“We have no inflation,” President Donald Trump said in his “60 Minutes” interview Sunday evening. “Our groceries are down.”
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And with those two false claims, Trump is repeating a political mistake that haunted his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, and contributed to the Democrats losing the White House: Trump appears to be denying the economic reality that people are experiencing in their everyday lives.
Whether or not Trump is making a similar political miscalculation remains to be seen. Today’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City could serve as an indication.
Inflation is far from the crisis levels of the Biden years, but it never went away. And inflation is on the rebound again, rising in September to the highest annual rate since January in part because of the president’s tariffs.
Grocery prices aren’t down, either – they’re up across all major product categories, rising 1.4% since Trump took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Denying that reality is a tough sell to Americans, many of whom seriously hate this economy, mainly because they feel those higher prices every time they go to the store.
A new CNN poll conducted by SSRS showed that 72% of Americans say the economy is in poor shape, and 47% call the economy and cost of living the top issue facing the country.
Biden polled miserably on the economy, too.
In June 2022, as millions of Americans were grappling with the highest gas price of their lifetimes and inflation hit a four-decade high, Biden highlighted strong gross domestic product (GDP) growth.
“Look, here’s where we are. We have the fastest growing economy in the world,” Biden said on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” a claim that CNN later deemed false.
Biden conceded that inflation is “the bane of our existence,” but downplayed it by saying it’s “mostly in food, and in gasoline.”
That dismissiveness probably hurt the Democrats in last year’s election, considering Americans in 2024 said affordability was their chief concern. Even if inflation was falling, prices were still rising – just more slowly, and from painfully high levels. So voters weren’t exactly swayed by the Biden administration’s frequent statements that the economy was on fire.
“Wages keep going up. Inflation keeps coming down. Inflation has dropped from 9% to 3% — the lowest in the world and trending lower,” Biden said during his 2024 State of the Union address. “It takes time, but the American people are beginning to feel it. Consumer studies show consumer confidence is soaring.”
Voters didn’t buy it. Biden’s speech dismissed the cumulative effect of rising prices that voters were living through.
Trump’s tactics aren’t exactly Biden’s. In 2023 and 2024, Biden correctly argued that price hikes were slowing. And when Biden acknowledged high prices, he typically tried to assign blame to corporations, lambasting “greedflation” and “shrinkflation.”
Trump is just straight-up doling out untruths – and blaming Biden.
But either way, the effect may be the same. Americans don’t take kindly to politicians who refuse to see voters’ lived experiences – especially when they’re smacked in the face with high prices on every supermarket trip.
Interestingly, Trump identified Biden’s flaw, and he and his campaign frequently criticized the former president for failing to sufficiently acknowledge the pain inflation had inflicted on Americans. Trump at campaign stops would sometimes pose with groceries, commenting on how unaffordable they had become.
The consequence of becoming president, of course, is that those inherited problems quickly became Trump’s. But blaming Biden or denying reality doesn’t seem to be working. Trump is already starting to shoulder much of the blame for the bad economic vibes: About 6 in 10 (61%) say Trump’s policies have worsened US economic conditions, according to CNN’s poll.
Americans aren’t just kvetching about high prices; they’re (not) putting their money where their mouths are, and they’re changing their behavior. Chipotle, Coke, Crocs and other consumer brands said during earnings calls with Wall Street analysts last month that middle-class and lower-income customers are closing their wallets.
Despite a still-robust economy, on paper anyway, lackluster hiring is adding to Americans’ frayed nerves, as is the erosion of federal safety-net benefits. Loan defaults and delinquencies are on the rise again among some of America’s most vulnerable.
The problem with inflation is that it’s cumulative. There is a snowballing effect from years of price hikes – even if those price increases are smaller today than under Biden after the pandemic.
The typical American household is spending $208 more per month to buy the same goods and services as they were in September 2024, according to Moody’s Analytics data based on the most recent inflation report. Keep in mind that in September 2024, Trump was on the campaign trail claiming inflation was out of control.
Zooming out further, Moody’s found that due to inflation, the typical household is spending $1,043 more per month than they did at the start of 2021.
In other words, to buy the same amount of stuff that Americans purchased four years ago, they need to spend $1,000 more of their paychecks.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last week explained why Americans don’t care about metrics that politicians like to cite, including strong spending or gross domestic product booms.
“Consumers are not interested in that story,” Powell said in a media briefing Wednesday. “Their prices are higher. More than that, the reason they are so unhappy about inflation is the inflation we had in 2021, 2022 and 2023. You can say prices aren’t going up as much, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t feeling those higher prices from the inflation we had two or three years ago. They are, and that is why a large part of the public, if you sample people, inflation is still very much making people unhappy.”
Powell noted it will take time – and growing paychecks – for the effect of higher prices to wear off.
“It will feel better over time, but that will take time,” he said.
Meanwhile, the lesson for Trump may have been best stated by Democratic political strategist David Plouffe.
In “Original Sin,” the book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson into Biden’s late-term cognitive decline, Plouffe said the fatal mistake by Democrats was to deny the reality voters were witnessing.
“Never again can we as a party suggest to people that what they’re seeing is not true,” he said.
