By Zachary Klonoski

If you’re like me, you’ve been doing the math at the grocery store cash register. Coffee is up nearly 20 percent from a year ago, and beef more than 16 percent. Electricity prices climbed 7 percent this year; gas passed $4 a gallon nationally a month after the illegal/unconstitutional attack on Iran began on Feb. 28, and here in Eugene it has hovered right around $5 all fall.

Donald Trump’s tariffs, an illegal tax Congress never passed, cost the average household about $1,745 last year and is projected to increase to approximately $2,500 in 2026. Oregon importers paid nearly $3 billion in tariffs from March through December 2025, and the Oregon economists tie about 750 lost manufacturing jobs directly to them. 

The farms, mills and small businesses in this district pay more for everything they need to stay open, and they pass it on to us. And when the Courts struck down those tariffs as unconstitutional, Trump didn’t refund the money to the people who paid those higher prices, he wrote million-dollar checks to some of the largest corporations in the country — the same ones that bankrolled his campaign. 

Then came the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” It cuts Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade. One in three Oregonians relies on Medicaid, and rural Oregon is projected to lose about $400 million a year in federal health care funding, the money that keeps small-town clinics and hospitals open up and down this district. More than 70,000 Oregonians lost SNAP food benefits between April 2025 and April 2026, and Oregon food banks logged a record 2.9 million visits. Food for Lane County reported last year that demand at its pantries has doubled over the past four years.

Then the attack on Iran — the biggest foreign policy disaster since President George W. Bush invaded Iraq. Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the extra gas and diesel bill since February at about $1,000 per household. Add last year’s tariffs, and the typical family is out roughly $2,745, before counting the care and services our communities are losing. And when people said out loud that they were struggling, President Trump called affordability “a hoax and a con job by the Democrats,” and later summed up his true feelings quite succinctly, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s own ledger looks very different. Forbes put Trump’s net worth at $2.3 billion on its 2024 billionaires list. By March 2026, it was $6.5 billion, with crypto ventures — an industry his own administration regulates, and which provides nothing of value to the country and to the American people — adding about $1.8 billion in the past year alone. 

And that doesn’t even take into consideration the hundreds of millions of dollars taken in through corrupt deals brokered by his children and The Trump Organization. Disgustingly, Trump’s youngest son, Barron, has racked up a net worth of $150 million during Trump’s second term and he is barely out of high school. Trump is clearly looking out for his family and their future, not yours. 

This is self-dealing on a scale that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, and Oregonians are paying for it.

Congress has the tools to investigate and stop it: the subpoena, the power of the purse, and constitutional authority over tariffs and war. The Republican majority has chosen not to use them. A Democratic majority would ban stock trading for members of Congress and the executive branch alike, take back its authority over tariffs and war, bring real oversight to an administration that has so far escaped it, and impeach the president for his nearly innumerable impeachable offenses. 

That majority will be decided by a handful of seats, and ours is one of them.

Rep. Val Hoyle has been plain about what she’d do with a majority: Use Congress’s constitutional power over war, tariffs and power of oversight. She co-sponsors the bipartisan TRUST in Congress Act to ban members of Congress and their families from trading individual stocks. When the SNAP cuts came, she stood in Eugene and called them what they are: “moral negligence.” And she has delivered for this district, bringing home about $31 million in infrastructure investments.

This is not a safe seat. Hoyle won by fewer than eight points in 2024, and she faces the same Republican opponent this year. So the question in this race is simple: Would her opponent vote to check this president? The Republicans currently running Congress have already shown us their answer.

Trump’s up more than $4 billion. You’re down about $2,745 and counting, and the counting doesn’t stop on its own.

Trump told you the pain was in your head. Your ballot is your answer. Fill it out, return it by 8 pm on Nov. 3, and vote for Val Hoyle and a Congress that will finally hold this president accountable.

Zach Klonoski lives in Eugene with his wife and 2 kids and practices law at the Center for Nonprofit Law.