On the menu today: Our political scene is full of a lot of liars, and that fact can often feel dispiriting. But on some level, reality always wins eventually. Fantasy, and spin, and the preferred narratives can often temporarily reign supreme, but reality has a way of slowly eating away at the foundation of a false narrative, proving those narratives are about as durable and sturdy as a Chinese infrastructure project. Back in 2022, then-Vice President Kamala Harris insisted, “The border is secure.” It was not, and eventually this gap between narrative and reality became an enormously consequential problem for the Biden administration. The Biden team tried to convince America that Joe Biden was healthy and sharp enough to serve another four years, and that lie was exposed, irrevocably, on a debate stage.
Last night, President Trump addressed the American people and insisted, “Inflation has stopped, wages are up, prices are down,” and “we’re poised for an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen.” He spent the evening insisting that the U.S. economic numbers are significantly better than they actually are. Read on.
You Cannot Spin Americans About Their Finances, but Trump Is Going to Try Anyway
About a month ago, I wrote that you can’t spin people’s perceptions of their own finances. People know how much they pay for groceries, week to week and month to month. They know how much a car costs, compared to the last time they bought one. They know their cost of rent or their mortgage, they have a pretty good sense of how much they spent on Christmas presents last year, and they know how much they have in savings. People can be “gaslit” or fooled about a lot of things, but sooner or later they run into the brick wall of the reality of their particular economic circumstances.
President Trump has decided he’s going to try to spin people’s perceptions of their own finances anyway.
In last night’s address to the nation, President Trump played fast and loose with the facts.
Right out of the gate, Trump claimed, “When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.”
The inflation rate, meaning the Consumer Price Index year-over-year numbers, started to increase in spring 2021, peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 — before the midterms! — and didn’t come down to 3 percent until June 2023.
The inflation rate in January 2025, when Trump was sworn into office, was actually just 3 percent. That’s still higher than the Federal Reserve’s goal of 2 percent and/or people’s perception of “normal,” and I would argue that 3 percent is still high enough to create a widespread public perception that the cost of living keeps getting higher. Since January 2025, the Consumer Price Index has ranged between 3.3 percent and 2.7 percent. While that is much better than the worst days of the Biden administration in 2022, but that’s also roughly where it was for Biden’s final year in office.
A late November Yahoo/YouGov poll found that just 17 percent of respondents think inflation is getting better in America right now, while 60 percent say it is getting worse and 16 percent say it is staying the same. In that same poll, 38 percent of Americans blame Trump for inflation, while just 31 percent blame former President Joe Biden.
The reason Americans aren’t giving Trump much credit on the issue of inflation is because the inflation rate hasn’t changed much from Biden’s final year in office, and Americans haven’t seen any significant improvement in prices since Trump took office.
Nonetheless, last night, Trump boasted, “I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.”
When you get into these arguments, Trump fans love to point to egg prices and gasoline prices. These are indeed two bright spots for the administration’s economic policies. The bad news is that Trump’s instincts for exaggeration and braggadocio mean he’s constantly claiming the numbers are better than they actually are, even when the facts are on his side.
Egg prices jumped at the start of the year, peaking in March, primarily because of the bird flu outbreak. Fewer chickens means fewer eggs, and lower supply and high or consistent demand mean higher prices. As discussed in the Morning Jolt back then, U.S. Department of Agriculture policies may have exacerbated the problem by compensating farmers for culled chickens, which gave farmers the incentive to cull any flock that was at any risk of exposure.
But according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of a dozen grade A large eggs in a U.S. city peaked at $6.22 in March, and the price as of September is $3.48. (Want more recent numbers? Blame the government shutdown.) That’s a 44 percent drop; you don’t see people complaining about the price of eggs much anymore, because they’re back to late 2024 prices.
However, last night Trump claimed, “The price of eggs is down 82 percent since March.” Maybe Trump is referring to a different class of eggs or something.
Gasoline prices have remained fairly flat since Trump took office, and in the past month, the national average price for a gallon of regular has declined from $3.06 to $2.85, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. (As of this morning, AAA lists the national average price as $2.89.)
Unfortunately, even on this issue, where the facts tell a fairly positive story, Trump couldn’t help making claims that are not supported by real numbers. “On Day 1, I declared a national energy emergency. Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon, and in much of the country, in some states, it, by the way, just hit $1.99 a gallon.”
There is no state where the average is $1.99 per gallon. The state with the lowest average price is Oklahoma at $2.34 per gallon. There are several counties in the state where the average is $2.26 per gallon. That’s a great price, but it is not $1.99 per gallon, as Trump claims, and it is not representative of “much of the country.”
Trump claimed, “Under the Biden administration, car prices rose 22 percent, and in many states, 30 percent or more. Gasoline rose 30 to 50 percent. Hotel rates rose 37 percent. Airfares rose 31 percent. Now, under our leadership, they are all coming down and coming down fast.”
On cars, Trump isn’t even close to accurate. If you squint, you might be able to spot a slight decline from September to October:
Ready for some good news that won’t sound like good news? The average new car sold for $49,766 last month.
That, believe it or not, is a slight improvement. The average briefly crested $50,000 in September.
The car market has been rocked by chaotic change in 2025. Tariffs, trade wars, a government shutdown limiting economic data, and threatened parts shortages have meant loud headlines and growing uncertainty.
What’s making cars so expensive this year? Well, tariffs are a big factor:
According to data the Detroit Free Press requested from Edmunds as part of the USA TODAY Network, the destination charges across nearly all automakers have increased at a faster rate for the 2025 model year than during any other time in at least a decade. Within the past year, the Detroit automakers have increased the destination charge across their pickup lineups for GMC, Chevrolet, Ford and Ram brands, from $1,995 in the past to $2,595 for 2026 models.
“I have seen those destination fee increases that are out of the norm versus the typical annual adjustments,” Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds, told the Detroit Free Press of recent hikes in destination charges. “Almost everyone is guilty in part on some level because of tariff/inflation and hedging their bets. There is only one vehicle with a destination fee below $1,000 for the 2025 model year, the BMW ALPINA XB7 (SUV). I think they just forgot to increase it due to the niche nature.”
Drury said by rolling a cost increase into the destination free instead of upping the MSRP, it means the dealer eats the added cost of tariffs more than the carmaker.
As for airfares, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Travel Association, airfares are 3.2 percent higher in September 2025 than September 2024. That’s not a huge jump, but remember, the president didn’t say that the cost of air travel was rising at about the rate of inflation. He said air fare prices were “coming down fast.”
On hotels, the president has a number that is closer to his version; from September 2024 to September 2025, lodging prices are down . . . eight-tenths of 1 percent. But for what it’s worth, the September 2025 prices, seasonally adjusted, were 1.7 percent higher than the previous month of August.
I think that few Americans feel, as the president insists, that the costs associated with travel “are all coming down and coming down fast,” and I don’t think he should spend much time insisting that a year-over-year decline of eight-tenths of one percentage point in one category of costs is something worth celebrating.
Finally, Trump proclaimed, “For the first time in years, wages are rising much faster than inflation. Remember that rate, the wages, just look at it, wages are going up much faster than inflation. How big is that?”
Eh . . . remember, since January, the inflation rate has ranged between 3 percent and 2.3 percent. In September, it was 3 percent. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Compensation costs for private industry workers increased 3.5 percent, not seasonally adjusted, for the 12-month period ending in September 2025.” The BLS only updates this quarterly; it was 3.5 percent in June, and 3.4 percent and March.
Is 3.5 percent wage growth and 3 percent inflation a sign that “wages are going up much faster than inflation”?
In the end, President Trump sees the reality that he wants to see, rather than the reality that is actually there in front of him. Everything he does and associated with his administration is the greatest ever, and everything associated with the previous administration was the worst ever. (The Biden era was, indeed, pretty darn bad.) Trump genuinely believes that American is enjoying a “golden age” that began with his inauguration, and — in an ironic echo of his predecessor — believes that his administration only has a messaging problem, not an actual economic results problem.
There are 319 days until the midterm elections.
ADDENDUM: The Providence, R.I., police, continuing their investigation of the Brown University shooting, released an image of an individual and are “asking for the public’s help in identifying and speaking to the individual shown in this photo who was in proximity of the person of interest.” They have also released a map “showing the streets where the person of interest in the Brown University shooting is confirmed to have been present on the day of the incident.” In light of my column in that other place, the shooting occurred Saturday afternoon, and the Providence police are showing us an image from a surveillance camera that might prove useful . . . Wednesday afternoon.