During Donald Trump’s first term various people declared that his superpower was shameless. Whether it is a superpower or not, the obvious shameless has continued in to his second term. One area that has unsurprisingly been on display is inflation. Donald Trump promised to lower the cost of goods, which would require deflation, but prices have been going up instead. How does he address that? Blatantly lie about it.
On Tuesday, he claimed his administration had “inherited the worst inflation ever, that we’ve ever had.” He then went on to claim “now we’re down to a very low rate of inflation, 2.7 percent, and it’s going to be a little bit lower than that. It’s almost a perfect number. Believe it or not, you don’t want to have zero. You want to have 1 percent to 2 percent, and we’re very close to that number.” The numbers tell a different story.
Trump didn’t specify what figure he was referring to, but the what matches that 2.7% in the latest month available is the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) number, which is seen as the Federal Reserves preferred measure of inflation. Here is the government’s chart of that going back in to the Biden administration:
You can see that since Donald Trump took over the figure went down from where it was at the end of the Biden administration and then went up to the level it was when he took over. Considering the rate is the same as it was under Biden,how can the “worst inflation ever” also be “very low inflation”? It could be that the worst inflation was actually very low inflation. Or in reality, Trump just claims that things are good under him and bad under other people.
Also, worth noting in the comments quoted above, he said that you want to have inflation, which runs counter to his promise to lower prices, which, would require deflation.
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