WASHINGTON — Two months ago, in his first network television interview after the election, Donald Trump said he owed his victory to Americans' anger over immigration and inflation, specifically the rising cost of groceries.
“When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time,†he told NBC’s “Meet the Press. “And I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.â€
President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order aiming to declassify remaining federal records relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan. 23 in the Oval Office.
But in Trump's first week back in the White House, there was little in his initial blitz of executive orders that directly tackled consumer prices, besides directing federal agencies to start “pursuing appropriate actions.†He is taking steps to lower energy costs, something that Trump hopes will have ripple effects throughout the economy. Otherwise, his focus has been clamping down on immigration, which he described as his “No. 1 issue†shortly after taking the oath of office.
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“They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue. I said, ‘I disagree,’†Trump said. “I talked about inflation, too, but how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?â€
Trump's comments reflect the reality that presidents have almost no levers to reduce inflation quickly without causing collateral damage to other parts of the economy.
President Donald Trump speaks about the economy during an event Saturday at the Circa Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Inflation was a driving force behind Trump's election victory, but he's put the issue behind immigration and other issues.
There is more that Trump can do on energy. He is pushing to reduce regulations and increase the amount of land available for drilling. He is trying to persuade domestic and foreign oil producers to potentially sacrifice their own profits by pumping more.
During a recent rally in Las Vegas, Trump went after his Democratic predecessor for allowing prices to rise under his watch, and promised to take care of the problem quickly.
“When I think of (former President Joe) Biden, I think of incompetence and inflation,†Trump said.
Shoppers pass displays of goods in a Costco warehouse last February in Sheridan, Colo.Â
Inflation peaked at a 9.1% annual rate in June 2022 during worldwide supply chain problems after the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic. Overall consumer prices have fallen since then, but have ticked up in recent months, from 2.4% in September to 2.9% in December, the latest figures available. Economists have warned that Trump's plans for tariffs and tax cuts could create new inflationary pressures and keep interest rates elevated.
Vice President JD Vance, in an interview with CBS' “Face the Nation,†defended the White House's work so far.
“Prices are going to come down, but it’s going to take a little bit of time, right?†he said. He added, “Rome wasn't built in a day.â€
Trump's relative shift away from addressing costs could create an opening for Democrats to say he is not helping working-class voters, hoping that argument could offer the party a path back to power in Washington.
Scripps News Correspondent Dan Grossman takes us behind the scenes to look at some of the massive farming machines that companies are creating to make a big difference in the field and in your wallet. (Scripps News)
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Trump preferred to distract people from inflation with talk of adding Greenland to the United States or seizing the Panama Canal.
“It’s catnip and it causes everybody to stop paying attention to their actual economic agenda, which has nothing to do with lowering costs and everything to do with rigging the economy to help the Mar-a-Lago crowd,†he said.
During an interview on Fox News this past week, host Sean Hannity struggled to get Trump to focus on the economy.
"Let me get to the economy,†Hannity said at one point. “I’m running out of time.â€
“The economy is going to do great,†Trump insisted.
When Trump did talk about inflation in the interview, he noted how low it was during his first term and insisted prices would not have jumped up if he had president after the 2020 election, even though higher inflation was a global trend coming out of the pandemic.
It is not clear how Trump would persuade oil companies and foreign countries to quickly increase production, possibly costing them profits.
The Energy Information Administration reported that domestic oil production has grown at an annual rate of roughly 8.4% over the past two years to an average of nearly 13.5 million barrels a day in October. Some Trump aides suggest that could increase by an additional 3 million barrels a day.
It would be difficult to achieve that much additional production in a single year without serious changes to the global market. The International Energy Agency estimates that the oil supplied to the entire world will increase by 1.8 million barrels per day to 104.7 million barrels a day. He also has expressed opposition to climate-friendlier wind and solar energy, putting more pressure on the U.S. economy to rely on fossil fuels.
EJ Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, said the potential increase in energy production under Trump would ultimately flow through the economy in the form of lower prices.
“If you’re going to bring down the cost of energy, you’re going to bring down the cost of all kinds of goods and services," he said.
The true, massive cost of Trump's mass deportation plans
The true, massive cost of Trump's mass deportation plans
At a campaign rally in the border state of Arizona on Oct. 24, Donald Trump roused the crowd with a , after lamenting that the country has become "like a garbage can for the world."
This promise to round up and ship off the estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. who lack permanent legal status was one of Trump's signature campaign promises in 2024, and one of his biggest applause lines. Trump —say the economy—would leave his audiences bored, the New York Times reported at the end of October.
Several found that a second Trump administration would face myriad challenges in effecting mass deportation at this scale, and that the effort would require a Herculean .
A study by the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration advocacy group, calculated that , and hundreds of thousands of new immigration agents, judges and other staff. Fiscal analyses have concluded that mass deportation on this scale could . Even at its current rate of enforcement, detention, and deportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is already for staff and detainees," at its facilities according to a Department of Homeland Security watchdog report released in September. Many of those detention locations are run by private companies on former prison grounds. Bloomberg News reported in October that Trump's deportation plan
To get around the already backlogged deportation system, Trump and his advisors have said they . The law—which was used during the two World Wars—allows the president to arrest, imprison or deport immigrants from a country considered an enemy of the U.S. during wartime without the usual due process. Its use would draw immediate legal challenges, and legal experts are divided over how such an effort would fare in the courts. The U.S. is not at war with any of the countries from which large numbers of migrants arrive, which the language of the act requires. Courts, however, are often deferential to the executive branch over this kind of authority.
Enforcement efforts would likely include the use of novel surveillance technology. Some tech observers on the border, including surveillance towers, high-tech blimps, incognito license plate readers and biometric readers.
Trump has also repeatedly said he to carry out elements of his deportation agenda, as well as the National Guard in states where the governor is sympathetic to this goal.
Some have already declared that they will not participate in mass deportation efforts. Even officials who have raised concerns about the challenges created by large influxes of migrants are not necessarily interested in mass deportation. In Whitewater, Wisconsin, by efforts to politicize the situation in his town, where at least 1,000 mostly Nicaraguan migrants have recently settled.
Meyer said his department has dealt with "very real challenges tied to the arrival of so many people from another country," mostly related to poverty, language barriers and administrative challenges—like the fact that many migrants don't have, and struggle to get, driver's licenses.
But what Meyer said was not happening was a , a claim that's been a cornerstone of Trump's campaign for mass deportation. Meyer told ProPublica that the new immigrants aren't committing crimes at a greater rate than other Whitewater residents.
In Aurora, Colorado, another police chief says that Trump's claims don't represent the reality on the ground. Chief Todd Chamberlain , despite Trump describing it as "overrun" by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua (TDA). Trump has identified .
Chamberlain said that there is crime related to TDA members, but that Trump's rhetoric has dramatically overstated the situation. On Oct. 23, NBC News reported that the Department of Homeland Security has , although some experts the outlet cited said that number was certainly an undercount.
Beyond the legal and logistical challenges of Trump's deportation plan are profound potential economic costs. one Arkansas business leader told the New York Times, referring to the labor that migrants provide in fields that are either unattractive to U.S. workers or where there are . Some analyses suggest that a complete mass deportation could cut more than a trillion dollars of production from the U.S. economy and .
None of that accounts for the human toll of mass deportations. Writing for Texas Monthly, Jack Herrera tells the story of Marco, a Honduran man in Georgia working in construction and landscaping. Marco was deported once before, in 2010, and had planned to make peace with life in Honduras. But the threat of violence by local gangs there, and the prospect of making 10 times his annual income, .
Like most undocumented people in the U.S., Marco lives in a mixed-status home, meaning "some relatives have citizenship or green cards and some have neither." If Marco were deported, Herrera writes: "His family are the ones who would truly miss him—the girls waiting for their uncle to get home each sundown, with mud on his boots and wood chips on his shirt."
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