Trump Lied. (But You Knew That.) He Promised to Lower the Grocery. Tariffs Pushed Inflation Up

Jul 16, 2025 10:21 PM EDT, Wed

Inflation picked up again in June, as Trump’s trade tariffs pushed prices higher

The White House keeps insisting that inflation is a thing of the past. The latest Consumer Price Index numbers help prove otherwise.

July 15, 2025, 12:04 PM EDT By Steve Benen

On a nearly daily basis, Donald Trump attacks Jerome Powell, his own handpicked chairman of the Federal Reserve, in unusually caustic terms. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, the president went so far as to tell reporters, “We have a moron at the head of the Fed,” adding, “He’s a moron.”

There’s no great mystery behind the over-the-top rhetorical offensive: Trump wants Powell to lower interest rates, which would accelerate economic growth. Powell, meanwhile, has already explained that he would’ve already lowered interest rates were it not for the White House’s radical trade tariffs agenda, which the Fed chairman has said will push prices higher.

While monetary policy can get rather complicated, this is relatively straightforward: Inflation spiked after the pandemic, but began improving during the latter half of Joe Biden’s term. Powell hopes to prevent a return to high inflation, a task made more difficult by the president’s insistence on tariffs, which are likely to punish American consumers.

Trump, when he’s not engaging in juvenile taunts and name-calling, has responded to these concerns by arguing that concerns about inflation are a thing of the past. “I brought down costs more than any President in recorded history,” the Republican wrote to his social media platform last week, pointing to developments that only occurred in his imagination. Days earlier, Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, told a national television audience, “Inflation has been defeated. Inflation is gone.”

That’s not quite right. The New York Times reported:

Inflation accelerated in June as President Trump’s tariffs started to leave a bigger imprint on the economy, keeping the Federal Reserve on track to hold interest rates steady when policymakers next meet this month. The Consumer Price Index rose 2.7 percent from a year ago, the swiftest pace since February, data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed on Tuesday. That is slightly higher than expected and is up from an annual pace of 2.4 percent in May.

If the Fed is going to push rates lower, it’s going to look for evidence of inflation inching closer to 2%. The latest data suggests the trend is starting to move in the opposite direction.

A CNBC report added, “While the evidence in June was mixed on how much influence tariffs had over prices, there were signs that the duties are having an impact.”

The developments did not go unnoticed on Capitol Hill.

Trump says he was surprised that Jerome Powell, the Fed chair he appointed, was appointed “We’ve said from the start that Donald Trump’s tariffs are a national sales tax on working and middle class families — and now it is causing inflation to rise, as many of us feared,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the data was released. “And there is too large a chance this tariff increase is just the beginning, as chaos on tariffs rise.”

The New York Democrat added, “Tariffs raise the price of groceries, add thousands of dollars in additional costs for the average household, and Donald Trump’s chaotic approach does nothing — nothing — to make our economy stronger. Even worse, real wages are down for June as Americans pay more for groceries, electricity and health care. … Remember what Donald Trump said on the campaign trail? He said that if elected, he would bring costs down on day one. It is now the middle of July. Inflation is going up. And that is the definition of a broken promise.”

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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