The year-over-year inflation rate in January, the month President Donald Trump returned to the White House, was 3.0%.
The year-over-year inflation rate in September, the most recent month for which Consumer Price Index figures have been released, was ... the same, 3.0%.
The fact that the inflation rate eight months into Trump's term was unchanged from the one he inherited has debunked his triumphant claims that "inflation has stopped" after he "inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country." So what is a White House to do when the real comparisons aren't working in its favor?
Trump's team has chosen to use some misleading comparisons - deploying apples-to-oranges sets of statistics to serve Trump's point. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried it from the podium on Thursday.
Kaitlan Collins, CNN anchor and chief White House correspondent, noted to Leavitt that inflation is about where it was last year, that grocery prices are up, and that economic signals are mixed. Leavitt claimed: "Inflation is down from where it was, as measured by the overall CPI; it has slowed to an average 2.5%. This is down from what the president inherited. The president inherited 2.9% in January" - it was 2.9% in December - "today it's at about 2.5%. So we're trending in the right direction with more to come."
But the inflation rate is not "trending in the right direction," or at least wasn't as of the most recent available numbers (the November numbers come out next week). In fact, September was the fifth consecutive month the year-over-year inflation rate increased from the month prior, Consumer Price Index figures show. Specifically, the rate was 2.3% in April, 2.4% in May, 2.67% in June, 2.7% in July, 2.9% in August, and, again, 3.0% in September.
So what was Leavitt talking about when she spoke of Trump achieving a 2.5% average? She explained later in the briefing. When another reporter reminded her that the most recent inflation rate is the same 3.0% it was in January, not "2.5%," Leavitt said, "No, it's 2.5%. It's 2.5%, the average CPI right now; I have it in front of me: In President Trump's first eight months in office, inflation, as measured by the overall Consumer Price Index, has slowed to a 2.5% average pace."
In summary: after Leavitt was reminded of the inflation rate for a particular month, January, she cited an average of eight months of inflation rates from February through September. That's not a like-to-like comparison. And the eight-month average conveniently understates the current inflation challenge because it incorporates the lower rates from Trump's first three months back in office, before and immediately after the president announced his sweeping global tariffs in early April. Inflation began accelerating in May.
Also, it's worth noting a smaller point: 2.5% isn't even the simple arithmetic "average." The simple average of the last eight months of year-over-year inflation rates is 2.7% - the figure the White House used in a social media graphic in late November and that Leavitt herself cited at the beginning of the Thursday briefing. The White House explained to CNN later on Thursday that Leavitt was citing the eight-month "annualized" rate when she invoked the "2.5%" figure, though she did not use the word "annualized" herself.
The comparison in that White House social media graphic was even more unmistakably misleading.
In large text, the graphic said "9.1% Inflation under Biden" and "2.7% Inflation under Trump." Only in much smaller text did it explain that this, too, was an apples-to-oranges comparison.
While the 2.7% rate the graphic attributed to Trump is the eight-month average for this Trump term through September, the 9.1% rate it attributed to Biden is the single one-month peak rate for the Biden presidency, the rate in June 2022. For obvious reasons, the graphic did not note that the rate had plummeted to 3.0% by June 2023, that it fell further to 2.4% in September 2024, or that it was at 3.0% in Biden's last partial month in office in January 2025.
Leavitt tried a version of this peak-versus-average comparison at the beginning of the Thursday briefing, saying that "under the painful Biden years, inflation reached a record-high 9%," while under Trump, "inflation has dropped to an average of just 2.7%." Neither of those numbers is false, but Leavitt didn't point out that the record-high 9% under Biden happened in a single month about two-and-a-half years before Trump returned to office.