America’s Latest Inflation Check-In Doesn’t Look Good for Trump

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America just had its last major checkup on inflation ahead of the midterm elections, and the results aren’t looking good. Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released September’s update to the Consumer Price Index, one of the most important metrics for understanding how much Americans actually pay for goods and services. (Among them: cupcakes, dental care, sports equipment.) Overall, costs for consumers have been rising faster than economists expected. They’re up 3.7 percent over the past year, and September marked the largest monthly increase since April—much of which had to do with massive Iran-war-driven spikes in energy prices.

That’s just the first half of the problem. At the same time, the BLS revealed yesterday that Americans now have less spending power than they did earlier this year. Real wages—the average amount, adjusted for inflation, that workers earn an hour—have tumbled back down to about where they were when Donald Trump retook the presidency last January. Prices are now rising so fast, across so many different industries, that they’ve overwritten nearly two years of wage gains. As the economist Jared Bernstein put it in his CPI postmortem today, “It’s one thing to cope with high prices when your earnings are at least keeping pace with inflation. But when they’re falling behind … well, that makes for a much tougher equation.”

Kevin Hassett, the Trump-appointed director of the National Economic Council, said yesterday that he sees a “whole bunch of good news” in the CPI report—namely food prices (they’ve held relatively steady) and prescription-drug prices, which have gotten lower (something he credits to Trump’s online drugstore). The sheer scope of the data makes it easy to cherry-pick examples. The prices of both milk and cookies have gone down since August too, so at least Trump’s economy has been good to Santa. But as economists and Democratic politicians have been quick to point out, the overwhelming majority of the data don’t support that optimism. For example, the prices of other everyday goods, such as coffee, clothing, and hardware, have all gone up.

Taken together, the BLS numbers offer a compelling explanation for Americans’ frustrations with the cost of living. Another recent report helps put those frustrations in context: People’s confidence in the economy is approaching a record low, per the preliminary October results of the University of Michigan’s consumer-sentiment survey. And according to today’s BLS data on wholesale prices, businesses are reckoning with higher costs too. The Producer Price Index is now at its highest level in four years.

Not all of this is attributable to Trump. The price spikes are the result of a “perfect storm” of macroeconomic forces, Heather Long, the chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, told me. The AI boom, for example, is clearly behind some of September’s computer-related increases. Bernstein told me over email that the breadth of last month’s price movement is part of what’s so concerning. Even when you strip away the volatile energy and food categories, what’s known as the “core” inflation rate is still up 2.6 percent year-over-year. Widespread hikes across these core categories—including housing, hotels, and recreational goods—suggest that the problem has to do with more than just foreign policy.

Still, these new BLS reports carry dire warnings for the president and his party. When Trump began his second term, he claimed to have inherited the worst inflation in United States history. Today, inflation is rising faster than it was last January, and Trump’s own actions have undercut his claim that we’re living through an economic “Golden Age.” The tariffs that he implemented last year had a dramatic impact on all kinds of consumer goods. Without those duties, economists at the New York Fed estimate that prices would have declined into early 2026. “For every percentage point increase in average tariffs, consumer goods prices increase by about a quarter of a percent,” the report reads.

The president’s decision to bring the country into a costly, protracted war with Iran has also made energy more expensive around the world. In America, gasoline alone is up 9.1 percent since last month and up 34.2 percent since last September, per the BLS. Trying to reclaim the narrative, Trump has recently been putting some of the blame on Ukraine. He said on Saturday that President Volodymyr Zelensky “wants to make problems for the world” by attacking Russian diesel refineries. (Rebuking Trump, Zelensky told the Financial Times today that Ukraine will keep attacking refineries anyway.)

Although it’s true that the war in Eastern Europe has contributed to higher diesel prices, experts agree that the bigger culprit is the war in Iran. As a stopgap measure, Trump temporarily lifted some restrictions on tax-exempt diesel use, and he made a controversial deal with Russia over the weekend to import potentially millions of tons of diesel. The agreement has been widely denounced as a betrayal of a U.S. ally during wartime, and analysts are doubtful that it will be enough to get prices down.

Trump has lately been urging voters to look away from the economic reality, even promising to hand out millions of $5,000 checks if Republicans hold on to their majority in the midterm elections. Judging by the forecasts for his party’s races, Americans aren’t listening. Inflation tends to speak for itself.

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Today’s News

President Trump canceled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the December 3 execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army officer convicted of killing 13 people in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. The execution will proceed by firing squad, and only immediate family members of the victims will be allowed to witness it in person.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with the Financial Times that America had threatened to withhold intelligence and had restricted military-satellite communications, though Trump denied having cut off intelligence-sharing and Ukraine said that Starlink service had been restored.
The new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, who has previously called herself a lawyer, confirmed that she has never passed the bar exam.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The falling autumn leaves taught Thoreau a lesson about death in his final years, Jake Lundberg writes.
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Evening Read

Absurdist illustration depicting people doing odd jobs and posing in a modernist room with a pool at the center — Illustration by Tina Zhou / The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; Michael Ochs Archives / Getty; Found Image Holdings / Archive Photos / Getty; Getty.

The Non-AI AI Jobs

By Annie Lowrey

Want to get a job in the Bay Area? The fastest-growing listings are for operations engineers, applied scientists, senior machine-learning engineers, principal cloud architects, forward-deployed engineers, and the like, according to Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “A year ago, people were very concerned about these types of jobs not coming to fruition,” she told me. Today, “it’s all AI. It’s all AI jobs.”

Or not quite all. Demand for estheticians, Pilates instructors, massage therapists, therapist therapists, and interior designers is also surging. And in a way, those are AI jobs too. It makes sense that someone earning seven figures a year at Anthropic would want a skilled person to untie the knots in their back and another to untie the knots in their psyche. Or that someone working a 72-hours-a-week, “996” schedule at Nvidia would not have time to shop for lamps for their Mission-style mansion on their own. Extraordinary wealth wants extraordinary luxuries.

Read the full article.