On Tuesday night, Donald Trump chatted briefly with reporters on a tarmac and boasted about inflation. “Prices are dropping fast,” the president said.
The rhetoric was wrong but familiar. In fact, a month earlier, the Republican similarly claimed, “Inflation is way down. Everything is great. The prices are coming down.”
The latest inflation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics wasn’t horrible, but the figures do not show that consumer prices are “dropping fast.”
The consumer price index showed prices rose 0.1% in July and were up 3.4% from a year earlier. If we exclude food and energy and look at what’s known as core CPI, prices rose 0.2% last month.
To be sure, these aren’t awful numbers. In fact, they’re entirely in line with expectations headed into the release of the latest statistics.
But the figures flatly contradict the president’s misplaced boasts, and they reflect inflation that’s still higher than when Trump took office a year and a half ago.
What’s more, the new CPI data comes less than a week after an ugly employment report — the U.S. economy actually lost 23,000 jobs in July, which followed related disappointment in the latest gross domestic product data, which showed weak and disappointing growth in the spring and early summer.
As recently as four days ago, Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council and the top economist in the White House, told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “The bottom line is that, if you look at the overall economy, then things are really, really booming.”
Reality keeps telling a very different story, and the more Team Trump effectively tells Americans, “Don’t believe your wallets or the data coming out of the Trump administration; everything’s actually great,” the more public opinion research shows a nation filled with people thoroughly dissatisfied with the economic status quo.
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