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Campaign promises on affordability coming back to haunt U.S. president.
Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election a year ago in large part because of voter outrage over the high cost of living in the Biden administration’s post-pandemic economy.
With Trump now nearly 10 months back in the White House, prices for many household items are still rising, and U.S. voters are telling pollsters that they’re feeling the economic pinch.
Yet the president is pushing back, not only against the notion that his tariffs are in any way contributing to inflation, but even against the fact that costs are going up.
It’s part of the growing evidence that Trump and the White House realize they’re politically vulnerable on affordability issues but have yet to figure out how to tackle people’s cost concerns beyond denying them.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham pressed Trump on how affordability factored into the results of last week’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City.
“Is this a voter perception issue of the economy, or is there more that needs to be done by Republicans on Capitol Hill, or done in terms of policy?” Ingraham asked in an interview Monday.
Trump’s answer, in effect, was none of the above.
“More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats,” he said, then complained that anchors on other networks declare that costs are going up because the Democrats tell them to.
Ingraham probed further, asking Trump whether he was saying that voters are “misperceiving how they feel.”
He responded by talking about his lead over Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2024 election campaign and didn’t address her question.
Groceries up 2.7 per cent
During that campaign, Trump promised repeatedly to “make America affordable again.” Yet the statistics show his administration has yet to accomplish that.
The latest consumer price index figures (for September) put the price of groceries 2.7 per cent higher than in the same month of 2024, and up 1.4 per cent from January, when Trump was sworn in.
Those same statistics show prices up year over year in nearly every category of household purchases: housing up 3.6 per cent, medical care up 3.9 per cent, car insurance up 3.1 per cent and electricity up 5.1 per cent.
Despite those increases, Trump keeps insisting otherwise.
‘Everything is way down’
“Our energy costs are way down. Our groceries are way down. Everything is way down and the press doesn’t report it,” Trump said last Thursday.
“The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows it is far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump said during an event at the White House on Friday.
Trump also claimed that a typical Thanksgiving meal will be 25 per cent cheaper than it was last year. It’s a stretch at best, based on the price of a Walmart Thanksgiving bundle that is significantly smaller than last year’s version.
Polls and last week’s election results indicate that voters aren’t seeing things Trump’s way:
- The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index, a closely watched measure of Americans’ perspective on their financial well-being, dropped this month to within a fraction of its lowest level in the survey’s nearly 50-year history.
- A poll by Ipsos for the Washington Post and ABC News in late October found seven in 10 Americans saying their grocery costs have risen over the past year, six in 10 saying their utility bills are up, and roughly four in 10 saying they’re paying more for health care, housing and fuel.
- The Democrat winners in the elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and for mayor in New York City all put affordability promises at the forefront of their campaigns. Exit polling indicated voters ranked the economy and cost of living concerns as the top issues in all three races.
However, Trump can — and frequently does — point to two key consumer items whose prices have dropped: gas and eggs.
Egg prices are down from a record spike that was entirely driven by last year’s avian flu epidemic. Some 20 million egg-laying hens died or were culled in the final three months of 2024, drastically reducing the supply and sending the average price of a dozen eggs above the $8 US mark (more than $11 Cdn) in March of this year before it began dropping.
Gas around $3 US per gallon for past year
The average retail price of a gallon of regular gas has hovered within a few cents of the $3 US mark for the past year. Gas prices peaked in the U.S. in the spring of 2022, as they did worldwide after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hitting a high of $4.76 US per gallon.
Trump likes to claim his “drill baby drill” policies are bringing down the cost of energy, but there’s no evidence that’s at play in what Americans are currently paying at the pumps.
The average price was $2.96 US per gallon when Trump won the election last November. Last month, it was $2.94, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.
Over the past few days, Trump has reacted to the affordability issue with a throw-things-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach.
He floated the ideas of allowing 50-year mortgages and giving citizens $2,000 dividend cheques from tariff revenue.
He is also proposing what would be a fundamental shift from the Obamacare model of subsidizing health insurance premiums.
“Instead of going to the insurance companies, I want the money to go into an account for people where the people buy their own health insurance,” Trump told Ingraham in their Monday interview.
“The insurance will be better. It’ll cost less. Everybody’s going to be happy,” he said. “Call it Trumpcare.”
Later in the interview, the Fox News host steered the conversation back to the cost of living.
“Why are people saying they’re anxious about the economy?” Ingraham asked.
“I don’t know that they are saying it,” Trump shot back, and dismissed as “fake” all the polls that say otherwise. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”
Trump’s well-documented history of repeatedly misrepresenting data has at times worked to persuade large numbers of people that what he says is actually true.
But when Americans see the evidence in their rent, grocery and electricity bills, or when they take out a loan to buy a car that’s been made more expensive by tariffs, Trump may find it difficult to convince them that the cost of living is truly coming down.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Correspondent
Mike Crawley is a correspondent for CBC News, based in Washington. He began his career as a newspaper reporter in B.C., spent six years as a freelance journalist in various parts of Africa, then joined the CBC in 2005. Mike reported on Ontario politics for 15 years. He was born and raised in Saint John, N.B.
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Credit belongs to : www.cbc.ca
