President Donald Trump boasted that he pressured Walmart into lowering their prices in honor of America’s 250th anniversary — but that’s not true, the company stated.
According to The Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell, “Earlier this week Walmart found itself enlisted in … when President Trump posted that at his administration’s ‘request to celebrate our great Country’s 250th birthday’ the company would be ‘dropping the price for a pound of ground beef by almost 15%, among many other products.’”
The issue is that the price drops were not unusual and were not ordered by Trump.
Walmart has so-called “rollback” sales all the time as promotions to get more people into the store or to buy more while they are there — and according to a spokesperson, the sale Trump is talking about began a week before he made the claim that the cuts would be happening soon at his request.
Sources for The Wall Street Journal claimed that “a USDA official had a phone call with Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons in the days before July Fourth to discuss beef prices, and on that call, Walmart revealed they “already had plans to reduce prices on many items for the summer, including beef.”
Trump has often tried to take credit for economic decisions that were not only made without his input, but often before he was paying attention to the issue or even before he was in office altogether.
In other cases, he has outright fabricated numbers, like his boast of securing $19.2 trillion in foreign manufacturing investment in the United States, when in reality, manufacturing investment has declined since he took office.
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