By Alan Jaffe and Saranac Hale Spencer
Approximately six months into the second term of president Donald Trump, Republicans, and Democrats are making conflicting and often misleading assessments of the Donald Trump administration’s impact on inflation and prices. Both sides cherry-pick examples of consumer products to support their claims, while sometimes wrongly taking credit for lower prices or falsely casting blame for rising costs.
Experts say the reasons for the rise or fall of prices usually involve a number of factors beyond the policies implemented in the first six months of the current administration, and predictions of success or failure of those policies, including tariffs, are still to be determined.
“The economy is roaring, business confidence is soaring, incomes are up, prices are down and inflation is dead, it’s dead,” Trump proclaimed at the White House Faith Office luncheon July 14.
At a news briefing the same day, Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries offered a different portrait of the American economy. “Costs aren’t going down in the United States of America, costs are going up,” he said. “America is too expensive. And things aren’t getting better under Donald Trump and House Republican rule, they’re getting worse.”
Inflation, a major theme of the 2024 election, had increased substantially during the first half of president Joe Biden’s term, due largely to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the 12-month period ending in June 2022, the Consumer Price Index increased 9.1% – “the largest 12-month change since the period ending November 1981,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. The annual CPI moderated to below 3% for the six months before Trump returned to the White House, as we’ve written. It was 3% for the 12 months ending in January.
Contrary to Trump’s claim, not all prices are “down” and inflation isn’t “dead.” Based on the CPI, the inflation rate was 2.7% for the 12 months ending in June, and was up 0.8% from January to June. Core inflation, which doesn’t include the categories of food and energy, rose 2.9% from June 2024. In January, annual core inflation was 3.3%.
Not all costs are “going up,” either, as Jeffries suggested.
We reached out to the White House for information to support Trump’s statements, but we did not receive a response. We also asked Jeffries’ office for support for his statements, and his office said it would “let the Leader’s comments on the record speak for themselves.” Jeffries’ office also noted the rise in the CPI in June and increases in prices for groceries, beef and other specific items.
In mid-July, President Donald Trump and top Democrats offered their accounting of the Trump administration’s impact so far on inflation and prices.
Based on the Consumer Price Index, the inflation rate was 2.7% for the 12 months ending in June, and rose 0.8% from January to June, contrary to Trump’s claim that “inflation is dead.”
Groceries
At a campaign event on Aug. 15, 2024, at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump spotlighted the high cost of food under the Biden administration. Surrounded by staged displays of groceries, Trump said, “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”
Then, in an interview in the Dec. 30 issue of Time magazine, Trump backpedaled on his pledge regarding grocery prices. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he said. “You know, it’s very hard.”
Yet, during a White House lunch with the presidents of West African nations on July 9, Trump responded to a reporter’s question about the impact of his economic policies, saying, “I brought down the cost of groceries. I brought down the cost of energy, tremendously energy, tremendously groceries.”
Also on July 9, in an interview on MSNBC, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin said Trump “ran on lowering costs for people. That was the issue last year. And now every action he’s taking appears to be raising costs for families, whether that’s food at the grocery store.” Baldwin added later, “we need to make sure that … the public is crystal clear about why their grocery bill isn’t going down, but is in fact going up.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI for “food-at-home” — products bought at a grocery store or supermarket — increased from January to June by 0.6%, and was up 2.4% from June 2024. The USDA’s Economic Research Service in July estimated that for 2025, “Food-at-home prices are predicted to increase 2.2 percent,” the midpoint of an estimated range of 1.1% to 3.4%.
“Grocery prices have been accelerating,” Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the nonpartisan Budget Lab at Yale University, told us via email. “Grocery prices overall are literally up over the last five months.”
“On the other hand, a little bit of grocery inflation is typical, and it’s not clear that the president has much to do with recent grocery price dynamics,” Tedeschi said, noting the impact of climate and disease on the prices of beef and eggs in recent years.
“On the third hand, while presidents have very few levers to actually affect prices, one they do have is tariffs, and tariffs have gone up considerably this year, from a 2.4% average effective tariff rate in January,” Tedeschi said, to an average effective tariff rate of 20.6% as of July 14, according to the Budget Lab. Due to Trump’s tariffs, “Over the next year or two, we think food prices will rise 3.7% more than otherwise, and stay 3.2% higher over the longer-run (5-10 years),” he said.
The average price for a dozen grade A white eggs paid by consumers fell 23.8% from January to June, according to BLS data — contradicting Jeffries’ suggestion that all “costs are going up.”
“Most of the decline in egg prices this year was due to bird flu season ending,” explained Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas.
The price of ground beef hit a record high in June, increasing 11.1% since January, according to BLS data. That economic news prompted Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan to lay the blame on Trump. But like egg prices, factors that have caused the rise in beef prices – including drought conditions that reduced the cattle herd in the Plains and Midwest – began years ago.
As for prices at the pump, the average retail price of gasoline has stayed largely the same since Trump took office, though the cost now is relatively low for summer.
The reasons for the rise or fall of prices usually involve factors beyond the policies implemented in the first six months of the current administration, experts told Alan and Sara, and predictions of success or failure of those policies, including tariffs, are yet to be determined.
Gasoline
The average retail price of gasoline has stayed largely the same since Trump took office, though the cost now is relatively low for summer pricing.
The national average was $3.11 per gallon for regular gas the week ending Jan. 20, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which calculates the cost of all grades of gasoline across the country. It was $3.12 for the week ending July 28, a small increase of less than 0.5%. However, gas is typically more expensive in the summer because the formula used in warm weather is more expensive and demand is higher. In July 2024, for instance, the average price was $3.48 per gallon.
Overall, the price of gasoline is expected to continue its downward trend, analysts predicted at the beginning of the year.
Prices reached a peak in 2022, due primarily to a drop-off in global supply following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — which prompted sanctions against one of the world’s three biggest oil producers — and a resurgence in demand as the world came out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Trump has been claiming credit for the current prices, which are in their third year of a general decline, and making false claims about the price at the pump.
At the start of the summer, during a July 3 rally in Des Moines, Iowa, the president said that “we’ve already cured inflation. Your gas prices are way down.”
Later in the month, at a July 14 luncheon, the president exaggerated the price of gasoline, saying, “Gas prices have reached the lowest level in five decades. … I got to make sure that people can afford to produce the gas, but the gas has gone to the lowest level in decades and you’re seeing $1.99, $1.98. And I saw $1.95 at certain states.”
There’s no support for either of these claims.
“First of all, this is not the lowest in decades,” Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told us in a phone interview.
As we said, the current average of $3.12 per gallon is low for the summer, but gas was a close $3.14 in the last week of July in 2021, during Biden’s presidency, before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. And as we said, it is 1 cent per gallon higher than the day Trump took office.
The EIA numbers are national averages, but even in states where gas is cheaper, De Haan said, there’s “no way” it’s below $2, as Trump claimed. We wrote about a similar claim from the president in April and the same thing holds — none of the state averages reported by AAA have been below $2 per gallon. The lowest state price as of July 29 was an average $2.70 in Mississippi.
As for who gets the credit — or the blame — for gas prices, it’s not the president, De Haan said.
The largest factor in determining the price of gas at the pump is the cost of crude oil, which has gone down since January and is affected by markets around the world.
“It’s a balance of the global economy, not just the U.S. economy, that dictates oil and gas prices,” De Haan said.
Energy
Trump made a campaign promise to “cut energy and electricity prices in half” in his first year, but so far, those prices have largely continued to follow their already existing trends.
The CPI for energy overall is down 1.6% between January and June, but household energy rose 5.5%, according to BLS data.
The president has recently, however, claimed to have lowered energy prices. During a diplomatic lunch on July 9, Trump said, “I brought down the cost of energy, tremendously energy.”
It’s unclear what measure Trump is referring to, and, as we said, the White House didn’t respond to our questions about his statements on prices.
Some Democrats have criticized the president’s policies and made the opposite claim. House Minority Leader Jeffries, for example, has speculated that the recently passed Republican tax and spending bill will cause utility costs to increase and said on July 14, “Costs aren’t going down.”
We don’t know what will happen in the future, but we do know that the overall cost of services used for heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, and running appliances and household equipment have increased so far in Trump’s second term. Those are the measures included in the BLS index tracking household energy prices.
Electric power — which is generated by a variety of sources — accounts for the largest share of energy consumption in the U.S., according to a 2024 report from the Energy Information Administration. The average price of electricity — which Trump has singled out as a priority — has risen about 6% between January and June and is projected to continue increasing faster than the rate of inflation through 2026, according to the EIA.
Data from the BLS show a 12.2% increase in the average price per kilowatt hour in 2022 and a relatively steady increase since.
“Overall, U.S. energy prices rapidly increased from 2020 to 2022 as economic activity recovered after the worst of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine interrupted energy supply chains. Since 2022, nominal prices for many fuels have declined, particularly for those such as gasoline and heating oil that are tied more closely to crude oil prices, which are affected by international markets,” the EIA wrote in an analysis of energy prices published on May 14. “Electricity prices, though, have continued a steady increase.”
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