Fact check: Trump’s lying spree about inflation
By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump went on a lying spree about inflation last week.
Grocery prices. Gas prices. Prescription drug prices. Overall prices. Over just three days, Trump made false claims about all of them.
Trump was discussing the issue of “affordability” after Democrats won state and local elections Tuesday in part by campaigning on the cost of living. He argued that this theme was “a con job by the Democrats” given how successful he said he has been in lowering prices.
But Trump repeatedly used inaccurate statistics and assertions to make his case that Democrats were dishonest. Here is a fact check.
Prices are up during this Trump presidency
Over and over, Trump claimed overall prices have fallen since he returned to office in late January.
“Every price is down,” he said Thursday. “Everything is way down,” he said at another Thursday event. “Prices are down under the Trump administration, and they’re down substantially,” he said Friday, adding, “Everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden. And the prices are way down.”
None of that is true.
Prices are up during this administration. Average prices were 1.7% higher in September than they were in January, according to the most recent figures from the federal Consumer Price Index, and 3% higher than they were in September 2024. There has been inflation every month of the term, and far more products have gotten costlier than cheaper.
Inflation has accelerated to 3%
Trump claimed Friday: “We have almost no inflation. We’re down now to 2%.” He said at the same event: “Inflation is almost nonexistent.”
Those claims are slightly more accurate than Trump’s late-October claims that “we don’t have any inflation” and that “we’re down to 2%, even less than 2%.” But the new claims are still wrong.
Inflation not only very much continues to exist but has been accelerating since the spring. As of September, the year-over-year inflation rate had increased for five consecutive months.
The September rate, 3%, was the same as the rate in January, the month Trump returned to the White House. Inflation of 3% is simply not inflation of 2%. (Core inflation, which omits volatile food and energy prices, was also 3% in September.) And this “2%” claim wasn’t a one-time slip by Trump; he claimed in late October, “We’re down to 2%, even less than 2%.”
Grocery prices have increased, not decreased
Trump claimed on both Wednesday and Thursday that “groceries are way down.” But grocery prices are actually up. Average grocery prices rose 1.4% between January and September, Consumer Price Index figures show, and they rose 2.7% between September 2024 and September 2025. The 0.6% increase in average grocery prices from July 2025 to August 2025, meanwhile, was the biggest month-to-month spike in three years – and it was followed by a 0.3% increase from August to September.
It isn’t just beef. Dozens of grocery products have gotten more expensive
Trump has repeatedly claimed that beef is the only grocery product whose price has increased this term. “Groceries are way down, other than beef,” he claimed Wednesday. “We have much lower prices than (Democrats) do, and we only have one thing, beef,” he claimed Thursday.
This is also false. The prices of dozens of individual grocery products increased from January to September. A smattering of products got less expensive over that period, most notably eggs, but a far greater number of products got more expensive; you can see a list here. Prices increased from January to September in five of the six overarching groups of grocery prices tracked by the Consumer Price Index.
Prescription drug prices can’t come down ‘1,200%’
Trump continued to use mathematically impossible figures when making claims about how much he is supposedly reducing prescription drug prices. “We’re bringing drug prices down to levels nobody ever thought was possible, tremendous cuts, 200%, 300%, 500%, 700%,” he claimed Thursday, adding later, “now we’re cutting it 1,000%, 1,200%.”
Trump has had some success in pushing drug companies to cut the prices of some medications; he made these comments at an event announcing reductions in the prices of certain blockbuster obesity drugs. But far more medications have not had their prices slashed – and regardless, Trump’s professed reductions in excess of 100% make no sense even if he is talking about a small number of specific drugs. A price reduction of 100% would make a drug cost $0, so a reduction of 200% or more would mean Americans would be getting paid a substantial amount of money to acquire medications. That is not happening.
Gas prices aren’t the lowest in two decades and aren’t close to $2 per gallon
Trump has been making false claims about gas prices for months. He claimed Wednesday: “Gasoline prices have plummeted to the lowest in two decades.” That was not even close to true given that the national average on Wednesday was $3.08, according to data provided by AAA – higher than it was on various days under Biden in January of this year, as well as during 2020 and early 2021 (amid the Covid-19 pandemic) and during much of the 2000s and 2010s. “Plummeted” is also a stretch given that the AAA national average was $3.12 per gallon on the day Trump returned to office in January and $3.10 per gallon one year before Wednesday, both just barely higher than Wednesday’s $3.08 per gallon.
It’s possible Trump was attempting to refer to the federal Energy Information Administration’s estimate in September that drivers will this year spend “the smallest share of their disposable income on gasoline since 2005.” But that’s an estimate, not a certainty, and it’s simply not the same thing as Trump said about gas prices alone; “there’s a big difference between ‘lowest gas prices in 20 years’ and ‘least amount of your paycheck going to fill your tank in 20 years,’” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, noted to CNN. It’s not necessarily your paycheck, either. The federal estimate is based on overall disposable income in the economy, so some Americans have less than the estimate while others have more.
Trump also made other false claims about gas prices last week. On Thursday, Trump claimed, “We’re at almost $2 for gasoline.” On Friday, he claimed, “We’re a little bit above $2 right now for gasoline.” Even granting Trump some wiggle room for the words “almost” and “a little bit,” there is no reasonable argument that a national average above $3 per gallon is “almost $2” or “a little bit above $2.” (De Haan said GasBuddy found one gas station, out of the tens of thousands of stations the company tracks, that sold gas for under $2 per gallon last week – and even that station only did so for a single day.)
Biden-era inflation was high, but Trump didn’t inherit the worst ever
Trump, echoing a claim he has made for months, said Wednesday that Biden “had the highest inflation rate in the history of our country.” Trump said Friday: “We took over a mess. The highest inflation in recorded history.”
It wasn’t the highest in history, as CNN and others have noted in numerous articles. Trump could have fairly said the inflation rate hit a 40-year high under Biden in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but that was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920 – and Trump didn’t mention that it had declined to 3% by Biden’s last partial month in office in January, the same as the most recent Trump-era figure for September.
Trump’s claim was also incorrect if he meant the Biden presidency set a record for cumulative inflation over the course of a presidential term; the Biden-era increase was much smaller than the increase during President Jimmy Carter’s term.
Oil and gas prices are down, but not household energy prices
Trump claimed Friday: “Energy prices are way down from what they were last year.”
But the Consumer Price Index shows that household energy prices are up substantially over the last year – 6.2% higher in September 2025 than they were in September 2024.
It’s possible Trump was not meaning to refer to household energy. A review of his recent comments suggests he often uses “energy” to describe either gas prices at the pumps, which have fallen a little over the past year, or oil prices on world markets, which have fallen more substantially.
So we won’t label this Trump claim false given that he could have been talking about the price of a barrel of oil. But when he doesn’t define the term “energy,” and speaks about it while discussing consumer prices, he leaves his assertion open to a possible misinterpretation.
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