As rising prices hit Americans, Trump continues to insist on lower costs

Donald Trump won the US presidential election a year ago largely on voter outrage over the high cost of living in the Biden administration’s post-pandemic economy.

While Trump has been back in the White House for nearly 10 months, prices of many household items continue to rise and American voters are telling pollsters they are feeling the economic pinch.

Yet the president objects not only to the idea that his tariffs are somehow contributing to inflation, but also to the fact that costs are rising.

It’s part of mounting evidence that Trump and the White House realize they are politically vulnerable on affordability issues, but have yet to figure out how to address people’s cost concerns beyond denying them.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham weighed in on how affordability factored into last week’s election results in Virginia, New Jersey and New York.

“Is this a problem with voters’ perceptions of the economy, or is there more to be done by Republicans on Capitol Hill, or in terms of policy?” Ingraham asked in an interview Monday.

Trump’s response, in fact, was none of the above.

“More than anything else, this is a scam by the Democrats,” he said, then complained that anchors on other networks are saying costs are going up because Democrats are telling them to.

Ingraham probed further, asking Trump if he was saying voters are “misperceiving how they feel.”

He responded by talking about his lead over Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2024 election campaign and did not answer her question.

Groceries up 2.7 percent

During this campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to “make America affordable again.” Yet statistics show his administration has yet to achieve that goal.

The latest Consumer Price Index figures (for September) show Grocery prices are up 2.7 percent from the same month in 2024 and 1.4 percent from January, when Trump was sworn in.

These same statistics show that prices are increasing year over year in almost every category of household purchases: housing up 3.6 percent, medical care up 3.9 percent, auto insurance up 3.1 percent and electricity up 5.1 percent.

Despite these increases, Trump continues to insist otherwise.

“Everything is broken”

“Our energy costs are down. Our groceries are down. Everything is down and the press isn’t talking about it,” Trump said last Thursday.

“The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everyone knows it’s a lot cheaper under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump said at a White House event Friday.

Trump also claimed that a typical Thanksgiving meal would be 25% cheaper than last year. That’s overkill at best, based on the price of a Walmart Thanksgiving package that’s significantly smaller than last year’s version.

Polls and last week’s election results indicate voters don’t see things Trump’s way:

• The University of Michigan’s consumer confidence index, a closely watched measure of Americans’ views of their financial well-being, fell this month to a fraction of its lowest level in its nearly 50-year history.

• A poll conducted by Ipsos for the Washington Post and ABC News in late October found that seven in 10 Americans say their grocery costs have increased over the past year, six in 10 say their utility bills have increased and about four in 10 say they are paying more for health care, housing and fuel.

• The Democratic winners in the elections for governor of Virginia and New Jersey and mayor of New York have all put promises of affordability at the forefront of their campaigns. Exit polls indicated that voters ranked the economy and cost of living as the top issues in all three races.

However, Trump can – and frequently does – point the finger at two key consumer products whose prices have fallen: gasoline and eggs.

Egg prices are down from a record rise driven entirely by last year’s crisis. avian flu epidemic. Some 20 million laying hens died or were slaughtered in the last three months of 2024, sharply reducing supply and pushing the average price of a dozen eggs above the average price of a dozen eggs.e US$8 (over CAN$11) in March of this year, before starting to decline.

Gasoline around US$3 per gallon last year

The average retail price of a gallon of regular gasoline hovers within a few cents US$3 mark for the past year. Gas prices peaked in the United States in the spring of 2022, as they did worldwide after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reaching a peak of US$4.76 per gallon.

Trump likes to claim that his “baby drilling” policy is lowering the cost of energy, but there is no evidence that this plays a role in what Americans currently pay at the pump.

The average price was US$2.96 per gallon when Trump won the election last November. Last month, it was $2.94, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Over the past few days, Trump has responded to the affordability issue with a throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach.

He floated the idea of ​​allowing 50-year mortgages and giving citizens $2,000 dividend checks from rate revenues.

It also proposes what would be a fundamental shift from the Obamacare model of subsidizing health insurance premiums.

“Instead of going to the insurance companies, I want the money to go into an account for people where people buy their own health insurance,” Trump told Ingraham during his Monday interview.

“The insurance will be better. It will cost less. Everyone will be happy,” he said. “Call it Trumpcare.”

Later in the interview, the Fox News host brought the conversation back to the cost of living.

“Why do people say they are worried about the economy?” » asked Ingraham.

“I don’t know if they say that,” Trump retorted, calling all polls that said the opposite “fake.” “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”

Trump’s well-documented history of repeatedly misrepresenting data has at times succeeded in persuading large numbers of people that what he says is actually true.

But when Americans see evidence of it in their rent, grocery and electricity bills, or when they take out a loan to buy a car made more expensive by tariffs, Trump may have a hard time convincing them that the cost of living is actually falling.