Trump backs off on promise to tackle grocery inflation

President-elect Donald Trump walked back his promises to lower grocery prices in an interview with TIME Magazine on Thursday. 

Throughout his campaign, Trump vowed to bring down prices, saying at one rally in North Carolina, “Prices will come down; you just watch. They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast.”

When asked by TIME if his presidency would be considered a failure if he doesn’t manage to bring the cost of groceries back down, he responded, “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.”

Despite these claims, a major Trump campaign promise was to place tariffs on imported goods, particularly from Mexico, China, and Canada, arguing that American producers would fill in the gaps and consumers would buy competitively priced American products, boosting the economy. 

Economists and other experts, however, have said that tariffs would cause a significant price jump, as American industries would not be able to keep up with demand, and distributors would continue to buy from foreign markets and then pass the buck onto their customers, so as not to eat the cost.

With an election cycle heavily focused on inflation, mainly grocery prices, a large percentage of voters feeling the pinch hedged their bets on which candidate would reduce their financial load. 

Related:Retail food inflation outpaced restaurant menu prices for 2nd time in three months

In an October article published right before the presidential election, Supermarket News reported that the inflation gauge monitored by the Federal Reserve dropped to near pre-pandemic prices, the lowest it had reached since 2021. Overall, inflation is up 2.7% over the past year, including 0.3% in November, a fraction of a percent above the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target, but not too far off of the 2.4% rate of 2018 — before the global COVID-19 pandemic caused prices to skyrocket.

Trump echoed a question posed by President Ronald Reagan in 1980, asking voters if they were “better off now than they were four years ago.” With prices roughly 20% higher in an economy recovering from a global pandemic, many Americans answered a resounding “no.”