Donald Trump loves to talk about groceries. “The word grocery,” he said with a childlike sense of wonder during an event at the Detroit Economic Club in October. “You know, it's a sort simple word, but it sort means like everything you eat. The stomach is speaking. It always does.”
The idea was that grocery prices are high because of President Joe Biden, and the only way to bring them down was for Americans to send Trump back to the White House. Trump had been pressing this point repeatedly down the stretch of the campaign.
“Prices will come down,” Trump said in August. “You just watch: They'll come down, and they'll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.” He added in September: “Vote Trump, and your incomes will soar. Your net worth will skyrocket. Your energy costs and grocery prices will come tumbling down.”
Inflation is far more complicated than Trump seemed to realize during the campaign — or than he wanted Americans to realize — but it doesn't matter. Americans did indeed vote to give Trump another term in office, and economic factors seem to be one of the biggest reasons they did so. Trump acknowledged this during an interview with Meet the Press on Sunday — again marveling at the word “groceries” as if he'd never considered it before a few months ago.
“I won on groceries,” he said. “It's a very simple word. Who uses the word? I started using the word. The groceries. When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs. They were double and triple the price over a short period of time. I won the election based on that. We're going to bring those prices down.”
One problem here is that the foundation of Trump's economic plan for the United States is imposing sweeping, staggering tariffs on goods imported from key trade partners with which he may or may not have an ax to grind. Economists have long insisted this will result in prices going up, not down, as retailers pass the burden of these tariffs onto their customers. Trump seemed to acknowledge this possibility in the very same Meet the Press interview.
“I can't guarantee anything,” he said when he was asked if he could guarantee tariffs wouldn't result in American consumers paying more, something he said wouldn't happen seconds earlier. “I can't guarantee tomorrow.”
Trump seemed even less sure while speaking with Time for his “Man of the Year” cover story, the transcript for which was released Thursday. When the president-elect was asked if his presidency would be a failure if grocery prices didn't go down he said: “I don't think so.”
“Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will,” Trump said before going on about how the supply chain is broken and so is “what they're doing with the cars” and how all of this is the problem.
It hasn't taken long, then, for Trump to enter excuse mode after locking up another stint in the White House. Reality is not his friend, and he's now in the process of pivoting from promising to change it to testing out what he can blame for his inability to do so. The one thing that can be guaranteed about his next four years in office is that there's going to be plenty more where this came from.
