Trump Makes Up Inflation Numbers and the Media Just Shrugs

With the cost of living shaping up to be one of the main issues that will determine the outcome of the midterms, Donald Trump on Tuesday used a tried-and-tested strategy to tout his record on inflation: He lied about it.

Joe Kernen, the host of CNBC’s Squawk Box, brought up the issue when he noted that inflation was about 3 percent when Joe Biden left office, “down to about where it is now.”

Even that is a bit of a charitable characterization. In Biden’s last full month in office, inflation was 2.9 percent. It ticked up to 3.0 percent in January of 2025 and reached 3.3 percent last month, which was the highest rate in almost two years. So, objectively, as of this moment, inflation is up during the Trump administration.

Obviously, that is not a narrative that works for the reality-challenged president.

“No, it wasn’t. It was down to 5 percent, it wasn’t down to 3 percent,” Trump said when confronted with the facts. “And the reason it was down was because I had won the election, and it started falling after I won the election, and I started getting prices down from right after November 5.”

None of that is true. Prices actually went up a bit between Election Day, when inflation was 2.7 percent, and Trump’s inauguration.

Of course, it’s impossible to say whether the president simply lied or whether he is delusional.

What we do know, however, is that the Trump-friendly Kernen didn’t push back to correct him, and that most of the media ignored the exchange.

And we believe that’s a dereliction of duty on the part of the press, especially in light of the importance of this issue.

To their credit, CNN ran a fact check, but the outlets who covered the interview at all focused on the more ridiculous stuff, such as Trump’s claim that he would have won the Vietnam War “very quickly.”

This just shows how much the president has worn down the media. Nowadays, hardly anybody bats an eye when he lies.

In this case, it may not help him because Americans are experiencing the high cost of living on a daily basis… and they are blaming Trump. In a new poll, more than two-thirds of them have a negative view of the president’s handling of inflation.

Still, that doesn’t mean that the media should simply shrug when Trump lies.

And that wasn’t the only problem with the 37-minute interview. It was also symptomatic of how the Trump-friendly media is treating the president like a recalcitrant toddler.

We have seen time and again how TV personalities sympathetic to him try to get him to back down from some of the more insane things he has said.

In this case, for example, Kernen began a question about the war by saying, “I know how much you respect and admire and are concerned with the Iranian people themselves,” in order to get Trump to say something nice and perhaps back off from his claim that Iran’s “civilization will die.” A bit later, the host also said, “I’m sure [bombing bridges and Iran’s electrical grid is] the last thing you’d probably want to do, but it would hurt at least some of the people that we care about and why we embarked on this in the first place.”

As per usual, Trump didn’t get the hint, but it shows how people like Kernen (and this is much more pronounced on Fox News) are trying to manipulate the president.

None of this is good… and it’s even worse that much of the media has largely stopped talking about it.