If something sounds too good to be true, a realist would suggest that’s because it might be. When President Trump promised on the campaign trail to “end inflation,” it might have been one of those moments.
Economists may have been surprised by the campaign pledge because low, stable inflation is a symptom of a healthy economy. When consumers can expect relative price rises, they can plan their spending and saving accordingly, while businesses can also reasonably budget for increased costs.
What Trump may have been trying to convey was that he would bring down rampant price rises, after inflation had stood comfortably ahead of the Fed’s 2% target through 2024. Latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the annual rate of inflation currently sits at 2.7%.
Recent analysis, shared exclusively with Fortune, from Senator Elizabeth Warren’s team at the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee reports this year-on-year increase equates to an added cost of $2,120 per household, assuming they purchased the same goods and services in 2025 that they bought in 2024. That includes an increase of $123 on electricity bills and $150 on groceries.
Politicians on the other side of the bench might argue that prices would and should go up anyway as a result of the Fed targeting inflation to 2%, and that it is hard to quantify how much White House policy has added to price rises. However, in the context of Trump’s second administration, the question of whether tariffs and tit-for-tat trade wars have further increased costs remains relevant.
2025 was, after all, the year of Liberation Day tariffs. On April 2, President Trump announced a raft of increased duties on every nation on the planet—including those which held existing trade agreements. Since then, many partners have come to a deal with the White House, and while below the initially threatened threshold, the agreements have still resulted in increased levies on both sides.
Debate has also been rife as to whether these increased costs would bite. Trump’s cabinet has suggested the massive spike in prices many feared has not come to pass, while others point to the fact that inflation rose steadily from April through September, and remains elevated. Trump’s team has also described any jump in prices as a blip: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, said any potential inflationary pass-through as a “one-time adjustment.”
Can consumers afford to ‘look through’?
Even for a one-off, consumers still have to pay for that adjustment, argued Emma Hussey, a policy advisor to Sen. Warren on the Banking Committee. She told Fortune: “Policymakers at the Fed can debate whether to ‘look through’ inflation, but families don’t get to choose to look through higher costs. Trump’s chaotic tariffs and failed economic policies have increased prices—even if these price-increases are ‘one-time’ in the data, they’re permanent for families already stretched thin.”
Sen. Warren highlighted that President Trump had promised families lower costs from “day one,” but said his economic agenda was “squeezing families already struggling to get by. This analysis shows that Trump’s broken promises have real consequences and they show up every month in Americans’ bills,” she added.
Affordability perception has proved a difficult subject to wrangle with the voters, even if the pandemic did prove to be an extraordinary economic Black Swan event. As David A. Steinberg, Associate Professor at John Hopkins University wrote in a 2024 study: “Simply asking people to think about inflation reduced approval of the Biden-Harris administration and reduced confidence in the Democratic Party leadership’s ability to manage the economy. In other words, when people thought about inflation, their support for the Democratic Party fell.”
For the Trump administration, arguments that tariffs lead to higher prices can be offset by the sheer size of the revenue they generate: $289 billion in 2025 alone. This, in turn, the White House has promised to share with the public in the form of $2,000 rebate checks (though the economic practicality of this plan remains to be seen).
And despite some volatility, Trump 2.0 has still presided over a period of solid economic growth, with GDP up by 4.4% in the third quarter of 2025.
This was a fact the White House was keen to point out, as spokesman Kush Desai told Fortune: “The simple reality is that Americans have objectively gotten better off since President Trump took office with inflation cooling, real wages rising, and economic growth accelerating—the exact opposite of what transpired under Joe Biden.”
Credit: Source link
