Conventional wisdom suggests economic turmoil harms incumbents as people attribute responsibility for poor performance. Recently, rising inflation—a highly salient and widely felt economic issue—has dominated global political debates. However, public opinions on inflation’s causes and solutions vary due to its complexity. Incumbent governments often attempt to deflect blame onto misfortunes (e.g., natural disasters or international price shocks) or “bad” actors (e.g., political opponents) while taking credit for popular distributive policies or unexpected good news (e.g., such as discoveries of lucrative natural resources). Despite inflation’s prominence in recent elections, little is known about the effectiveness of such blame-shifting and credit-claiming strategies. To explore this, we analyze incumbent rhetoric on inflation, identify popular attributions of responsibility using survey data, and test the effects of rhetorical frames through an original survey experiment. Our study focuses on Turkey—a populist-led electoral autocracy with two decades of incumbency and high inflation levels. Turkey’s polarized electorate and economic volatility present a hard test for rhetorical interventions, yet the findings highlight how incumbents can shape economic responsibility attribution and policy evaluations. We find that exposure to blame-shifting frames reduces the extent to which individuals assign full responsibility for inflation to the government, particularly when external factors are emphasized. While these frames have weaker effects on evaluations of government policy effectiveness, the credit-claiming frames highlighting redistributive policies modestly improve perceptions of policy effectiveness. This study advances our understanding of mass opinion on inflation and elite strategies in economically turbulent contexts.