Consumer prices rose 0.5% last month compared to December — the fastest monthly increase in prices since August 2023, according to Consumer Price Index data. And it could soon get even worse with wholesale prices remaining elevated, often a precursor to higher consumer prices.
The pain is most acute at the grocery store, where consumers are confronting soaring egg prices — if they’re lucky enough to come across any eggs — due to avian flu outbreaks nationwide. And despite Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill” to bring gas prices down, Americans are paying four cents more for a gallon of regular fuel on average than when he returned to the White House on January 20, according to AAA data.
Unsurprisingly, Americans aren’t pleased. A new CNN poll shows 62% of Americans feel Trump hasn’t done enough to tackle inflation. Nearly the same share of Americans view inflation as “a very big problem,” according to a Pew Research poll published on Thursday.
Team Trump in ‘clean-up’ mode
To be fair, it was probably unrealistic to expect prices would come down immediately once Trump was back in the Oval Office. And, frankly, it would have been a huge concern if prices had plunged right away.
But, as Vice President JD Vance said in a CBS News interview last month, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“Consumers are going to see lower prices at the pump and at the grocery store, but it’s going to take a little bit of time,” he added. Translation: My boss misspoke previously.
He has a point — barring black swan events like a global pandemic, economies don’t tend to significantly reverse course overnight. And if prices did manage to come down as rapidly as Trump promised, it likely would mean the economy had bigger problems on its hands.
The other approach Trump and his administration are employing when asked why prices aren’t coming down is a politician’s tried and true playbook: blame your predecessor.
“BIDEN INFLATION UP!” Trump posted on Truth Social last week after January inflation figures were released.
“If Joe Biden had simply held federal spending at the pre-pandemic levels we had in 2019, we right now, we would have virtually no inflation,” Trump told attendees at the FII Priority Summit in Miami on Wednesday.
But fear not: “We’re addressing inflation,” Trump’s top economist, Kevin Hassett, who leads the National Economic Council, told reporters during a White House press briefing on Thursday.
“And how are we doing it? Well, we’re doing it with a plan that President Trump and I and others have talked about in the Oval that involves, like, every level of fighting inflation.”
That plan — or to use Trump’s verbiage, concept of a plan — involves cutting government spending and “supply-side things,” Hassett said. “We’re still going to see some memory of Biden’s inflation — it’s not going to go away in a month,” he added.
Trump has outlined an inflation-reduction plan that involves a combination of cutting taxes, ramping up energy drilling leases, and unleashing DOGE to cut spending (and, perhaps, share some of that directly with taxpayers). But tax cuts could worsen America’s debt load and drive borrowing costs even higher, energy companies are not jumping at the chance to drill more while demand slumps, and writing stimulus checks could overheat the economy — and reignite inflation.
White House spokesman Kush Desai defended Trump’s promise to bring down prices immediately, telling CNN that “within hours of assuming office, President Trump took immediate executive action to deliver economic relief for everyday Americans by unleashing American energy, slashing costly regulations, and reining in runaway government spending.”
One month isn’t enough time to make progress on inflation
In general, most economists would agree that one month is not a meaningful length of time to judge how a nation’s economy is faring. Rather, they tend to prefer to analyze several months’ worth of data to shake out one-month blips from longer-lasting trends.
Similarly, it would be reasonable to wait several months before assessing whether Trump’s policies have had a positive or negative impact on inflation. After all, it took more than two years for inflation to cool from a four-decade high of just over 9% in 2022 to a level that is now just shy of the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
But Trump forfeited that grace period the moment he promised immediate relief — which Americans have yet to see.
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