2025, Thor Industries — the world's largest RV maker, headquartered in Elkhart — filed WARN notices for layoffs across its brands effective June 20: five Cruiser RV plants in Howe, six Heartland Recreational Vehicles plants in Elkhart and one in Middlebury, and a DRV plant in Howe. A Heartland facility across the state line in Sturgis, Michigan closed the same day, taking 121 more jobs.

And this month it got worse in a new way. On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down the emergency-powers tariffs as improperly imposed — including the Indonesia tariff that a newly negotiated trade deal had just removed. On Saturday, Trump announced a 15% across-the-board tariff on every country in the world under a different law.

Elkhart calls that whiplash. Manufacturers who spent eighteen months rebuilding supply chains around one set of rules now don't know which set applies.

Yakym's public position on all of it, this Monday, was that the president is rolling up his sleeves.

He is not the only Hoosier running this play

Yakym's neighbor Erin Houchin published an op-ed titled "Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing" — the same study that priced the damage at $2,600 a household counted the 9,148 factory jobs Indiana lost after she wrote it. In Minnesota, Brad Finstad spent two straight years telling farmers the tariff pain was "short term" and then voted twice to protect the tariffs causing it. In Kentucky, Andy Barr co-chairs the Bourbon Caucus while the tariffs hit the distillers he represents.

The script is always the same. Defend the policy on the way in. When the prices arrive, change the subject to the last administration.

There's nowhere to ask him about it

Here's the part that closes the loop.

In that same March 2025 interview, Yakym said he was "very accessible around Indiana's second district" — that he travels "to all 11 counties, every single month, hear from Hoosiers, hear what their concerns are."

What he does not do is hold a town hall. In March 2025, hundreds of people rallied outside his Mishawaka office asking for one on tariffs, Social Security and high prices. He described them as "individuals whose sole intention is to disrupt and create chaos." In April 2025, hundreds more filled a community town hall in South Bend that he was invited to and, organizers say, never responded about.

What he offers instead is "mobile office hours" run by his staff. His own office says those sessions "are not town halls."

So a Hoosier who paid $2,600 more last year, or who got a WARN notice from an RV plant, can watch their congressman tell a national TV audience that this is still Biden's mess — and has no room to walk into and say otherwise.

We deserve better.

Source

GOP Rep Pressed on Blaming Biden for Economy 18 Months Into Trump Term — The Daily Beast, August 10, 2026. Tariff impact figures from the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois' Project for Middle Class Renewal, summarized by Indiana Legislative Insight, August 5, 2026. Photo: The Daily Beast.