Donald Trump loves to put his name on things, and when it comes to the recent burst of inflation, it’s totally deserved. Trump and Republican politicians are doing their best to try to make a simple story complicated. But there is no doubt that Trump is the lead and almost sole author of the inflation we are now seeing.

Just to quickly clear away the stupid: We did have a large burst of inflation under Biden, just like the rest of the world. We were hit with a worldwide pandemic in Trump’s first term, which he apparently can’t remember. The pandemic led to a massive fall in output in 2020, while Trump was president.

When Biden took office in January of 2021, we were still down more than 10 million jobs from the pre-pandemic level. Biden’s recovery package quickly got back the lost jobs and got the unemployment rate down to 4.0 percent by the end of the year, far faster than anyone expected.

The reopening of the economy from the pandemic recession led to a burst of inflation in the United States, as it did in Germany, France, and everywhere else. Suddenly people were buying lots of things, and it took a while for businesses to ramp up production.

If Biden had cared less about getting people back to work, the recovery package could have been smaller, and the peak inflation rate might have been 1-2 percentage points lower. But the important part of the story is that inflation quickly came down.

Year-over-year inflation peaked at 9.0 percent in June of 2022. A year later, it was down to 3.1 percent. It was down to 2.6 percent by the election in November of 2024. Inflation was generally expected to continue to fall and to be at or near the Fed’s 2.0 percent target by the end of 2025.

But then Trump turned everything around. Inflation began to rise even before he took office, as households and businesses stocked up on imported goods in anticipation of Trump tariffs. Durable goods prices, which had been falling since early 2023, stopped falling and began to rise. The Consumer Price Index also stopped falling and started to rise. Year-over-year inflation hit 3.0 percent in September 2025 but then slowed to 2.7 percent by the end of the year.

It likely would have continued to slow through 2026. After all, Trump’s tariffs were primarily a one-time event. If he didn’t keep imposing new ones (a big “if”), it was reasonable to think that........

© Common Dreams