President Donald Trump is citing precise inflation numbers on the campaign trail that CNN’s Daniel Dale says can’t be squared with the data, and the White House hasn’t said where they came from.
At a Tuesday rally in Alaska, Trump said inflation had been “1.7” over the last three months and that former President Joe Biden had “real inflation of 19 percent.” He said it again in Montana a day later, after the government released a 3.7 percent year-over-year reading for September.
Dale, writing for CNN, examined three ways Trump might be getting the number. None worked.
One: he’s misstating annual rates. The CPI shows 3.7 percent for September and 3.4 percent for both August and July. Biden’s highest was 9.1 percent in June 2022, not 19 percent, though Trump once insisted the real figure was double the official one without support. In May he made the same false three-month claim about the period before the Iran war.
Two: he’s citing cumulative inflation. Over the past three months, that’s about 1.1 percent, not 1.7 percent. Setting that against the roughly 21 percent rise across Biden’s entire term would make little sense. Cumulative inflation in Trump’s term so far is 5.4 percent.
Three: he’s mangling a point from adviser Kevin Hassett, who said core PCE inflation, excluding food and energy, ran at about 2 percent annualized from June to August. That’s still not 1.7 percent, and leaving out gas prices matters when they’re driving voter frustration. September data pushed three-month annualized core CPI up to 3.4 percent.
The bottom line is that none of these "specific but phony numbers" make any sense, said Dale — and he's not the only one who reached this conclusion.
Economist Heather Long said the number “is not supported by the data.” CNN also noted that Biden did not hand Trump the worst inflation in U.S. history, since rates were under 3 percent when Trump took office, below any month since the Iran war started.