The White House has relied on averages and an annualized short‑term pace to portray inflation as lower under President Trump, even though the month‑to‑month year‑over‑year CPI was 3.0% in both January and September. Karoline Leavitt cited a 2.5% eight‑month annualized pace and a 2.7% simple average at different times—choices that smooth over a five‑month run of rising year‑over‑year rates through September. A White House graphic compared Trump’s multi‑month average with Biden’s single‑month peak (9.1%), a peak‑versus‑average contrast that obscures later declines in inflation under Biden.
White House Uses Misleading Inflation Comparisons To Downplay Rising Prices
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt takes questions from reporters during a press briefing in the White House on Thursday. - Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Analysis: The White House has been using mixed and selectively framed inflation statistics to present a rosier economic picture than month‑to‑month Consumer Price Index (CPI) data support.
The year‑over‑year CPI reading in January—the month President Donald Trump returned to the White House—was 3.0%. The most recent available CPI number for September was also 3.0%, meaning the headline, month‑to‑month year‑over‑year rate was unchanged over that span.
Faced with that flat comparison, the administration has highlighted alternative measures—such as eight‑month averages and an "annualized" pace—to make inflation appear lower. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that "inflation has slowed to an average 2.5%" and later said inflation in Mr. Trump's first eight months had averaged 2.5% as measured by the CPI. She also and at times cited a 2.7% eight‑month average that the White House circulated on social media.
Those presentations are misleading for two reasons. First, averaging eight months (February through September) is not the same as comparing the most recent monthly year‑over‑year rate to the one the president inherited. Averaging smooths in the lower readings from the early months of the term and can obscure a recent upward trend. Second, the 2.5% figure Leavitt cited is not the simple arithmetic mean of those eight months—it's an annualized eight‑month pace the White House later said it was using. The plain average of the eight month‑to‑month year‑over‑year rates is about 2.7%, a number the White House has also used.
More concretely, CPI year‑over‑year rates rose for five consecutive months through September: April 2.3%, May 2.4%, June 2.67%, July 2.7%, August 2.9%, and September 3.0%. These month‑by‑month readings show an acceleration that simple averaging can mask.
The White House social‑media graphic was another example of mixing metrics to shape impressions. In large type it compared a 9.1% inflation figure under President Biden with 2.7% under President Trump. But the 9.1% number was a single‑month peak (June 2022) while the 2.7% number was an eight‑month average through September—an apples‑to‑oranges comparison that downplays how inflation fell later in Mr. Biden's term (for example, to about 3.0% by June 2023).
"Inflation is down from where it was, as measured by the overall CPI; it has slowed to an average 2.5%." — Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary
That quote is technically a statement of a chosen metric, but it omits context and the more direct month‑to‑month comparison that many readers use to gauge current inflation pressures. Presenting peaks, averages and annualized short‑period rates without clear labels or like‑for‑like comparisons can mislead the public about real trends.
Bottom line: True, some of the numbers cited by the White House are factually correct in isolation. But using different measures (monthly peak vs. multi‑month average vs. annualized pace) to make cross‑period comparisons is misleading. For a clear view of recent inflation dynamics, compare the same type of statistic (for example, month‑to‑month year‑over‑year CPI) across the periods being compared.
