By Chris Walker
This article was originally published by Truthout
The president promised during the 2024 campaign to reverse price increases, but he has failed to deliver.
For months, President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that food prices have gone down under his watch — but a new federal report shows that prices have increased overall since he reentered the White House, particularly for some staple items.
Trump has peddled false narratives regarding price decreases at several junctures, including in late November, when he claimed that costs for groceries were down by 25 percent, citing the price of an annual deal offered by Walmart on holiday foods.
“My costs are lower than the Democrats on everything,” Trump boasted in a Truth Social post at the time.
In reality, the price of the deal from the superchain went down in large part because it included fewer items than in previous years.
A new Consumer Price Index (CPI) report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published earlier this week demonstrates that food prices went up over the past year.
For the category of “food at home” (e.g. grocery food items), costs increased at a rate of 2.4 percent year-over-year. For the broad category of meats (beef, pork, ham, poultry, seafood, etc.), prices increased by 6.9 percent. On specific items within that category, price increases were more profound — the cost of ground beef, for example, went up by 15.5 percent in 2025. Coffee, which two-thirds of Americans drink each day, also saw sharp price increases, going up by 19.8 percent.
There is no sign of the price increases stopping anytime soon — indeed, the change from November to December, a 0.7 percent uptick in food costs, was the fastest increase in grocery store prices in over three years.
The new report isn’t necessarily alarming compared to food price jumps just after the pandemic, agribusiness professor Ricky Volpe told The New York Times, but it does “hammer home the point that when the current administration claims that grocery prices are down, that is, of course, not correct.”
The report also refutes Trump’s claims of having done a better job on food prices than his predecessor, former President Joe Biden — in the final yearly CPI report of Biden’s term, grocery prices increased by just 1.8 percent, meaning food price increases during Trump’s first year back in office were 1.33 times higher than they were under Biden’s last year.
Some of the higher costs can be attributed to Trump’s tariff policies, including higher prices on coffee and some imported fruits.
During the 2024 presidential election season, Trump promised not only to stop inflation, but to reverse price increases, including on groceries and other consumer goods.
“Groceries, cars, everything. We’re going to get the prices down,” Trump said at one point during the campaign.
Yet a recent report on inflation shows that prices on all goods have gone up by 2.7 percent — not a significant difference from the 2.9 percent inflationary rate when he took office.
Trump has refused to take any responsibility for higher costs, despite claiming he could bring prices down. Meanwhile, Americans are paying, on average, around $700 per month more than they did before on basic needs.
“It’s a con job by the Democrats,” Trump complained in November, after special elections across the U.S. featuring the issue of affordability saw Democrats defeat many Republican candidates.
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