President-elect Donald Trump is backtracking on a major campaign promise, stating in a recent interview that he cannot guarantee that he will be able to drive down grocery prices after all.
In an interview with Time magazine following his being named “Person of the Year,” Trump was asked by the publication whether he still believed that his policies would be able to lower costs for consumers. In response, Trump took a strikingly different tone than the one he had at various campaign rallies throughout 2024, saying that lowering costs would be difficult to accomplish.
“I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard,” Trump said.
Asked whether he believed his presidency would be viewed as a failure if he could not deliver lower prices, Trump responded in the negative. “I don’t think so,” he said.
Trump’s lack of confidence is a drastic shift from his attitude on the issue during the campaign. According to documentation from HuffPost, Trump claimed at numerous points over the past year that he would absolutely make grocery prices lower, wrongly faulting the Biden administration for raising them in the first place (despite evidence that corporate greed played a major role in inflationary prices).
“Prices will come down. You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast,” Trump said at a rally in August.
“We will end inflation and make America affordable again, and we’re going to get the prices down. … Groceries, cars, everything. We’re going to get the prices down,” he said in September.
Earlier this month, Trump also backtracked on his promise that the huge tariffs he plans to impose on products being imported from several different countries wouldn’t raise prices for consumers.
Asked by NBC News host Kristen Welker whether he could “guarantee American families won’t pay more” under his plan, Trump said he wouldn’t make such a pledge.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” Trump said, also contradicting several statements he made during his campaign promising otherwise.
During Trump’s first term as president, prices did in fact go up after he imposed tariffs on several countries, despite his claim within that same interview that he was able to impose tariffs without rising costs on consumer goods.
Notably, retailers themselves have said that Trump’s planned tariffs would absolutely lead to higher, not lower, prices.
“Obviously, coming out of the gate, there would be price increases associated with tariffs that we put into the market,” Black & Decker CEO Donald Allan Jr. said last month.
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