Trump's walk back on lowering prices is a media failure
He was lying all along and got away with it.
🍳 Public Notice is made possible by paid subscribers. If you aren’t one, please click the button below to sign up and support our independent journalism. 🍳
Donald Trump repeatedly promised voters during the 2024 campaign that he was going to reduce prices to pre-covid levels. This pledge was never rooted in a real plan, but he skated by with help from a press that has spent nearly a decade normalizing his lies.
When Trump gave a speech in August detailing his “vision” for a second term, he declared, “From the day I take the oath of office, we will rapidly drive prices down, and make America affordable again"
“Prices will come down,” he said. “You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.”
And during a speech in October, Trump proclaimed that he would “very quickly” make groceries more affordable. (Watch below.)
These comments and others he made on the campaign trail were quite definitive, but now that he’s won the election and is set to return to the White House next month, Trump has dropped his Santa act and gone full Grinch. During his Time Magazine “Person of the Year” interview, he all but laughed in voters’ faces when asked about lowering prices.
“It's hard to bring things down once they're up,” Trump said. “You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will.”
This sudden about-face is hardly shocking considering Trump is a world historical liar. What’s damning, though, is that the mainstream press enabled Trump’s scam by helping him create an impression that he had an actual plan to lower prices instead of reporting the obvious truth — that he was offering nothing but bluster and empty talking points all along.
Double standards
Trump’s correct, of course, that it’s hard to lower prices once they’ve gone up, but any freshman economics student could’ve told you that before the election.
The coverage of Trump’s shameless backtracking is revealing. A USA Today headline read, “Trump says bringing down grocery prices is 'very hard' after vowing to cut costs on the campaign trail.” From ABC News: “Trump now says bringing down grocery prices, as he promised, will be 'very hard.’” And Vanity Fair: “Trump Promised No Wars and Lower Prices. Now He's Walking That Back.” Absent from these headlines is the simple word “lied,” which is what Trump did.
Compare this to the media’s reaction when Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter. PBS declared, “Biden broke a promise pardoning his son Hunter, raising questions about his legacy.” The Guardian tut-tutted, “With his pardon of son Hunter, Joe Biden delivers a heartfelt hypocrisy.”
Trump isn’t responding to compelling new information, as Biden did when he pardoned Hunter after Trump nominated malevolent conspiracy theorist Kash Patel to be his new FBI director. And economic indicators haven’t drastically changed since Trump’s carnival barker routine was in full swing during the campaign.
Legacy media gullibly accepted Trump’s promises to magically lower prices even though there was no coherent economic agenda behind his empty talk. In fact, Trump’s signature tariffs proposal would only cause prices to increase. But the press mostly let the conman behind the curtain do his thing.
Trump supporters would boo at his rallies when he asked, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” But the boos weren’t directed at Trump, who was president in 2020 when America experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
A note from Aaron: Working with brilliant contributors like Stephen takes resources. If you aren’t already a paid subscriber, please sign up to support our work.
After the pandemic, the US economy under Biden’s leadership enjoyed a “soft landing.” Unemployment is currently 4.2 percent, or about two points lower than it was when Trump left office. Average wages have risen higher than the rate of inflation, and the inflation of 2021 and 2022 has steadily decreased without a recession. Trump and Republicans obviously didn’t want to run against that record, so they focused on high prices, frequently making misleading comparisons to a pandemic-era baseline.
When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination for the third time last summer, Trump vowed to “make America affordable again.” At a press conference, he claimed that prices for everyday grocery items had surged specifically because of the Biden/Harris administration’s policies, with no mention of the pandemic he’d mismanaged. Reporters rarely pressed him on this omission.
"Harris has just declared that tackling inflation will be a day one priority for her," he said. "But day one for Kamala was three and a half years ago. Where has she been?"
Trump went even further, though, and vowed to outright lower prices. That’s all but impossible without a recession or deflationary period, both of which would be far worse for the average American’s wallet than a $3 carton of eggs.
The press would have been doing the country a service by exposing Trump’s pandering instead of nitpicking Harris to death. But even Trump’s most ridiculous campaign proposals — such as trying to rebrand himself as an advocate for women by floating the idea of taxpayers picking up the tab for costly IVF treatments — received exactly the sort of credulous coverage he was hoping for.
It’s just a fact that Trump will says anything to win an election and more often than not is full of it. But stating that clearly would make mainstream outlets like the New York Times seem like they were in the tank for Harris. And so instead of being straight with their audiences and telling them what Trump himself now admits — that he has no real plan to bring prices down — journalists far too often took him at face value.
Trump’s vibes campaign
One persistent and frustrating criticism of Harris’s campaign is that she ran on “vibes” and didn’t offer concrete policy details, unlike the “windmill cancer” guy.
NBC News asked in August, “Can Harris win on good vibes alone?” Bloomberg stated, “Harris’ Vibes-Heavy, Policy-Lite Campaign Leaves Businesses Guessing.” Nate Silver wrote that “Harris has been running on ‘vibes’ and has failed to articulate a clear vision for the country.”
In fact, just a few weeks after she became the presumptive nominee, Harris released a four-part policy package detailing how her administration would make housing, groceries, health care, and raising children more affordable. In October, Harris rolled out more new economic proposals intended to lower grocery and prescription drug prices and address the housing crisis.
Yet CNN said Harris wasn’t “giving the specifics some undecided voters say they want.” CNN’s Abby Phillips claimed Harris’s comments to Black journalists “lacked specifics.” These critiques may have made sense in a vacuum, but they seem ridiculous compared to Trump. It was hard not to suspect the real beef was about Harris not being more willing to engage with mainstream outlets on their terms.
Instead of doing the “weave” and going on tangents about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, Harris during her speeches often spoke about her economic policy priorities and vision for the future. Throughout her 107-day campaign, she was held to a higher standard in practically every way, all while Trump served up economic proposals that were the political equivalent of magic beans.
Another big example is housing policy. Trump flipped Nevada — the first time a Republican carried the state since 2004 — partly because of an affordable housing crisis. A New York Times headline in late October read, “As Harris Courts Sun Belt, Housing Costs Stand in Her Way.”
Of course, Trump blatantly lied about the situation.
“Today the mortgage rates are at 10 percent, 11 percent, 12 percent, you can't get the money,” he said at an Arizona rally in October. (Mortgage rates have not been above 10 percent for decades.) “We’re going to bring it down very fast, we're going to bring energy down. We will drive down the rates so you will be able to pay 2 percent again and we will be able to finance or refinance your homes drastically.”
Mortgage interest rates are mostly beyond any president’s control, but Harris proposed specific ways to alleviate the housing crisis. This included down payment assistance for first-time home buyers and tax incentives to build more housing. The media grilled her on how she’d pay for these reasonable policies, but they had less interested in pressing Trump to explain how he’d miraculously reduce interest rates to absurdly low levels.
Harris’s proposals were often placed on the same playing field as Trump’s gibberish. For instance, days before the election, NPR ran the article, “Housing is expensive. Here’s how Harris and Trump promise to bring costs down.” Buried deep in the piece was Trump’s insane idea that mass deportation could help free up housing.
Trump might think he can just sit back and take all the credit as a “vibecession” becomes a “vibe-expansion.” After all, consumer sentiment among Republicans has skyrocketed since the election, and the stock market recently hit new highs (though it has gone down significantly this week).
But it’s possible his cultish followers may actually notice that the price of eggs hasn’t dropped, and breaking major campaign promises is usually a political quagmire. George H.W. Bush never recovered from going back on his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge. Barack Obama eventually apologized for stating that "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which Politifact ruled 2013's "lie of the year.”
The difference here is that Trump wasn’t simply mistaken or proven wrong. He deliberately lied, and the question now is whether the press will actually hold him accountable or remain his willing accomplices. The early returns aren’t great.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s newsletter, please support us by signing up. Paid subscribers make PN possible.
Thanks for reading.
Trump’s base doesn’t care about the fact that he lied about anything and everything…they’re just happy he’s a white male…
Very well drafted, and the double standard is stunning in hindsight (and at the time as well).
I just can't get away from people using that as justification to vote against the qualified, articulate, and talented Black Woman. The misogyny and racism is still ascendant in America.