The year-over-year inflation rate in January, the month President Donald Trump returned to the White House, was 3.0%.
The year-over-year inflation charge in September, the most up-to-date month for which Consumer Price Index figures have been launched, was … the same, 3.0%.
The indisputable fact that the inflation charge eight months into Trump’s time period was unchanged from the one he inherited has debunked his triumphant claims that “inflation has stopped” after he “inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.” So what is a White House to do when the actual comparisons aren’t working in its favor?
Trump’s workforce has chosen to use some misleading comparisons – deploying apples-to-oranges units of statistics to serve Trump’s level. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried it from the podium on Thursday.
Kaitlan Collins, NCS anchor and chief White House correspondent, famous to Leavitt that inflation is about the place it was final yr, that grocery prices are up, and that financial alerts are combined. Leavitt claimed: “Inflation is down from where it was, as measured by the overall CPI; it has slowed to an average 2.5%. This is down from what the president inherited. The president inherited 2.9% in January” – it was 2.9% in December – “today it’s at about 2.5%. So we’re trending in the right direction with more to come.”
But the inflation charge is not “trending in the right direction,” or no less than wasn’t as of the most up-to-date obtainable numbers (the November numbers come out subsequent week). In truth, September was the fifth consecutive month the year-over-year inflation charge elevated from the month prior, Consumer Price Index figures present. Specifically, the charge was 2.3% in April, 2.4% in May, 2.67% in June, 2.7% in July, 2.9% in August, and, once more, 3.0% in September.
So what was Leavitt speaking about when she spoke of Trump reaching a 2.5% common? She defined later in the briefing. When one other reporter reminded her that the most up-to-date inflation charge is the similar 3.0% it was in January, not “2.5%,” Leavitt stated, “No, it’s 2.5%. It’s 2.5%, the average CPI right now; I have it in front of me: In President Trump’s first eight months in office, inflation, as measured by the overall Consumer Price Index, has slowed to a 2.5% average pace.”
In abstract: after Leavitt was reminded of the inflation charge for a specific month, January, she cited a mean of eight months of inflation charges from February by way of September. That’s not a like-to-like comparability. And the eight-month common conveniently understates the present inflation problem as a result of it incorporates the decrease charges from Trump’s first three months again in workplace, earlier than and instantly after the president announced his sweeping world tariffs in early April. Inflation began accelerating in May.
Also, it’s value noting a smaller level: 2.5% isn’t even the easy arithmetic “average.” The easy common of the final eight months of year-over-year inflation charges is 2.7% – the determine the White House utilized in a social media graphic in late November and that Leavitt herself cited at the starting of the Thursday briefing. The White House defined to NCS in a while Thursday that Leavitt was citing the eight-month “annualized” rate when she invoked the “2.5%” determine, although she didn’t use the phrase “annualized” herself.
The comparability in that White House social media graphic was much more unmistakably misleading.
In massive textual content, the graphic stated “9.1% Inflation under Biden” and “2.7% Inflation under Trump.” Only in a lot smaller textual content did it clarify that this, too, was an apples-to-oranges comparability.
While the 2.7% charge the graphic attributed to Trump is the eight-month common for this Trump time period by way of September, the 9.1% charge it attributed to Biden is the single one-month peak charge for the Biden presidency, the charge in June 2022. For apparent causes, the graphic didn’t be aware that the charge had plummeted to 3.0% by June 2023, that it fell additional to 2.4% in September 2024, or that it was at 3.0% in Biden’s final partial month in workplace in January 2025.
Leavitt tried a model of this peak-versus-average comparability at the starting of the Thursday briefing, saying that “under the painful Biden years, inflation reached a record-high 9%,” whereas beneath Trump, “inflation has dropped to an average of just 2.7%.” Neither of these numbers is false, however Leavitt didn’t level out that the record-high 9% beneath Biden occurred in a single month about two-and-a-half years earlier than Trump returned to workplace.