Fact check: Trump won’t stop inflating inflation numbers

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Americans have experienced significant price increases during the tenure of President Joe Biden – but prices have not gone up nearly as much as former President Donald Trump keeps saying.

Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has a years-old habit of using inaccurate figures even when accurate figures would serve his point. During his 2024 campaign, he has serially inflated the extent of inflation under Biden.

Perhaps most notably, Trump has claimed this month that total Biden-era inflation has been more than double what it actually has been. And since last fall, Trump has also exaggerated about oil prices, gas prices, overall energy prices, bacon prices and general food and grocery prices.

Total Biden-era inflation

Trump said at a campaign rally in Georgia on March 9: “The fact is, under Biden, we have a three-year inflation rate of almost 50%.” Trump went even bigger in a CNBC interview on March 11, saying, “I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50%.”

As The Washington Post noted last week, Trump’s claims aren’t close to true. Federal figures show that cumulative inflation from when Biden took office in January 2021 through February 2024 was 18.6% – not even half of what Trump said.

Oil prices

At his March 9 rally in Georgia and March 2 rallies in Virginia and North Carolina, Trump claimed that “the price of oil reached an all-time high” under Biden.

“Not surprisingly, the claims are not true,” Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis for the Oil Price Information Service, told CNN. “Crude oil prices – the two benchmarks, WTI and Brent – hit their all-time highs in July 2008,” trading above $147 per barrel.

While oil prices did spike under Biden in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, exceeding $130 for West Texas Intermediate crude and $139 for Brent crude, they never reached record highs. And when Trump claimed in October speeches that “now it’s $100” and “we’re hitting $100 now,” both kinds of crude were below $90 – where they still were on Monday.

Gas prices

Trump made false claims about gasoline prices under Biden in speech after speech last fall.

For example, he said in a Florida speech in October that “today, you have $5, $6 and $7” per gallon. At the time, though, the state’s average price for a gallon of regular gas was about $3.42 per gallon and the national average was about $3.66 per gallon, AAA data showed – and precisely zero of the 8,237 Florida stations tracked by GasBuddy were selling gas for as much as $5 per gallon that day, let alone for $6 or $7.

Trump deployed similarly inaccurate numbers while speaking in other states. You can read more here. The national average remains much lower today than the numbers Trump has cited; it was $3.47 per gallon on Monday, AAA reported.

Energy prices

Trump claimed in a November speech in Florida that “we have the highest energy costs anywhere now.” Pavel Molchanov, a Raymond James energy analyst, said in an email to CNN at the time that Trump’s claim was not close to accurate. Citing data you can see here, Molchanov said, “U.S. electricity prices are lower than in practically every other industrialized economy.” US household prices for natural gas are also nowhere near the world’s highest.

Bacon prices

In multiple speeches in the fall, Trump claimed that bacon cost Americans “five times” what it did before Biden became president. That was wildly incorrect. Federal figures showed that the average price of a pound of sliced bacon was up by about 21.5% under Biden at the time Trump made these claims, not the 400% Trump said.

Trump could not have known this at the time he made his comments, but the average price of bacon has steadily declined since the fall. The average in February 2024, $6.56 per pound, was about 12.5% higher than the $5.831 per pound average when Biden took office.

Food and grocery prices

Trump claimed in a February 9 speech to the National Rifle Association that Biden can’t possibly get re-elected given “food that costs 40, 50, 60% more than it did just a few years ago.” At a March 16 rally in Ohio, he claimed that, under Biden, “groceries are up 30%.”

As PolitiFact noted in February, federal figures showed that overall food prices were up 20.3% over the last three years at the time of Trump’s claim of a “40, 50, 60%” increase. No major category of foods was up even 40% over that time period, either. One item in particular, eggs, was up 72%, but Trump did not specify that he was talking about one specific product.

At the time Trump claimed in Ohio on Saturday that grocery prices had increased 30% under Biden, average grocery prices had increased about 21% under Biden. The Republican Party used the correct figure in a social media post the next day.

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